Then again I don't think it's entirely the company's fault for neglecting local game stores when the reality is that Trading Card Games / Collectible Card Games aren't as popular as they once were. Most people expect way too much out of a hobby as this one isn't as sustainable as the Video Game Industry was but that too seems to be dying out in favor of other gaming genres that are more "convenient".
Hard disagree on this point. The design choices WotC has made have gotten them to this point (brink of utter failure) and they've heaped more pain upon themselves by making terrible marketing choices along with putting out a crap product.
THEY caused people to quit during the CoCo winter (they admitted they likely should have banned CoCo).
Choosing to shorten cards lifespan in standard (completely misunderstanding of consumers desires)
Follow that with Cat Combo (further reducing the number of people willing to play NOT fun standard)
Follow with repeat banning to get rid of obviously broken cards in an utterly broken design phase.
Now we're in Energy winter and standard events don't fire in a high percentage of places where Standard was healthy just before this chain of events.
Add marketing deleting FNM promo cards (Tokens are not popular)
Add trying to force people from their habits, engaged players supposed to play on sat or sun now? Why? FNM is their habit. SUPPORT IT.
81 people playing modern at an FNM means there's plenty of people who like to play, and Standard doesn't fire.
People are just not playing Standard. This equals a LOT fewer packs bought.
They continuously shoot themselves in the foot and not they can barely walk.
There are a lot of people who would love to play Standard but refuse to pay money and give time to a game that isn't fun and lacks the diversity to allow creativity.
They have to stop making stupid decisions while improving design.
I seriously do not understand why Wizards spends so much money flooding the market with products no one really wants. If they want to release an Ixalan board game, include it in the bundle or booster box to give added value to the set. If they want to help people get into the game, make starters that can compete with the main set and have stronger cards in them. On top of which, make the cards that are unique to the starters on par with the main set, not weaker than the main set. It's like they just want to waste paper in some pretend lala land or just make these secondary products the most expensive advertising campaign ever for MtG. Also the card development for this game is just horrific compared to some of the competition. So many obvious mistakes being cloaked as "we're just making the higher rarities more open ended because it makes them valuable" garbage. There's two ways to end up with an expensive standard:
Market saturation. Some higher-up likely passed it down the line that the rest of company needed to print more product. Not to increase sales, but to saturate the market as much a humanly possible in order to push out the competition. It's basically spending (and losing) money now in order to build your name recognition by having Magic: The Gathering plastered all over stores in the form of products and the like. It's not a completely idiotic idea, but it certainly isn't a great one all the time. The problem is that I don't think that Magic is a brand which reasonably profits off of the strategy.
1) Few people are drafting standard so there aren't a lot of copies.
2) A single strategy dominates and only a tiny subset of cards in the entire set is carrying it.
Guess which one of those describes the sorry state the game is in right now. The only reason the prices aren't completely out the window is that attendance for standard is so low that the demand for anything from standard is almost non-existent. The only thing holding card prices is the expected resurgence once they spoil rivals.
I will say that my LGS has oddly old out of a lot of the staple rares from Ixalan. They didn't under-open it much, so I'm guessing that a lot of people actually want to play standard but don't due the state of the format.
Masters 25 and/or Dominaria will determine whether or not If Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro really gives a damn about the actual game instead of looking to make things worse for local game stores like what they've been doing over the past year. Then again I don't think it's entirely the company's fault for neglecting local game stores when the reality is that Trading Card Games / Collectible Card Games aren't as popular as they once were. Most people expect way too much out of a hobby as this one isn't as sustainable as the Video Game Industry was but that too seems to be dying out in favor of other gaming genres that are more "convenient".
I do think a great number of people at WotC, at all levels, do care to varying degrees on the success of LGS's for different reasons. I imagine, for instance, that having IMA in big-box stores was as a means to get product to markets that don't typically have Brick & Mortar stores more than it was to just get it printed everywhere, and screw the LGS. Not for altruistic reasons, mind you, but for business reasons. As a short story, I got into the game largely because of K-Mart; I lived 2 hours away from the closest Game Store, and the only place I could buy anything locally in 2001 was at K-Mart (which is where I bought my first pack). There are good reasons why they went to Big Box, even if said good reasons ended up being bad, poorly thought out decisions. This is one where I think that hindsight will be 20-20, and they inform themselves in the future to never do this again given how poorly IMA sold and is selling. Basically, I think they didn't realize that this would cause such issues for stores, and assumed all it would do is increase the markets that IMA was available at without having any adverse affect on other markets. Bone-headed and near-sighted, certainly.
Fundamentally, the whole mess has come about through chasing new players at the expense of the old, and designing the game according to data of what people like, not what makes for a good game, and the end product has been an anaemic mess.
Purely and simply, reactive data driven approaches ultimately fail, Maro has failed to grasp that. He needs to reevaluate the whole approach, starting from the point of view "what makes a good game?" and not "what do people get upset by/like?". The aim that should be nailed to the wall should be "ten deck standard". If people leave Standard because they "did not play magic", that is great, they will go and play it in Commander most likely. As it is, those people who have Vintage, Modern and Legacy decks won't play Standard not because they can't afford it, but because the game is a pale representation of what they can do in the older formats and very few cards can be used in the older formats.
The day someone said "we don't want Lilly OTV in Standard" was they day Mtg started on its path to where it is now.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
People with belligerent signatures are trying to compensate for something....
Fundamentally, the whole mess has come about through chasing new players at the expense of the old, and designing the game according to data of what people like, not what makes for a good game, and the end product has been an anaemic mess.
Purely and simply, reactive data driven approaches ultimately fail, Maro has failed to grasp that. He needs to reevaluate the whole approach, starting from the point of view "what makes a good game?" and not "what do people get upset by/like?". The aim that should be nailed to the wall should be "ten deck standard". If people leave Standard because they "did not play magic", that is great, they will go and play it in Commander most likely. As it is, those people who have Vintage, Modern and Legacy decks won't play Standard not because they can't afford it, but because the game is a pale representation of what they can do in the older formats and very few cards can be used in the older formats.
The day someone said "we don't want Lilly OTV in Standard" was they day Mtg started on its path to where it is now.
You nail it on the head when it comes to Maro. Stop crap data collection and design with the principals used when the game was good.
It's not like they have to reinvent the wheel. RTR was a great block. Dragons of Tarkir was a great block. It wasn't that long ago that things were good.
GO BACK to what was good even if it's cloning at this point to get players interested in that 10 deck standard.
I may sit and wait for Dominaria. There's not much that a small set could do at this point to shake anything up.
And why buy cards when there's no one to play?
Fundamentally, the whole mess has come about through chasing new players at the expense of the old, and designing the game according to data of what people like, not what makes for a good game, and the end product has been an anaemic mess.
Purely and simply, reactive data driven approaches ultimately fail, Maro has failed to grasp that. He needs to reevaluate the whole approach, starting from the point of view "what makes a good game?" and not "what do people get upset by/like?". The aim that should be nailed to the wall should be "ten deck standard". If people leave Standard because they "did not play magic", that is great, they will go and play it in Commander most likely. As it is, those people who have Vintage, Modern and Legacy decks won't play Standard not because they can't afford it, but because the game is a pale representation of what they can do in the older formats and very few cards can be used in the older formats.
The day someone said "we don't want Lilly OTV in Standard" was they day Mtg started on its path to where it is now.
You nail it on the head when it comes to Maro. Stop crap data collection and design with the principals used when the game was good.
