I personally played a bit when MtGOnline was a free beta and used 7th edition/odyssey/invasion as Standard, then I really started playing paper Magic in Mirrodin through Lorwyn.
Throughout the years of MtG there were few things I noticed (and even now restarting to play) that Magic sets always feel to "stand alone" by themselves and rarely seem to connect with each other in any way outside sometimes very minor things, When you look at Standard now (Ixalan/Dominaria and Ravnica) it doesn't seem that they really fit together, they all seem to work between themselves and rarely go outside. Also, every set always had there new mechanics, keyword and ability that has been almost never reused through the year. Not that I mind so much learning new stuff, why almost never reuse something? I feel like it's a design to make rules more and more dense of specific unique keyword rather than use already created keyword.
Jump Start could have been flashback, so no need to reword a specific keyword just to basically have a keyword we already had.
Convoke, hey look, already use keyword!
Also, I feel like that every new block always seem to basically "restart" the new trend of doing the same "staple" card over and over and I left Magic back then because it felt like it was getting a little bit too stagnant, when you don't play competitive and only "casual" and with friend, where there no use to have 5 different variant of shock. So because of a concept of having a Standard format and always "restarting", Magic feel like it's not really evolving or it's doing it but very slowly.
Because no matter what I feel like there will always be a shock, lightning strike, giant growth, cancel, wrath of god, murder and such in all set because well, they are staples and they have a hard time coming up with anything "really" new and rather just stay with what worked for the past 15 years or so. I personally feel there barely any difference from 7th/Odyssey/Invasion than today with minor things, very few major changes have been done. You tell me the major change from 7th edition to now
I started playing Weatherlight/Tempest/5th Edition (maybe 4th, it's 20+ years ago) and the biggest change since those early days is the general increased power of creatures and the decreased power of spells. The Magic story is published on Wizards website and connect the blocks together through the Planeswalker characters, recently they have also been better at conveying key story elements on the cards themselves.
Adapt (Sharktocrab) is Monstrous (Fleetfeather Cockatrice), but the mechanical fix, means the mechanic needed a different name. The mechanic name also didn't suit the Simic guild as it stood, the guild are don't view themselves or their creations as monsters.
Enablers, threats and answers are essentially the core of the game and they need to be balanced. So in a sense your right, certain effects will always exist, but that isn't a bad thing. The threats in standard come in the form of creatures or Planeswalkers, walkers didn't exist in 7th edition. In addition, when I started playing, blue wouldn't get Sphinx of Foresight a flying 4/4 with an upside for 4 mana, that is a decent value package. Dovin, Grand Arbiter goes in a very different deck to Teferi, Hero of Dominaria and will appeal to a different audience. While most cards are for draft you still need the answer / threat balance, constructed, ideally, lets you build a synergistic deck with both answers and threats, the best of those threats or answers make there way into eternal formats.
Yeah I guess, I know staple are a good thing. Althought sometimes I wonder about how they do things, like we have enemy tap land in Rivals Ixalan at uncommon, and friendly tap land in dominaria and m19.
There is Colossal Dreadmaw in Ixalan, Rivals and M19, was this very neccessary?
Jump Start could have been flashback, so no need to reword a specific keyword just to basically have a keyword we already had.
And most keywords in general could have been printed as Kicker or Multikicker. But that gets super boring and doesn't demonstrate specific unities within a set, like a mechanic tying the cards of a Ravnica guild together.
they have a hard time coming up with anything "really" new and rather just stay with what worked for the past 15 years or so.
It's not that they have a hard time coming up with truly new cards, because I guarantee that isn't the case. The problem is that they need to consistently have a balanced Limited and Standard format (on top of maintaining color identities), so similar effects need to stay in circulation for that to be possible.
Mechanics like "suspend" did something pretty different than what we are used to.
But it was also much more complicated than what the casual new player is used to, as they had to understand what the upkeep is (most newbies dont, as almost nothing happens in the upkeep anymore), they had to manage counters ticking down, then the creature is "cast" in the upkeep and gets haste.
You could also do a lot of tricks with it, removing or adding time counters and the set even had Split Second, which was also somewhat difficult to understand for a newbie player, as they had no idea how it really worked (as a newbie does not really understand the concept of "priority" and what abilities work and which dont, as you can use Morph even with Split Second spells on the stack and so on).
Lots and lots of mechanics that did pretty special stuff, but too complicated for lots of players.
Established players LOVED Time Spiral and its mechanics and people that got used to the mechanics also enjoy the mechanics (as suspend is also a pretty "strong" mechanic as it greatly reduces the cost of spells).
At this point in time, WotC will re-use mechanics and also re-use the concepts of mechanics to dumb the game down, so casuals can understand and play with the mechanics without really understanding the rules to fully grasp the mechanics ; in the eyes of an established player, thats a bad thing, but thats also a much smaller group than the casual crowd.
Limited doesnt need to be balanced at all, as it is self-balancing.
If a color is stronger than the others, it will be over-drafted and that weakens the cards the players are able to get, so the person thats drafting the weaker colors gets to choose from more of them.
However, its "easier" to balance a set when every color gets more or less the same stuff in slight variations, its more of a spread-sheet design process as you can easily fill the slots and check the boxes, instead of really tinkering with the set in other ways.
They really badly do that, especially visible are the "uncommon" multicolor cycles in sets that work as sign posts to "in your face" tell everyone what the color combination is supposed to look like in a given set.
So its not a BAD thing perse, but if its done over and over and over again, the spread-sheet design approach becomes way too predictable and that stretches the border of when it becomes boring and just lazy.
----
Even with the spread-sheet kind of design process sprinkling more "unique" card designs into a set might help it, cards that produce a build-around me effect without being just a filler (they do that, mostly in the form of an obscure rare or even mythic at this point, could do that more on the uncommon level).
