I'm pretty sure that at least Aaron Forsythe shares a dislike for "solitaire" decks. So don't hold your breath.
Forsythe isn't a person that says to run Great Sable Stag in Legacy like Tom LaPille did. Among other gaffes. To me, it is MUCH easier to communicate with Forsythe over Twitter than LaPille.
Where's CorpT when you need him? His sig used to have a running list of idiocy from LaPille.
Pretty close. WotC implemented a bunch of changes that didn't go over well with players. They took a "Well you'll just have to learn to like it, there isn't any other alternative!" approach to the community complaints (sound familiar guys?) and then Pathfinder came out and people flooded into that game. For almost a year now it's outsold 4E and now WotC is busy playing catch up. They tried to make an "Essentials" product which was basically an attempt to get 4E to be as similar to 3.5 as possible to draw back pathfinder fans but it didn't, it just alienated the people who liked 4E. So now they are really in a bind, they've barely released any products in the last six months, and there is a new edition coming down the pipes.
So yeah. As much as MTG has its problems right now, D&D has it worse.
So much inaccurate info here.
First of all, Pathfinder only just pulled ahead of D&D this summer (the CEO announced it at the end of June) and that doesn't take into account the sales of subscriptions to D&D Insider, which supposedly rakes in a ton of money. And by all accounts, the sales of D&D and Pathfinder are pretty close (and have been) no matter how you slice it.
D&D 4th edition was meant to streamline the game so that everyone could play it, not just their previous fans. D&D wasn't doing so well even in 3.5. Compared to WOW, or even Magic, it doesn't pull in much for the amount of work the company puts into it.
Even before Pathfinder pulled ahead though, WotC has been trying to strengthen up D&D. The Essentials were nice (and not at all like Pathfinder, what are you even talking about?) for beginners, which was the point, they brought Monte Cook back into the fold, and now LaPille, the head developer of WotC's best property, is moving over to their team. Looks pretty good for D&D. Or desperate, depending on how you look at it.
Anyway, not trying to start an edition war, just thought I'd set the record straight. Also, thought that might add some insight into why LaPille might be moving.
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d20 really was the final word in RPG game design. That's the reason my playgroup never even glanced at 4.0. d20 works beautifully.
What? You must have never heard of Vincent Baker or Luke Crane.
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I don't have any issue with Tom Lapille as a person. However, I will always remember the article he wrote on the state of blue a few years ago; how the entire article was him grasping for straws in defense of R&D's indefensible position on blue. So many obvious falsehoods in that article. I'm certainly not sad to see him go.
I don't have any issue with Tom Lapille as a person. However, I will always remember the article he wrote on the state of blue a few years ago; how the entire article was him grasping for straws in defense of R&D's indefensible position on blue. So many obvious falsehoods in that article. I'm certainly not sad to see him go.
I just can't forgive him when he wrote that "Zen-Scars" was the best Standard magic ever had to him, He has great understanding of mechanics but seems to be a more spike focused player, wish him the best.
Note: I don't outright hate him I just can't forgive that 1 comment since he seems to be one of the main guys that holds Maro back.
lol, Urza-Masques and MIR-CHK must be very diverse back then.
I really liked this part, "I also have one Grand Prix Top 8 finish and a Grand Prix Top 16 finish. I'd be surprised if more than a small percentage of my opponents had similar Magic resumes. "
Good riddance. Hope to god he has no say on the next banned list update for legacy, cause if he bans brainstorm I'm going to go ****ing send tons and tons of hatemail to WotC for ruining the best format in magic.
Seriously he said that ZEN SOM standard was the best standard environment ever? The one that had bannings for the first time since mirrodin kamigawa standard? And even after that, caw blade was still on top of the format. It was just unreal how bad that standard environment was and how many people left because of it.
Good riddance I'd say. Also hate how he's supposedly a hardcore spike but he apparently hates dredge and storm combo with a passion.
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"Yawgmoth," Freyalise whispered as she set the bomb, "now you will pay for your treachery."
This is rather sad news for me. I tend to agree with Mr. LaPille's statements on most of the controversial subjects. That article on blue was great. The current direction of Modern and its ban list is a good one. And I will go so far as to say that ZEN/SOM gave rise to one of the most amazing Standard decks ever. The Caw-Blade engine was extremely fun and deep to play, but I do want to note that I did not like the format as a whole. Still, I can certainly understand why someone would claim it as their favorite.
Whatever complaints can be leveled against him, it's undeniable that Magic has grown tremendously under his watch. Whoever replaces him has some big shoes to fill.
This is rather sad news for me. I tend to agree with Mr. LaPille's statements on most of the controversial subjects. That article on blue was great. The current direction of Modern and its ban list is a good one. And I will go so far as to say that ZEN/SOM gave rise to one of the most amazing Standard decks ever. The Caw-Blade engine was extremely fun and deep to play, but I do want to note that I did not like the format as a whole. Still, I can certainly understand why someone would claim it as their favorite.