It's not like they have to reinvent the wheel. RTR was a great block. Dragons of Tarkir was a great block. It wasn't that long ago that things were good.
GO BACK to what was good even if it's cloning at this point to get players interested in that 10 deck standard.
I may sit and wait for Dominaria. There's not much that a small set could do at this point to shake anything up.
And why buy cards when there's no one to play?
The NWO is getting in the way of Maros own strategy is the thing. Under NWO they can never do something like what Force of Will does with Nyarlathotep, the Realized Truth + Crimson Sanction and red sealed cards. Basically, a sealed card gets stronger if there are X number of lands in play and Nyarlathotep unseals the cards. Crimson Sanction is basically a shock that once gets unlocked turns into a full lightning bolt vs players and flame slash vs creatures. Also I got things to say about the return to dominaria, but at this point they probably aren't really worth saying because there isn't anything I can say that people probably don't already feel is coming.
The entire reason the game has gotten to where it is started a long, long time ago after Innistrad. They decided that they wanted to make the game more accessible so they invented NWO and made it so only very basic stuff could show up at common, got themselves stuck in a common power creep scenario because there was no other direction they could take other than reprint a bajillion versions of squire, storm crow, etc, and forced all the complex strategies into the rares, which in turn got everyone buying more singles than sealed product, etc.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
The most iconic problem they did in the last bunch of sets is that they are WAY to easy on mana symbols in manacosts.
They so BADLY want every good card to be splashable that lots of decks can play it, without thinking that this is exactly what forces the problem even more.
Cards like the Scarab God should NEVER cost just UB in the manacost, but at least UUBB , to make it difficult to play them unless you really commit to (which would also make colorless lands worse and so on).
In the last bunch of sets theres almost no card that has 3 colored manasymbols and the ones that have that cost are not pushed at the slightest and "intentionally" made bad (as they are overcosted for what they do AND have a harder manacost to pay).
----
They should put a lot more mana symbols on cards that have a powerlevel to justify that a player commits to the colors.
Fundamentally, the whole mess has come about through chasing new players at the expense of the old, and designing the game according to data of what people like, not what makes for a good game, and the end product has been an anaemic mess.
Purely and simply, reactive data driven approaches ultimately fail, Maro has failed to grasp that. He needs to reevaluate the whole approach, starting from the point of view "what makes a good game?" and not "what do people get upset by/like?". The aim that should be nailed to the wall should be "ten deck standard". If people leave Standard because they "did not play magic", that is great, they will go and play it in Commander most likely. As it is, those people who have Vintage, Modern and Legacy decks won't play Standard not because they can't afford it, but because the game is a pale representation of what they can do in the older formats and very few cards can be used in the older formats.
The day someone said "we don't want Lilly OTV in Standard" was they day Mtg started on its path to where it is now.
You nail it on the head when it comes to Maro. Stop crap data collection and design with the principals used when the game was good.
It's not like they have to reinvent the wheel. RTR was a great block. Dragons of Tarkir was a great block. It wasn't that long ago that things were good.
GO BACK to what was good even if it's cloning at this point to get players interested in that 10 deck standard.
I may sit and wait for Dominaria. There's not much that a small set could do at this point to shake anything up.
And why buy cards when there's no one to play?
The NWO is getting in the way of Maros own strategy is the thing. Under NWO they can never do something like what Force of Will does with Nyarlathotep, the Realized Truth + Crimson Sanction and red sealed cards. Basically, a sealed card gets stronger if there are X number of lands in play and Nyarlathotep unseals the cards. Crimson Sanction is basically a shock that once gets unlocked turns into a full lightning bolt vs players and flame slash vs creatures. Also I got things to say about the return to dominaria, but at this point they probably aren't really worth saying because there isn't anything I can say that people probably don't already feel is coming.
The entire reason the game has gotten to where it is started a long, long time ago after Innistrad. They decided that they wanted to make the game more accessible so they invented NWO and made it so only very basic stuff could show up at common, got themselves stuck in a common power creep scenario because there was no other direction they could take other than reprint a bajillion versions of squire, storm crow, etc, and forced all the complex strategies into the rares, which in turn got everyone buying more singles than sealed product, etc.
NWO predates Innistrad by a good margin; it was introduced in 2008 largely in response to poor pergormance of Time Spiral block, which actively drove players away due to its complexity. The purpose of NWO is actually rather sound. Innistrad, after all, was fully developed under NWO paradigms. To much meaningless complexity can ruin a format, and drive people away from it. The problem is that they have taken it to an extreme that they themselves warned against wgen introducing the concept, and having adopting the "lower rarities are inherently weaker" paradigm whole-heartedly, which was never the intended purpose of NWO. NWO isnactually a goodnidea that has been executed well in the past (INN, RTR, KTK), its just that they do not seem to have forgotten the purpose ofnthe paradigm shift and, much like many things, have taken it for granted.
Note that this isn't a brand new concept in game design at all. By the time Rosewater and the like started talking about NWO, tjat sort of concept was already bybamd large how most other game with a similar sort of randomization element design their games. It was moreso Wizards catching up than it was them coming up woth a new idea.
The most iconic problem they did in the last bunch of sets is that they are WAY to easy on mana symbols in manacosts.
They so BADLY want every good card to be splashable that lots of decks can play it, without thinking that this is exactly what forces the problem even more.
Cards like the Scarab God should NEVER cost just UB in the manacost, but at least UUBB , to make it difficult to play them unless you really commit to (which would also make colorless lands worse and so on).
In the last bunch of sets theres almost no card that has 3 colored manasymbols and the ones that have that cost are not pushed at the slightest and "intentionally" made bad (as they are overcosted for what they do AND have a harder manacost to pay).
----
They should put a lot more mana symbols on cards that have a powerlevel to justify that a player commits to the colors.
Agree in general, but I think the Ixalan developers/designers cared about colored mana cost. You can see this in Wily Goblin and Burning Sun's Avatar. Walk the Plank at least shows they haven't softened since Victim of Night. Wily Goblin is a sign not of just caring about colored mana symbols but going a bit overboard.
The problem is that different designers/developers work on different sets. I get the feeling that colored mana requirements are something that are pushed by individuals, and unless those individuals are part of the team for that set, most cards will be as easy to cast as possible, the only exceptions being cards with historical counterparts (for example, even a bad designer/developer will submit a Wrath variant starting with WW in its cost, not because he thought about it, but because it's a meme.)
Fundamentally, the whole mess has come about through chasing new players at the expense of the old, and designing the game according to data of what people like, not what makes for a good game, and the end product has been an anaemic mess.
Purely and simply, reactive data driven approaches ultimately fail, Maro has failed to grasp that. He needs to reevaluate the whole approach, starting from the point of view "what makes a good game?" and not "what do people get upset by/like?". The aim that should be nailed to the wall should be "ten deck standard". If people leave Standard because they "did not play magic", that is great, they will go and play it in Commander most likely. As it is, those people who have Vintage, Modern and Legacy decks won't play Standard not because they can't afford it, but because the game is a pale representation of what they can do in the older formats and very few cards can be used in the older formats.
The day someone said "we don't want Lilly OTV in Standard" was they day Mtg started on its path to where it is now.
You nail it on the head when it comes to Maro. Stop crap data collection and design with the principals used when the game was good.
It's not like they have to reinvent the wheel. RTR was a great block. Dragons of Tarkir was a great block. It wasn't that long ago that things were good.