In Ravnica for example the "guild gate" mechanics kind of produce a secret 11th guild that combines colors.
So thats a nice thing to have, breaking out of the otherwise 2-color cycle of the guild mechanics and pushing a 4-5 color approach.
They could do that more often, to break out of the spread-sheet design and put some cool mechanics in the set that are not just keyword mechanics (as the guild-gate mechanics do not have a keyword).
Throughout the years of MtG there were few things I noticed (and even now restarting to play) that Magic sets always feel to "stand alone" by themselves and rarely seem to connect with each other in any way outside sometimes very minor things, When you look at Standard now (Ixalan/Dominaria and Ravnica) it doesn't seem that they really fit together, they all seem to work between themselves and rarely go outside. Also, every set always had there new mechanics, keyword and ability that has been almost never reused through the year. Not that I mind so much learning new stuff, why almost never reuse something? I feel like it's a design to make rules more and more dense of specific unique keyword rather than use already created keyword.
Jump Start could have been flashback, so no need to reword a specific keyword just to basically have a keyword we already had.
Convoke, hey look, already use keyword!
Also, I feel like that every new block always seem to basically "restart" the new trend of doing the same "staple" card over and over and I left Magic back then because it felt like it was getting a little bit too stagnant, when you don't play competitive and only "casual" and with friend, where there no use to have 5 different variant of shock. So because of a concept of having a Standard format and always "restarting", Magic feel like it's not really evolving or it's doing it but very slowly.
Because no matter what I feel like there will always be a shock, lightning strike, giant growth, cancel, wrath of god, murder and such in all set because well, they are staples and they have a hard time coming up with anything "really" new and rather just stay with what worked for the past 15 years or so. I personally feel there barely any difference from 7th/Odyssey/Invasion than today with minor things, very few major changes have been done. You tell me the major change from 7th edition to now
What is your opinion?
Adapt (Sharktocrab) is Monstrous (Fleetfeather Cockatrice), but the mechanical fix, means the mechanic needed a different name. The mechanic name also didn't suit the Simic guild as it stood, the guild are don't view themselves or their creations as monsters.
Enablers, threats and answers are essentially the core of the game and they need to be balanced. So in a sense your right, certain effects will always exist, but that isn't a bad thing. The threats in standard come in the form of creatures or Planeswalkers, walkers didn't exist in 7th edition. In addition, when I started playing, blue wouldn't get Sphinx of Foresight a flying 4/4 with an upside for 4 mana, that is a decent value package. Dovin, Grand Arbiter goes in a very different deck to Teferi, Hero of Dominaria and will appeal to a different audience. While most cards are for draft you still need the answer / threat balance, constructed, ideally, lets you build a synergistic deck with both answers and threats, the best of those threats or answers make there way into eternal formats.
There is Colossal Dreadmaw in Ixalan, Rivals and M19, was this very neccessary?
It's not that they have a hard time coming up with truly new cards, because I guarantee that isn't the case. The problem is that they need to consistently have a balanced Limited and Standard format (on top of maintaining color identities), so similar effects need to stay in circulation for that to be possible.
Two Score, Minus Two or: A Stargate Tail
(Image by totallynotabrony)
But it was also much more complicated than what the casual new player is used to, as they had to understand what the upkeep is (most newbies dont, as almost nothing happens in the upkeep anymore), they had to manage counters ticking down, then the creature is "cast" in the upkeep and gets haste.
You could also do a lot of tricks with it, removing or adding time counters and the set even had Split Second, which was also somewhat difficult to understand for a newbie player, as they had no idea how it really worked (as a newbie does not really understand the concept of "priority" and what abilities work and which dont, as you can use Morph even with Split Second spells on the stack and so on).
Lots and lots of mechanics that did pretty special stuff, but too complicated for lots of players.
Established players LOVED Time Spiral and its mechanics and people that got used to the mechanics also enjoy the mechanics (as suspend is also a pretty "strong" mechanic as it greatly reduces the cost of spells).
At this point in time, WotC will re-use mechanics and also re-use the concepts of mechanics to dumb the game down, so casuals can understand and play with the mechanics without really understanding the rules to fully grasp the mechanics ; in the eyes of an established player, thats a bad thing, but thats also a much smaller group than the casual crowd.
Limited doesnt need to be balanced at all, as it is self-balancing.
If a color is stronger than the others, it will be over-drafted and that weakens the cards the players are able to get, so the person thats drafting the weaker colors gets to choose from more of them.
However, its "easier" to balance a set when every color gets more or less the same stuff in slight variations, its more of a spread-sheet design process as you can easily fill the slots and check the boxes, instead of really tinkering with the set in other ways.
They really badly do that, especially visible are the "uncommon" multicolor cycles in sets that work as sign posts to "in your face" tell everyone what the color combination is supposed to look like in a given set.
So its not a BAD thing perse, but if its done over and over and over again, the spread-sheet design approach becomes way too predictable and that stretches the border of when it becomes boring and just lazy.
----
Even with the spread-sheet kind of design process sprinkling more "unique" card designs into a set might help it, cards that produce a build-around me effect without being just a filler (they do that, mostly in the form of an obscure rare or even mythic at this point, could do that more on the uncommon level).
In Ravnica for example the "guild gate" mechanics kind of produce a secret 11th guild that combines colors.
So thats a nice thing to have, breaking out of the otherwise 2-color cycle of the guild mechanics and pushing a 4-5 color approach.
They could do that more often, to break out of the spread-sheet design and put some cool mechanics in the set that are not just keyword mechanics (as the guild-gate mechanics do not have a keyword).
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