You tend to agree with him on most of his controversial subjects, (including that article on blue) but have no reason for why?
Tom Lapille, through that article, tries to explain away the problems with blue in Standard (circa January 2010). Namely, the accusations by many players that blue was too weak at card drawing, counterspelling and blue's overall power level in standard.
He attempts this in a variety of odd ways, including comparing blue in Q1 2010 to blue in 1998. Also, no one thinks Ancestral Recall should be reprinted, and everyone realizes blue was the most powerful color by far in the early years of Magic. That's irrelevant 15 years later.
His article seemed to me to be a grasping at straws in a weak effort to defend R&D's position on the state of blue. He even goes as far as admitting that "blue is probably the weakest of the five colors [in Standard]", though he maintains that blue is fine at a tournament level, because: "I've (Tom Lapille) played in four Pro Tours. I also have one Grand Prix Top 8 finish and a Grand Prix Top 16 finish. I'd be surprised if more than a small percentage of my opponents had similar Magic resumes." Great argument, Tom. Clearly you should never have joined R&D so you could continue your overwhelming success on the Pro Tour. [/sarcasm]
Quote from Tom Lapille »
To people who complain that the best deck isn't blue, I would remind them that the two most recent runaway best decks in Standard before Jund were Faeries and Five-Color Control, both blue-based decks.
First, he starts off with a straw-man fallacy. No one is or was complaining that the best deck isn't blue. Blue hasn't been the best color in over a decade, and that's fine. He then argues that the two previous best decks in Standard were Faeries and 5-color control. I argue that Faeries was a black based deck, and would never have existed as a top-tier deck without Bitterblossom and Thoughtseize. While this may be hypothetical, what isn't hypothetical is the fact that Bitterblossom is the only Faerie card on the Modern banlist, and Faeries is hasn't been a deck since it rotated out of extended. Faeries is a dumb deck, I agree, but was dumb because of the broken black card: Bitterblossom. Furthermore, Faeries was a creature-based deck, running a heavy number of creatures. As for five color control, you can hardly call a five color deck a blue deck.
Regarding Tom Lapille's position on card draw:
Quote from Tom Lapille »
There is also a rich history of more recent blue card drawing being stronger than Magic developers thought. Compulsive Research was intended to be a card that you could play in constructed, but it was not expected to become the premier card drawing spell in Ravnica block.
If R&D did not expect Compulsive Research to become the premier card drawing spell in Ravnica block, what card did it expect? Telling Time?
Quote from Tom Lapille »
Mystical Teachings was not on the Magic development radar as being the core of one of the most powerful decks in Time Spiral block.
That's nice. Too bad Mystical Teachings, while being a powerful card, isn't a draw spell. It's a tutor.
Ironically, one of the best blue cards in this era was Spreading Seas. Why would that be? Because the lack of blue in the metagame made it basically a Stone Rain for 2 mana, with draw a card tacked on. Lots of decks splashed blue so they could play 4 Spreading Seas... and no other blue card.
Quote from Tom Lapille »
We've done a lot of research, both in focus testing and in the field, and we have learned that people really hate it when their spells get countered. They take it as a personal affront: my opponent kept me from doing what I want to do. That's a terrible feeling. Mysteriously, those people do not feel nearly as bad when they cast a creature that immediately dies to a Lightning Bolt or a Doom Blade. They feel like their card actually did something, even though it really did just as little as the creature that got hit with an Essence Scatter. This may not make logical sense, but it is consistent with all of our observations.
So he admits that however illogical it is that people don't like their spells being countered vs destroyed (even though it's actually the same thing), R&D will continue to pander to this notion. Wouldn't it be better to correct people's understandings that in fact your card did the same amount of work being Essence Scattered as it would have being Doom Bladed?
There's a culture of casual players on MTGO who concede to every Discard, Land Destruction, Counter, or "expensive card" that is played against them. This isn't every player on there (I am a casual player and I only concede when I have lost), but it is a large number. Pandering to those people is just wrong. They have their own sense of how Magic should be played, and that's fine. But to force their own arbitrary ban list onto other people is unreasonable.
Whatever complaints can be leveled against him, it's undeniable that Magic has grown tremendously under his watch. Whoever replaces him has some big shoes to fill.
The game as a whole may have grown, but that doesn't mean that he (or rather, his team as a whole) did a good job.
Think back about half a year ago, just after the release of New Phyrexia. Not a single major Constructed format was healthy.
Standard was pretty much a one-deck format. New Phyrexia, which we had been told by development would fix the problem, actually made things worse.
Extended was dying slowly. Few wanted to play it.