GO BACK to what was good even if it's cloning at this point to get players interested in that 10 deck standard.
I may sit and wait for Dominaria. There's not much that a small set could do at this point to shake anything up.
And why buy cards when there's no one to play?
The NWO is getting in the way of Maros own strategy is the thing. Under NWO they can never do something like what Force of Will does with Nyarlathotep, the Realized Truth + Crimson Sanction and red sealed cards. Basically, a sealed card gets stronger if there are X number of lands in play and Nyarlathotep unseals the cards. Crimson Sanction is basically a shock that once gets unlocked turns into a full lightning bolt vs players and flame slash vs creatures. Also I got things to say about the return to dominaria, but at this point they probably aren't really worth saying because there isn't anything I can say that people probably don't already feel is coming.
The entire reason the game has gotten to where it is started a long, long time ago after Innistrad. They decided that they wanted to make the game more accessible so they invented NWO and made it so only very basic stuff could show up at common, got themselves stuck in a common power creep scenario because there was no other direction they could take other than reprint a bajillion versions of squire, storm crow, etc, and forced all the complex strategies into the rares, which in turn got everyone buying more singles than sealed product, etc.
NWO predates Innistrad by a good margin; it was introduced in 2008 largely in response to poor pergormance of Time Spiral block, which actively drove players away due to its complexity. The purpose of NWO is actually rather sound. Innistrad, after all, was fully developed under NWO paradigms. To much meaningless complexity can ruin a format, and drive people away from it. The problem is that they have taken it to an extreme that they themselves warned against wgen introducing the concept, and having adopting the "lower rarities are inherently weaker" paradigm whole-heartedly, which was never the intended purpose of NWO. NWO isnactually a goodnidea that has been executed well in the past (INN, RTR, KTK), its just that they do not seem to have forgotten the purpose ofnthe paradigm shift and, much like many things, have taken it for granted.
Note that this isn't a brand new concept in game design at all. By the time Rosewater and the like started talking about NWO, tjat sort of concept was already bybamd large how most other game with a similar sort of randomization element design their games. It was moreso Wizards catching up than it was them coming up woth a new idea.
The problem isn't the concept of making games easier for players to absorb. The problem is that this was specifically targeted to simplify commons and uncommon cards and the results of it being taken to it's natural extremes has resulted in the majority of playable cards ending up at rare or even mythic rare simply because they tiered the power level without having any kind of asymmetric mechanical advantages. NWO ended up being more than just a rules simplification effort.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Agree in general, but I think the Ixalan developers/designers cared about colored mana cost. You can see this in Wily Goblin and Burning Sun's Avatar. Walk the Plank at least shows they haven't softened since Victim of Night. Wily Goblin is a sign not of just caring about colored mana symbols but going a bit overboard.
Yes, especially on the Goblin its EXTREMLY visible how they tried to "fix" a card that would just be barely playable even if they pushed it harder.
Making manafixing harder to cast is completely contradictory to what it should do, making stuff easier to cast.
In the same set they have 2U 1/4 that makes a treasure and it solves exactly that purpose to fix mana and ramp to 5 drops, its a solid card in Limited for Ixalan that even allows Pirates to splash better.
The goblin should by any means cost 1R and that would be absolutely fine.
If they wanted to further push the card it could have even been a 2/1 , which would make it a lot stronger.
As it is, the card is a JOKE for being an uncommon its almost unplayable bad in Limited and does nothing for nobody , and a total waste of an uncommon slot, when the common in blue does a way better job anyway, its downright laughable.
----
The problem is that different designers/developers work on different sets. I get the feeling that colored mana requirements are something that are pushed by individuals, and unless those individuals are part of the team for that set, most cards will be as easy to cast as possible, the only exceptions being cards with historical counterparts (for example, even a bad designer/developer will submit a Wrath variant starting with WW in its cost, not because he thought about it, but because it's a meme.)
Thats something that would be very interesting to further look into, if some specific devs/designers can be named that look deeper into how cards are costed and who is responsible for making the manacosts more and more generic, especially for problematic strong cards.
The manacost issue even stretches into limited.
The gods are so easy to cast that almost any deck was able to play them with minimal cost.
Same is true for something like Hostage Taker and planeswalkers, they have manacosts so aggressively easy to pay, that its pathetic.
Planeswalkers could be more pushed, as long as they arent cards that slot into every deck without any form of commitment.
Fundamentally, the whole mess has come about through chasing new players at the expense of the old, and designing the game according to data of what people like, not what makes for a good game, and the end product has been an anaemic mess.
Purely and simply, reactive data driven approaches ultimately fail, Maro has failed to grasp that. He needs to reevaluate the whole approach, starting from the point of view "what makes a good game?" and not "what do people get upset by/like?". The aim that should be nailed to the wall should be "ten deck standard". If people leave Standard because they "did not play magic", that is great, they will go and play it in Commander most likely. As it is, those people who have Vintage, Modern and Legacy decks won't play Standard not because they can't afford it, but because the game is a pale representation of what they can do in the older formats and very few cards can be used in the older formats.
The day someone said "we don't want Lilly OTV in Standard" was they day Mtg started on its path to where it is now.
You nail it on the head when it comes to Maro. Stop crap data collection and design with the principals used when the game was good.
It's not like they have to reinvent the wheel. RTR was a great block. Dragons of Tarkir was a great block. It wasn't that long ago that things were good.
GO BACK to what was good even if it's cloning at this point to get players interested in that 10 deck standard.
I may sit and wait for Dominaria. There's not much that a small set could do at this point to shake anything up.
And why buy cards when there's no one to play?
The NWO is getting in the way of Maros own strategy is the thing. Under NWO they can never do something like what Force of Will does with Nyarlathotep, the Realized Truth + Crimson Sanction and red sealed cards. Basically, a sealed card gets stronger if there are X number of lands in play and Nyarlathotep unseals the cards. Crimson Sanction is basically a shock that once gets unlocked turns into a full lightning bolt vs players and flame slash vs creatures. Also I got things to say about the return to dominaria, but at this point they probably aren't really worth saying because there isn't anything I can say that people probably don't already feel is coming.
The entire reason the game has gotten to where it is started a long, long time ago after Innistrad. They decided that they wanted to make the game more accessible so they invented NWO and made it so only very basic stuff could show up at common, got themselves stuck in a common power creep scenario because there was no other direction they could take other than reprint a bajillion versions of squire, storm crow, etc, and forced all the complex strategies into the rares, which in turn got everyone buying more singles than sealed product, etc.
NWO predates Innistrad by a good margin; it was introduced in 2008 largely in response to poor pergormance of Time Spiral block, which actively drove players away due to its complexity. The purpose of NWO is actually rather sound. Innistrad, after all, was fully developed under NWO paradigms. To much [b]meaningless [/b] complexity can ruin a format, and drive people away from it. The problem is that they have taken it to an extreme that they themselves warned against wgen introducing the concept, and having adopting the "lower rarities are inherently weaker" paradigm whole-heartedly, which was never the intended purpose of NWO. NWO isnactually a goodnidea that has been executed well in the past (INN, RTR, KTK), its just that they do not seem to have forgotten the purpose ofnthe paradigm shift and, much like many things, have taken it for granted.
Note that this isn't a brand new concept in game design at all. By the time Rosewater and the like started talking about NWO, tjat sort of concept was already bybamd large how most other game with a similar sort of randomization element design their games. It was moreso Wizards catching up than it was them coming up woth a new idea.
I know NWO does predate innistrad and that Time Spiral was confusing to new players, but declaring a restriction on the basis of one single block? Name some other set that people complained about the complexity. That and even though NWO was declared in 2008, the effect of the restriction would have taken at least 2 years given how they designed sets. So case in point, the earliest people could see NWO would have been 2010. Regardless, it was a reactionary movement that was completely unnecessary.
Time Spiral wasn't *just* confusing to new players; it was also unpleasant to a lot of players except the most enfranchised drafters. The problem you are having, and to an extect current R&D is putting, is that both you and they view it as a restriction; rather, it was originally intended to be and should only be a [b]guideline[/b] of design. Put most simply in game turns, cards with 2-3 (And especially more) different abilities should probably be uncommon for the most part, for the simple reason that seeing too many cards with that sort of design tends to make the drafting of the format a slog and a bit of a convoluted mess. [b]Which is fine[/b] in both theory and practice, as evidenced by Innistrad, RtR, and KtK being pretty damn good draft formats all around while following NWO paradigms. This doesn't mean that it's always used well; we need look at various other sets with have pretty poor draft formats to see this.
Essentially, it is the difference between Conspiracy and Conspiracy: Take the Crown. One of the bigget complaints about Conpsiracy: Take the Crown is how damn complicated it is, and how so much of this complication doesn't matter much in the end. Meanwhile, Conspiracy (Proper) is widely considered a fantastic draft format, even though a lot of what is going on in the set is much simpler (Particularly at common) than the second one. NWO simply means that generally speaking, simpler cards should exist at common. Which [b]does[b/] work, and has worked very well in the recent past. The fundamental problem, however, is that they have taken it to mean that common cards [b]must[/b] be very simple, and now we get to the modern day. The more apt way of looking at it is that commons should be designed to be [b]elegant[/b] and feel like a natural part of the draft format, not a hot mess that just is a clunky mess. A huge part of Innistrad's success is because it successfully utilized NWO paradigms properly.
It's not NWO that is causing the problems that you talk about, it's that R&D have taken every damn thing for granted, including NWO, and are not cognizant about their decisions. They focus only on the "good" things that come about from their decisions, without thinking about the potential fallout of what happens when you do X or Y. NWO is actually intelligent set design, to be blunt. Hell, it isn't even new to Magic at all. Its creation isn't even entirely because of Time Spiral; rather Time Spiral made them realize that they needed to be cognizant about what they were doing, and not just slap ***** together. It's not that NWO was originally reactionary, but rather it was spelling out a design philosophy they had from the beginning of the game, had its edges honed in the Invasion-Odyssey era, was near perfect (by accident) in the original Ravnica era, and then abandoned in Time Spiral. All NWO is codifying what they already "knew", so as to [b]guide[/b] future development. That is why the two large sets that were likely two of the first fully developed sets under NWO are considered some of the best draft formats in the game (Innistrad and RtR), while Time Spiral is liked only be a very small fraction of extremely involved players (And not all of them). NWO seeks to strike a balanced gameplay for both new and old players, and it [b]was[/b] successful in both Innistrad and RtR, as both new and old players loved the draft formats. The thing you need to realize is that Time Spiral didn't cater to Enfranchised players; even enfranchised players were giving up on the draft format because of how dumb it was. It catered to a very small subset of enfranchised players, and that was it.
The problems were are seeing are the same ones that created the Time Spiral mess, but expressed differently. Namely, they are charging forward and forgetting the important lessons they have built up through out the game's history, while not being cognizant of the pitfalls of their decisions. All NWO is was R&D acknowledging the Design principles developed by Richard Garfield, as everything stated in NWO is exactly why every set Garfield touches is absolute gold. NWO is best described as "Sound design theory", and the fact that R&D needed to codify it at all should indicate to you that there are problems with their internal philosophies. At the end of the day, NWO isn't revolutionary, it isn't interesting, and it's bad. It's just regular-old set design principles that R&D needed to be told existed. The problem is they are charging head long into development without being cognizant of what NWO even means anymore or why it exists; much like many other principles, they have taken it all for granted.
This is why I have high hopes for Dominaria; Garfield knows all about "NWO", and knows how to use it well. The reason he knows all about it is that he was using it correctly without ever needing to be told about explicitly, which is why Odyssey, Ravnica, and Innistrad are some of the best sets for both drafting and constructed that have ever existed. The reality is that NWO is best described as "Common sense", of which there seems to be lacking a lot in R&D at times as they rest on their laurels of success rather than wondering [b]why[/b] things are successful.
Hard disagree on this point. The design choices WotC has made have gotten them to this point (brink of utter failure) and they've heaped more pain upon themselves by making terrible marketing choices along with putting out a crap product.
The same argument can be made for other competing Trading Card Games / Collectible Card Games which are currently breaking under the weight of their own design philosophies and willingness to turn away from older players while continuing to make these games more complicated. If you make a Trading Card Game / Collectible Card Game too complicated you ruin the ability to build new audiences. The problem we're seeing now is that Magic has long since branded itself as the "complex, adult card game".
Even If Magic managed to get rid of the complicated mechanics by going back to basics it would only act as a means of disenfranchising their current playerbase who enjoys the current status quo and complexity of the game. Magic has dug itself into a hole that it can't climb out of and doing so would be short-term financial suicide (at this point, Magic doesn't have much long-term hope elsewise). Yu-Gi-Oh! suffers from this same problem as well yet it's too far gone to redeem itself even If Duel Links was meant to be what the game once was. Pokémon TCG for the most part has been beating Magic to the punch.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
You nail it on the head when it comes to Maro. Stop crap data collection and design with the principals used when the game was good.
It's not like they have to reinvent the wheel. RTR was a great block. Dragons of Tarkir was a great block. It wasn't that long ago that things were good.
GO BACK to what was good even if it's cloning at this point to get players interested in that 10 deck standard.
I may sit and wait for Dominaria. There's not much that a small set could do at this point to shake anything up.
And why buy cards when there's no one to play?
The NWO is getting in the way of Maros own strategy is the thing. Under NWO they can never do something like what Force of Will does with Nyarlathotep, the Realized Truth + Crimson Sanction and red sealed cards. Basically, a sealed card gets stronger if there are X number of lands in play and Nyarlathotep unseals the cards. Crimson Sanction is basically a shock that once gets unlocked turns into a full lightning bolt vs players and flame slash vs creatures. Also I got things to say about the return to dominaria, but at this point they probably aren't really worth saying because there isn't anything I can say that people probably don't already feel is coming.
The entire reason the game has gotten to where it is started a long, long time ago after Innistrad. They decided that they wanted to make the game more accessible so they invented NWO and made it so only very basic stuff could show up at common, got themselves stuck in a common power creep scenario because there was no other direction they could take other than reprint a bajillion versions of squire, storm crow, etc, and forced all the complex strategies into the rares, which in turn got everyone buying more singles than sealed product, etc.
NWO predates Innistrad by a good margin; it was introduced in 2008 largely in response to poor pergormance of Time Spiral block, which actively drove players away due to its complexity. The purpose of NWO is actually rather sound. Innistrad, after all, was fully developed under NWO paradigms. To much [b]meaningless [/b] complexity can ruin a format, and drive people away from it. The problem is that they have taken it to an extreme that they themselves warned against wgen introducing the concept, and having adopting the "lower rarities are inherently weaker" paradigm whole-heartedly, which was never the intended purpose of NWO. NWO isnactually a goodnidea that has been executed well in the past (INN, RTR, KTK), its just that they do not seem to have forgotten the purpose ofnthe paradigm shift and, much like many things, have taken it for granted.