The problems with the other formats had driven many players to Legacy. However, this was causing prices to skyrocket out of control due to very limited supply of key staples. Further, New Phyrexia brought Mental Misstep, which was intended to make Legacy healthier but ended up doing the exact opposite.
Taken as a whole the constructed environment was arguably at its lowest point since the early days of the game.
Facing a crisis which could cause serious and permanent damage to the game, they took emergency action. They used the banhammer in Standard for the first time in years. They banned Mental Misstep from Legacy mere months after it had been released. They effectively killed Extended in favor of Modern, marking the first time ever that a major tournament format had to be abandoned.
So they averted the crisis. But the logical next step is to make sure it doesn't happen again. The current development team had not only allowed it to happen, but had made it worse with their attempts to make things better. So staff changes would be the rational thing to do at this point.
We'll probably never know the true story behind this, but it wouldn't surprise me if Tom was basically forced out.
So he admits that however illogical it is that people don't like their spells being countered vs destroyed (even though it's actually the same thing), R&D will continue to pander to this notion. Wouldn't it be better to correct people's understandings that in fact your card did the same amount of work being Essence Scattered as it would have being Doom Bladed?
No, absolutely not. Games can't fight human nature. They CAN'T correct people's feelings of frustration on having a Counterspell land against them.
If they print enough Counterspells, they can make it so that Magic players like having counterspells flying around. This will have been achieved by forcing out everyone who doesn't like it, though, not by converting them.
No, absolutely not. Games can't fight human nature. They CAN'T correct people's feelings of frustration on having a Counterspell land against them.
If they print enough Counterspells, they can make it so that Magic players like having counterspells flying around. This will have been achieved by forcing out everyone who doesn't like it, though, not by converting them.
I don't think it's that big of a problem. At least in my experience most players are fine with counterspells and understand why they are needed once they have enough experience with the game.
The uber-casual players that will never be ok with counters or land destruction or combo will just play by their own rules with their casual friends anyway so it seems useless to ruin the game for everyone instead of letting them play their own variants.
I don't think it's that big of a problem. At least in my experience...
That's the thing, though. The information R&D is using to make these judgments is waaaaay more far-reaching than your own experience, or mine. I'm not going to trust anecdotes and the like to give me a better picture of the reality of what Magic players as a whole enjoy over information gathered from a far wider spectrum of people and in far greater numbers than I could ever have contact with.
I don't think it's that big of a problem. At least in my experience most players are fine with counterspells and understand why they are needed once they have enough experience with the game.
The uber-casual players that will never be ok with counters or land destruction or combo will just play by their own rules with their casual friends anyway so it seems useless to ruin the game for everyone instead of letting them play their own variants.
THAT is possible. If he's just wrong that countermagic is so reviled, then there's no reason to weaken it.
If he's right about the facts - if he's right that countermagic elicits that response - then they're right to reduce the rate at which they print it and reduce the overall power of it. Purity be damned, Magic is a game and if they've got strong data that says that the game is being made less fun for large segments of their playerbase by a single mechanic, I should hope they would act on that.
Gavin Verhey created Overextended, which was not the first fan format of its sort. (Hell, the idea of a smaller eternal format was considered internally the first time Extended rotated, though at that point they decided that turning Type 1.5 into Legacy was a better idea.) It was the first to become really popular, which may very well have influenced Wizards to create Modern (given that they hired him, I'd imagine someone in there was reading his articles). Tom was, by all accounts, the one who pushed for Modern as a sanctioned format inside Wizards. Whether he was the original one to suggest the idea we don't know, so I suppose my original statement wasn't quite right in that respect, but the point is that it's silly to say that Modern would have been better off without the person largely responsible for its existence; if he really was the driving force behind some of the bannings then perhaps it would have been better off if he'd left immediately after its creation, but that doesn't cancel out the fact that the format wouldn't even be there without him.
If he was forced out, it can't really have been because of the bannings and lack of balance, bad as they were. He was not the only person responsible for these things, far from it.
The reasonable thing to do after what happened earlier this year is have an internal investigation. Look back through the decisions which led to the problem and see what went wrong. They may have concluded that he was significantly at fault for what happened.
It's also possible that other developers may be leaving too and they just chose to stagger the departures.
Gavin Verhey created Overextended, which was not the first fan format of its sort.
He didn't create it.
After the reserve list was strengthened, there were some suggestions of something like this from the community, but nothing that got much attention. Then, in the middle of 2010, there was a post on this forum claiming that Wizards was going to create such a format that year. This got the community's attention and there was much discussion about it. Someone (I think it may have been Evan Erwin) coined the name Overextended.
As time went on and the problems with Extended/Legacy grew, Overextended grew as a fan format. Gavin was arguably the biggest advocate for the format at this stage.