Note that this isn't a brand new concept in game design at all. By the time Rosewater and the like started talking about NWO, tjat sort of concept was already bybamd large how most other game with a similar sort of randomization element design their games. It was moreso Wizards catching up than it was them coming up woth a new idea.
I know NWO does predate innistrad and that Time Spiral was confusing to new players, but declaring a restriction on the basis of one single block? Name some other set that people complained about the complexity. That and even though NWO was declared in 2008, the effect of the restriction would have taken at least 2 years given how they designed sets. So case in point, the earliest people could see NWO would have been 2010. Regardless, it was a reactionary movement that was completely unnecessary.
Time Spiral wasn't *just* confusing to new players; it was also unpleasant to a lot of players except the most enfranchised drafters. The problem you are having, and to an extect current R&D is putting, is that both you and they view it as a restriction; rather, it was originally intended to be and should only be a [b]guideline[/b] of design. Put most simply in game turns, cards with 2-3 (And especially more) different abilities should probably be uncommon for the most part, for the simple reason that seeing too many cards with that sort of design tends to make the drafting of the format a slog and a bit of a convoluted mess. [b]Which is fine[/b] in both theory and practice, as evidenced by Innistrad, RtR, and KtK being pretty damn good draft formats all around while following NWO paradigms. This doesn't mean that it's always used well; we need look at various other sets with have pretty poor draft formats to see this.
Essentially, it is the difference between Conspiracy and Conspiracy: Take the Crown. One of the bigget complaints about Conpsiracy: Take the Crown is how damn complicated it is, and how so much of this complication doesn't matter much in the end. Meanwhile, Conspiracy (Proper) is widely considered a fantastic draft format, even though a lot of what is going on in the set is much simpler (Particularly at common) than the second one. NWO simply means that generally speaking, simpler cards should exist at common. Which [b]does[b/] work, and has worked very well in the recent past. The fundamental problem, however, is that they have taken it to mean that common cards [b]must[/b] be very simple, and now we get to the modern day. The more apt way of looking at it is that commons should be designed to be [b]elegant[/b] and feel like a natural part of the draft format, not a hot mess that just is a clunky mess. A huge part of Innistrad's success is because it successfully utilized NWO paradigms properly.
It's not NWO that is causing the problems that you talk about, it's that R&D have taken every damn thing for granted, including NWO, and are not cognizant about their decisions. They focus only on the "good" things that come about from their decisions, without thinking about the potential fallout of what happens when you do X or Y. NWO is actually intelligent set design, to be blunt. Hell, it isn't even new to Magic at all. Its creation isn't even entirely because of Time Spiral; rather Time Spiral made them realize that they needed to be cognizant about what they were doing, and not just slap ***** together. It's not that NWO was originally reactionary, but rather it was spelling out a design philosophy they had from the beginning of the game, had its edges honed in the Invasion-Odyssey era, was near perfect (by accident) in the original Ravnica era, and then abandoned in Time Spiral. All NWO is codifying what they already "knew", so as to [b]guide[/b] future development. That is why the two large sets that were likely two of the first fully developed sets under NWO are considered some of the best draft formats in the game (Innistrad and RtR), while Time Spiral is liked only be a very small fraction of extremely involved players (And not all of them). NWO seeks to strike a balanced gameplay for both new and old players, and it [b]was[/b] successful in both Innistrad and RtR, as both new and old players loved the draft formats. The thing you need to realize is that Time Spiral didn't cater to Enfranchised players; even enfranchised players were giving up on the draft format because of how dumb it was. It catered to a very small subset of enfranchised players, and that was it.
The problems were are seeing are the same ones that created the Time Spiral mess, but expressed differently. Namely, they are charging forward and forgetting the important lessons they have built up through out the game's history, while not being cognizant of the pitfalls of their decisions. All NWO is was R&D acknowledging the Design principles developed by Richard Garfield, as everything stated in NWO is exactly why every set Garfield touches is absolute gold. NWO is best described as "Sound design theory", and the fact that R&D needed to codify it at all should indicate to you that there are problems with their internal philosophies. At the end of the day, NWO isn't revolutionary, it isn't interesting, and it's bad. It's just regular-old set design principles that R&D needed to be told existed. The problem is they are charging head long into development without being cognizant of what NWO even means anymore or why it exists; much like many other principles, they have taken it all for granted.
This is why I have high hopes for Dominaria; Garfield knows all about "NWO", and knows how to use it well. The reason he knows all about it is that he was using it correctly without ever needing to be told about explicitly, which is why Odyssey, Ravnica, and Innistrad are some of the best sets for both drafting and constructed that have ever existed. The reality is that NWO is best described as "Common sense", of which there seems to be lacking a lot in R&D at times as they rest on their laurels of success rather than wondering [b]why[/b] things are successful.
Okay, to get past all this silliness, lets just forget the term NWO. The issue they are having is that they have mixed up strategic depth for complexity (which is exactly what I thought would happen when they codified NWO), and pushed too much of the actual game mechanics into the rare and mythic slots, then made the mythics and rares more open. From observation they basically engineered the game into being more pricey to play in terms of constructed to the point that people basically have to play all rares just to be able to play on the level being pushed for official play. I mean, it's bad enough that the game is already kind of archaic compared to a lot of the stuff that has come out later. The last thing people need is the game to turn into Warhammer Age of Sigmar / 40k in terms of prices just to play in what should be an affordable format. Pauper is getting tournaments now in paper just because of the lower price point and the huge swath of cardboard that has basically no home anywhere else except maybe someones cube.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
I heard one of my local stores might not be doing prereleases this time around due to bad attendance at events. It's a shame because tehy usually got good turnouts
Hard disagree on this point. The design choices WotC has made have gotten them to this point (brink of utter failure) and they've heaped more pain upon themselves by making terrible marketing choices along with putting out a crap product.
The same argument can be made for other competing Trading Card Games / Collectible Card Games which are currently breaking under the weight of their own design philosophies and willingness to turn away from older players while continuing to make these games more complicated. If you make a Trading Card Game / Collectible Card Game too complicated you ruin the ability to build new audiences. The problem we're seeing now is that Magic has long since branded itself as the "complex, adult card game".
Even If Magic managed to get rid of the complicated mechanics by going back to basics it would only act as a means of disenfranchising their current playerbase who enjoys the current status quo and complexity of the game. Magic has dug itself into a hole that it can't climb out of and doing so would be short-term financial suicide (at this point, Magic doesn't have much long-term hope elsewise). Yu-Gi-Oh! suffers from this same problem as well yet it's too far gone to redeem itself even If Duel Links was meant to be what the game once was. Pokémon TCG for the most part has been beating Magic to the punch.
It's not card complexity that is killing them. Complexity in mechanics and rules is just where it needs to be.
I know I am just one person, so my experience does not really mean much. I have not been to my LGS in 2 months, which means I have not played standard or drafted in two months. I have been very busy lately with other life things, such as work.
If I really tried and pushed myself I probably could have made it to some events, but my motivation was fairly low to do so. Standard became boring to me, and I have no desire to play modern. Mostly, I got tired of playing against the same decks over and over again at standard. Drafting Ixalan became tedious.
Standard pauper league would probably interest me.
Goblins that's how many people have felt. That's why events aren't firing.
Could you imagine carving out the time, commuting to get to an FNM, and having it not fire? That's mostly what's going on right now because 3, 2, and 1 deck formats are boring. And lots of times they're expensive because everyone wants just a few cards.
If standard were more interesting you might make some time for it right?
Goblins that's how many people have felt. That's why events aren't firing.
Could you imagine carving out the time, commuting to get to an FNM, and having it not fire? That's mostly what's going on right now because 3, 2, and 1 deck formats are boring. And lots of times they're expensive because everyone wants just a few cards.
If standard were more interesting you might make some time for it right?
At this point EDH/Commander is more interesting than Standard right now yet Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro does nothing to promote events for it other than the annual product releases that continues to oversaturate the market. How do you expect to run a sanctioned event with enough 4 player pods so that there's no bye? That and it's more time consuming compared to other formats due to the nature of being 100 card singleton.
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America Bless Christ Jesus
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
I wasn't aware that Commander had sanctioned events anywhere. The nature of the beast is Standard is the flagship format because it rotates and keeps them selling cards, or it used to. If you can't play anywhere how do you expect people to buy cards?
They need to throw big time support behind local stores and FNM with the rebirth of promos that don't suck for everyone who participates and 1st/2nd and 2 randoms get those special packs with foils and rares in them. Stop trying to force 'engaged' players to play on the weekend. Just because their jobs are MTG every day of the week doesn't mean that their consumers want to/can play other than FNM.
Okay, so WoTC just went on an organized purging spree on youtube. I don't care what side of the fence people are on I'm not on the side of a company abusing the strike system on YouTube and going out of their way to take away the livelihood of others. Jeremy did post a few bad videos, but nothing he posted warranted getting a triple strike and having his entire channel deleted. It didn't even stop there either and it looks like they are attacking anyone who had sided with him. This is basically asking for a lawsuit. They were wiping judges from the judges list before this and no one probably would have cared beyond "oh look, WoTC is doing some shady stuff, that is new", but this kind of goes beyond that. I'm just done with this. All of this could have been dead and buried if they just did the one DCI banning and ended it there.
What makes this so bad is that it is down right petty and WoTC knows it. People were still going to buy Rivals of Ixalan whether some youtuber was talking bad about them or not because ultimately he is only catering to a small audience. Participating in a triple strike against the quartering because of a technicality in the video he most recently posted is wrong. That's no different than if someone didn't like MTG Salvation over some article that got published here so they wait until some exploitable thing happens that can be used as fuel to organize a take down. And to make this even worse, I don't even follow Jeremy anymore and heard about this just from a completely unrelated channel that primarily deals with Video Gaming.
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Warning for spam, drastically off-topic
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
I wasn't aware that Commander had sanctioned events anywhere.
It doesn't that's why Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro needs to officially sanction it like they recently did with Pauper. The point I was trying to get at earlier is that EDH/Commander has replaced Standard as their flagship format in Magic with new set releases reinforcing this recent shift in design philosophy.
With too many new cards being printed/reprinted for casual markets it doesn't leave as much incentive for competitive players to play Standard, Modern, and Legacy. Local game stores are still an important venue for casual players just as much as it is for competitive players.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
America Bless Christ Jesus
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
I wasn't aware that Commander had sanctioned events anywhere.
It doesn't that's why Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro needs to officially sanction it like they recently did with Pauper. The point I was trying to get at earlier is that EDH/Commander has replaced Standard as their flagship format in Magic with new set releases reinforcing this recent shift in design philosophy.
With too many new cards being printed/reprinted for casual markets it doesn't leave as much incentive for competitive players to play Standard, Modern, and Legacy. Local game stores are still an important venue for casual players just as much as it is for competitive players.
I completely agree with you on their need to support stores and casual players but I have to say Modern is the flagship right now. Hell my LGS had 81 players do Modern at FNM last weekend. Eighty-one.
Standard didn't fire.
Maybe your local players are hard into Commander but it's not quite so popular here. Your LGS should support what people want to play.
I feel like the Commander releases are part of their multi-angle push to get people to buy more product as they've been releasing Commander boxes for several years now predating the spear they hurled into Standard. The only reason standard isn't doing well is because they've messed it up.
I wasn't aware that Commander had sanctioned events anywhere.
It doesn't that's why Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro needs to officially sanction it like they recently did with Pauper. The point I was trying to get at earlier is that EDH/Commander has replaced Standard as their flagship format in Magic with new set releases reinforcing this recent shift in design philosophy.
With too many new cards being printed/reprinted for casual markets it doesn't leave as much incentive for competitive players to play Standard, Modern, and Legacy. Local game stores are still an important venue for casual players just as much as it is for competitive players.
I completely agree with you on their need to support stores and casual players but I have to say Modern is the flagship right now. Hell my LGS had 81 players do Modern at FNM last weekend. Eighty-one.
Standard didn't fire.
Maybe your local players are hard into Commander but it's not quite so popular here. Your LGS should support what people want to play.
I feel like the Commander releases are part of their multi-angle push to get people to buy more product as they've been releasing Commander boxes for several years now predating the spear they hurled into Standard. The only reason standard isn't doing well is because they've messed it up.
To be honest, they've been more or less knocking it out of the park with their Commander releases, particularly over the last few years. While they are far from perfect, they are largely enjoyable and reasonably well executed products.
I'm hoping that they have a big push in R&D to fix their standard issues, and frankly re-examine their paradigms. It seems that the Play Design group has some of the right idea, as they are a large part of the reason that Abrade exists; they just need to push for more damn doom blades in Black and White, and we need them post haste. Among other things, but I feel that would help the format immensely.
Hard disagree on this point. The design choices WotC has made have gotten them to this point (brink of utter failure) and they've heaped more pain upon themselves by making terrible marketing choices along with putting out a crap product.
THEY caused people to quit during the CoCo winter (they admitted they likely should have banned CoCo).
Choosing to shorten cards lifespan in standard (completely misunderstanding of consumers desires)
Follow that with Cat Combo (further reducing the number of people willing to play NOT fun standard)
Follow with repeat banning to get rid of obviously broken cards in an utterly broken design phase.
Now we're in Energy winter and standard events don't fire in a high percentage of places where Standard was healthy just before this chain of events.
Add marketing deleting FNM promo cards (Tokens are not popular)
Add trying to force people from their habits, engaged players supposed to play on sat or sun now? Why? FNM is their habit. SUPPORT IT.
81 people playing modern at an FNM means there's plenty of people who like to play, and Standard doesn't fire.
People are just not playing Standard. This equals a LOT fewer packs bought.
They continuously shoot themselves in the foot and not they can barely walk.
There are a lot of people who would love to play Standard but refuse to pay money and give time to a game that isn't fun and lacks the diversity to allow creativity.
They have to stop making stupid decisions while improving design.
Market saturation. Some higher-up likely passed it down the line that the rest of company needed to print more product. Not to increase sales, but to saturate the market as much a humanly possible in order to push out the competition. It's basically spending (and losing) money now in order to build your name recognition by having Magic: The Gathering plastered all over stores in the form of products and the like. It's not a completely idiotic idea, but it certainly isn't a great one all the time. The problem is that I don't think that Magic is a brand which reasonably profits off of the strategy.
I will say that my LGS has oddly old out of a lot of the staple rares from Ixalan. They didn't under-open it much, so I'm guessing that a lot of people actually want to play standard but don't due the state of the format.
I do think a great number of people at WotC, at all levels, do care to varying degrees on the success of LGS's for different reasons. I imagine, for instance, that having IMA in big-box stores was as a means to get product to markets that don't typically have Brick & Mortar stores more than it was to just get it printed everywhere, and screw the LGS. Not for altruistic reasons, mind you, but for business reasons. As a short story, I got into the game largely because of K-Mart; I lived 2 hours away from the closest Game Store, and the only place I could buy anything locally in 2001 was at K-Mart (which is where I bought my first pack). There are good reasons why they went to Big Box, even if said good reasons ended up being bad, poorly thought out decisions. This is one where I think that hindsight will be 20-20, and they inform themselves in the future to never do this again given how poorly IMA sold and is selling. Basically, I think they didn't realize that this would cause such issues for stores, and assumed all it would do is increase the markets that IMA was available at without having any adverse affect on other markets. Bone-headed and near-sighted, certainly.
They need to push people to play with carrots not over saturation.
Purely and simply, reactive data driven approaches ultimately fail, Maro has failed to grasp that. He needs to reevaluate the whole approach, starting from the point of view "what makes a good game?" and not "what do people get upset by/like?". The aim that should be nailed to the wall should be "ten deck standard". If people leave Standard because they "did not play magic", that is great, they will go and play it in Commander most likely. As it is, those people who have Vintage, Modern and Legacy decks won't play Standard not because they can't afford it, but because the game is a pale representation of what they can do in the older formats and very few cards can be used in the older formats.
The day someone said "we don't want Lilly OTV in Standard" was they day Mtg started on its path to where it is now.
You nail it on the head when it comes to Maro. Stop crap data collection and design with the principals used when the game was good.
It's not like they have to reinvent the wheel. RTR was a great block. Dragons of Tarkir was a great block. It wasn't that long ago that things were good.
GO BACK to what was good even if it's cloning at this point to get players interested in that 10 deck standard.
I may sit and wait for Dominaria. There's not much that a small set could do at this point to shake anything up.
And why buy cards when there's no one to play?
The NWO is getting in the way of Maros own strategy is the thing. Under NWO they can never do something like what Force of Will does with Nyarlathotep, the Realized Truth + Crimson Sanction and red sealed cards. Basically, a sealed card gets stronger if there are X number of lands in play and Nyarlathotep unseals the cards. Crimson Sanction is basically a shock that once gets unlocked turns into a full lightning bolt vs players and flame slash vs creatures. Also I got things to say about the return to dominaria, but at this point they probably aren't really worth saying because there isn't anything I can say that people probably don't already feel is coming.
The entire reason the game has gotten to where it is started a long, long time ago after Innistrad. They decided that they wanted to make the game more accessible so they invented NWO and made it so only very basic stuff could show up at common, got themselves stuck in a common power creep scenario because there was no other direction they could take other than reprint a bajillion versions of squire, storm crow, etc, and forced all the complex strategies into the rares, which in turn got everyone buying more singles than sealed product, etc.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
They so BADLY want every good card to be splashable that lots of decks can play it, without thinking that this is exactly what forces the problem even more.
Cards like the Scarab God should NEVER cost just UB in the manacost, but at least UUBB , to make it difficult to play them unless you really commit to (which would also make colorless lands worse and so on).
In the last bunch of sets theres almost no card that has 3 colored manasymbols and the ones that have that cost are not pushed at the slightest and "intentionally" made bad (as they are overcosted for what they do AND have a harder manacost to pay).
----
They should put a lot more mana symbols on cards that have a powerlevel to justify that a player commits to the colors.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
NWO predates Innistrad by a good margin; it was introduced in 2008 largely in response to poor pergormance of Time Spiral block, which actively drove players away due to its complexity. The purpose of NWO is actually rather sound. Innistrad, after all, was fully developed under NWO paradigms. To much meaningless complexity can ruin a format, and drive people away from it. The problem is that they have taken it to an extreme that they themselves warned against wgen introducing the concept, and having adopting the "lower rarities are inherently weaker" paradigm whole-heartedly, which was never the intended purpose of NWO. NWO isnactually a goodnidea that has been executed well in the past (INN, RTR, KTK), its just that they do not seem to have forgotten the purpose ofnthe paradigm shift and, much like many things, have taken it for granted.
Note that this isn't a brand new concept in game design at all. By the time Rosewater and the like started talking about NWO, tjat sort of concept was already bybamd large how most other game with a similar sort of randomization element design their games. It was moreso Wizards catching up than it was them coming up woth a new idea.
Agree in general, but I think the Ixalan developers/designers cared about colored mana cost. You can see this in Wily Goblin and Burning Sun's Avatar. Walk the Plank at least shows they haven't softened since Victim of Night. Wily Goblin is a sign not of just caring about colored mana symbols but going a bit overboard.
The problem is that different designers/developers work on different sets. I get the feeling that colored mana requirements are something that are pushed by individuals, and unless those individuals are part of the team for that set, most cards will be as easy to cast as possible, the only exceptions being cards with historical counterparts (for example, even a bad designer/developer will submit a Wrath variant starting with WW in its cost, not because he thought about it, but because it's a meme.)
The problem isn't the concept of making games easier for players to absorb. The problem is that this was specifically targeted to simplify commons and uncommon cards and the results of it being taken to it's natural extremes has resulted in the majority of playable cards ending up at rare or even mythic rare simply because they tiered the power level without having any kind of asymmetric mechanical advantages. NWO ended up being more than just a rules simplification effort.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Yes, especially on the Goblin its EXTREMLY visible how they tried to "fix" a card that would just be barely playable even if they pushed it harder.
Making manafixing harder to cast is completely contradictory to what it should do, making stuff easier to cast.
In the same set they have 2U 1/4 that makes a treasure and it solves exactly that purpose to fix mana and ramp to 5 drops, its a solid card in Limited for Ixalan that even allows Pirates to splash better.
The goblin should by any means cost 1R and that would be absolutely fine.
If they wanted to further push the card it could have even been a 2/1 , which would make it a lot stronger.
As it is, the card is a JOKE for being an uncommon its almost unplayable bad in Limited and does nothing for nobody , and a total waste of an uncommon slot, when the common in blue does a way better job anyway, its downright laughable.
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Thats something that would be very interesting to further look into, if some specific devs/designers can be named that look deeper into how cards are costed and who is responsible for making the manacosts more and more generic, especially for problematic strong cards.
The manacost issue even stretches into limited.
The gods are so easy to cast that almost any deck was able to play them with minimal cost.
Same is true for something like Hostage Taker and planeswalkers, they have manacosts so aggressively easy to pay, that its pathetic.
Planeswalkers could be more pushed, as long as they arent cards that slot into every deck without any form of commitment.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
Time Spiral wasn't *just* confusing to new players; it was also unpleasant to a lot of players except the most enfranchised drafters. The problem you are having, and to an extect current R&D is putting, is that both you and they view it as a restriction; rather, it was originally intended to be and should only be a [b]guideline[/b] of design. Put most simply in game turns, cards with 2-3 (And especially more) different abilities should probably be uncommon for the most part, for the simple reason that seeing too many cards with that sort of design tends to make the drafting of the format a slog and a bit of a convoluted mess. [b]Which is fine[/b] in both theory and practice, as evidenced by Innistrad, RtR, and KtK being pretty damn good draft formats all around while following NWO paradigms. This doesn't mean that it's always used well; we need look at various other sets with have pretty poor draft formats to see this.
Essentially, it is the difference between Conspiracy and Conspiracy: Take the Crown. One of the bigget complaints about Conpsiracy: Take the Crown is how damn complicated it is, and how so much of this complication doesn't matter much in the end. Meanwhile, Conspiracy (Proper) is widely considered a fantastic draft format, even though a lot of what is going on in the set is much simpler (Particularly at common) than the second one. NWO simply means that generally speaking, simpler cards should exist at common. Which [b]does[b/] work, and has worked very well in the recent past. The fundamental problem, however, is that they have taken it to mean that common cards [b]must[/b] be very simple, and now we get to the modern day. The more apt way of looking at it is that commons should be designed to be [b]elegant[/b] and feel like a natural part of the draft format, not a hot mess that just is a clunky mess. A huge part of Innistrad's success is because it successfully utilized NWO paradigms properly.
It's not NWO that is causing the problems that you talk about, it's that R&D have taken every damn thing for granted, including NWO, and are not cognizant about their decisions. They focus only on the "good" things that come about from their decisions, without thinking about the potential fallout of what happens when you do X or Y. NWO is actually intelligent set design, to be blunt. Hell, it isn't even new to Magic at all. Its creation isn't even entirely because of Time Spiral; rather Time Spiral made them realize that they needed to be cognizant about what they were doing, and not just slap ***** together. It's not that NWO was originally reactionary, but rather it was spelling out a design philosophy they had from the beginning of the game, had its edges honed in the Invasion-Odyssey era, was near perfect (by accident) in the original Ravnica era, and then abandoned in Time Spiral. All NWO is codifying what they already "knew", so as to [b]guide[/b] future development. That is why the two large sets that were likely two of the first fully developed sets under NWO are considered some of the best draft formats in the game (Innistrad and RtR), while Time Spiral is liked only be a very small fraction of extremely involved players (And not all of them). NWO seeks to strike a balanced gameplay for both new and old players, and it [b]was[/b] successful in both Innistrad and RtR, as both new and old players loved the draft formats. The thing you need to realize is that Time Spiral didn't cater to Enfranchised players; even enfranchised players were giving up on the draft format because of how dumb it was. It catered to a very small subset of enfranchised players, and that was it.
The problems were are seeing are the same ones that created the Time Spiral mess, but expressed differently. Namely, they are charging forward and forgetting the important lessons they have built up through out the game's history, while not being cognizant of the pitfalls of their decisions. All NWO is was R&D acknowledging the Design principles developed by Richard Garfield, as everything stated in NWO is exactly why every set Garfield touches is absolute gold. NWO is best described as "Sound design theory", and the fact that R&D needed to codify it at all should indicate to you that there are problems with their internal philosophies. At the end of the day, NWO isn't revolutionary, it isn't interesting, and it's bad. It's just regular-old set design principles that R&D needed to be told existed. The problem is they are charging head long into development without being cognizant of what NWO even means anymore or why it exists; much like many other principles, they have taken it all for granted.
This is why I have high hopes for Dominaria; Garfield knows all about "NWO", and knows how to use it well. The reason he knows all about it is that he was using it correctly without ever needing to be told about explicitly, which is why Odyssey, Ravnica, and Innistrad are some of the best sets for both drafting and constructed that have ever existed. The reality is that NWO is best described as "Common sense", of which there seems to be lacking a lot in R&D at times as they rest on their laurels of success rather than wondering [b]why[/b] things are successful.
Even If Magic managed to get rid of the complicated mechanics by going back to basics it would only act as a means of disenfranchising their current playerbase who enjoys the current status quo and complexity of the game. Magic has dug itself into a hole that it can't climb out of and doing so would be short-term financial suicide (at this point, Magic doesn't have much long-term hope elsewise). Yu-Gi-Oh! suffers from this same problem as well yet it's too far gone to redeem itself even If Duel Links was meant to be what the game once was. Pokémon TCG for the most part has been beating Magic to the punch.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Okay, to get past all this silliness, lets just forget the term NWO. The issue they are having is that they have mixed up strategic depth for complexity (which is exactly what I thought would happen when they codified NWO), and pushed too much of the actual game mechanics into the rare and mythic slots, then made the mythics and rares more open. From observation they basically engineered the game into being more pricey to play in terms of constructed to the point that people basically have to play all rares just to be able to play on the level being pushed for official play. I mean, it's bad enough that the game is already kind of archaic compared to a lot of the stuff that has come out later. The last thing people need is the game to turn into Warhammer Age of Sigmar / 40k in terms of prices just to play in what should be an affordable format. Pauper is getting tournaments now in paper just because of the lower price point and the huge swath of cardboard that has basically no home anywhere else except maybe someones cube.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
It's not card complexity that is killing them. Complexity in mechanics and rules is just where it needs to be.
If I really tried and pushed myself I probably could have made it to some events, but my motivation was fairly low to do so. Standard became boring to me, and I have no desire to play modern. Mostly, I got tired of playing against the same decks over and over again at standard. Drafting Ixalan became tedious.
Standard pauper league would probably interest me.
Could you imagine carving out the time, commuting to get to an FNM, and having it not fire? That's mostly what's going on right now because 3, 2, and 1 deck formats are boring. And lots of times they're expensive because everyone wants just a few cards.
If standard were more interesting you might make some time for it right?
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
They need to throw big time support behind local stores and FNM with the rebirth of promos that don't suck for everyone who participates and 1st/2nd and 2 randoms get those special packs with foils and rares in them. Stop trying to force 'engaged' players to play on the weekend. Just because their jobs are MTG every day of the week doesn't mean that their consumers want to/can play other than FNM.
What makes this so bad is that it is down right petty and WoTC knows it. People were still going to buy Rivals of Ixalan whether some youtuber was talking bad about them or not because ultimately he is only catering to a small audience. Participating in a triple strike against the quartering because of a technicality in the video he most recently posted is wrong. That's no different than if someone didn't like MTG Salvation over some article that got published here so they wait until some exploitable thing happens that can be used as fuel to organize a take down. And to make this even worse, I don't even follow Jeremy anymore and heard about this just from a completely unrelated channel that primarily deals with Video Gaming.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
With too many new cards being printed/reprinted for casual markets it doesn't leave as much incentive for competitive players to play Standard, Modern, and Legacy. Local game stores are still an important venue for casual players just as much as it is for competitive players.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
I completely agree with you on their need to support stores and casual players but I have to say Modern is the flagship right now. Hell my LGS had 81 players do Modern at FNM last weekend. Eighty-one.
Standard didn't fire.
Maybe your local players are hard into Commander but it's not quite so popular here. Your LGS should support what people want to play.
I feel like the Commander releases are part of their multi-angle push to get people to buy more product as they've been releasing Commander boxes for several years now predating the spear they hurled into Standard. The only reason standard isn't doing well is because they've messed it up.
To be honest, they've been more or less knocking it out of the park with their Commander releases, particularly over the last few years. While they are far from perfect, they are largely enjoyable and reasonably well executed products.
I'm hoping that they have a big push in R&D to fix their standard issues, and frankly re-examine their paradigms. It seems that the Play Design group has some of the right idea, as they are a large part of the reason that Abrade exists; they just need to push for more damn doom blades in Black and White, and we need them post haste. Among other things, but I feel that would help the format immensely.