I met Tom when he played in an unsanctioned modern tournament in my area. The guy had a complete disconnect with reality, he makes statements about what works and what does not but doesn't back them up. I heard him talking about control being viable in modern and saying that 12post wasn't busted.
He played Kibler's counter cat.
edit: so I'm excited to see him go. Especially because of his ridiculously condescending articles.
You tend to agree with him on most of his controversial subjects, (including that article on blue) but have no reason for why?
I have reasons. I just felt this wasn't the appropriate thread to debate the issue. But since you mentioned some specific points, I'll address them.
He attempts this in a variety of odd ways, including comparing blue in Q1 2010 to blue in 1998. Also, no one thinks Ancestral Recall should be reprinted, and everyone realizes blue was the most powerful color by far in the early years of Magic. That's irrelevant 15 years later.
You are taking things out of context. Yes, Tom mentioned Ancestral Recall because that was the starting point of the problem with blue card drawers being overpowered. However, he went on to mention more recent and relevant blue cards from Ravnica block, Time Spiral block, and Lorwyn block. All three cards he mentioned (Compulsive Research, Mystical Teachings, and Mulldrifter) are very powerful because they are very good at generating card advantage for the blue player.
He also admits that all three cards were underestimated in development. His point here is that evaluating the true strength of blue card drawers is difficult. If you want to fault him for that, that's fine. However, underestimating blue cards is a fault shared by many, many developers through the years.
His article seemed to me to be a grasping at straws in a weak effort to defend R&D's position on the state of blue. He even goes as far as admitting that "blue is probably the weakest of the five colors [in Standard]", though he maintains that blue is fine at a tournament level, because: "I've (Tom Lapille) played in four Pro Tours. I also have one Grand Prix Top 8 finish and a Grand Prix Top 16 finish. I'd be surprised if more than a small percentage of my opponents had similar Magic resumes." Great argument, Tom. Clearly you should never have joined R&D so you could continue your overwhelming success on the Pro Tour. [/sarcasm]
Again, you are taking his statements completely out of context. Tom said he was testing blue decks against other players online. While some of his success can be attributed to his higher play skill and experience compared to the average MTGO player, Tom's point was that his play skill was NOT the only reason he could win online. He was trying to say that the blue decks he was using in that Standard were very strong.
First, he starts off with a straw-man fallacy. No one is or was complaining that the best deck isn't blue. Blue hasn't been the best color in over a decade, and that's fine. He then argues that the two previous best decks in Standard were Faeries and 5-color control. I argue that Faeries was a black based deck, and would never have existed as a top-tier deck without Bitterblossom and Thoughtseize. While this may be hypothetical, what isn't hypothetical is the fact that Bitterblossom is the only Faerie card on the Modern banlist, and Faeries is hasn't been a deck since it rotated out of extended. Faeries is a dumb deck, I agree, but was dumb because of the broken black card: Bitterblossom. Furthermore, Faeries was a creature-based deck, running a heavy number of creatures. As for five color control, you can hardly call a five color deck a blue deck.
At this point, I feel I am just wasting my time responding to you. You constantly take things out of context and now you seem to be suggesting that Faeries wasn't a blue deck. I'm not sure I can provide any rational argument to change your mind, because your thoughts seem so irrational to me.
So he admits that however illogical it is that people don't like their spells being countered vs destroyed (even though it's actually the same thing), R&D will continue to pander to this notion. Wouldn't it be better to correct people's understandings that in fact your card did the same amount of work being Essence Scattered as it would have being Doom Bladed?
How is this any different from trying to correct people's understandings that counterspells are "in fact" no more fun than playing creatures?
Hint: neither are actually facts.
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Forsythe isn't a person that says to run Great Sable Stag in Legacy like Tom LaPille did. Among other gaffes. To me, it is MUCH easier to communicate with Forsythe over Twitter than LaPille.
Where's CorpT when you need him? His sig used to have a running list of idiocy from LaPille.
So much inaccurate info here.
First of all, Pathfinder only just pulled ahead of D&D this summer (the CEO announced it at the end of June) and that doesn't take into account the sales of subscriptions to D&D Insider, which supposedly rakes in a ton of money. And by all accounts, the sales of D&D and Pathfinder are pretty close (and have been) no matter how you slice it.
D&D 4th edition was meant to streamline the game so that everyone could play it, not just their previous fans. D&D wasn't doing so well even in 3.5. Compared to WOW, or even Magic, it doesn't pull in much for the amount of work the company puts into it.
Even before Pathfinder pulled ahead though, WotC has been trying to strengthen up D&D. The Essentials were nice (and not at all like Pathfinder, what are you even talking about?) for beginners, which was the point, they brought Monte Cook back into the fold, and now LaPille, the head developer of WotC's best property, is moving over to their team. Looks pretty good for D&D. Or desperate, depending on how you look at it.
Anyway, not trying to start an edition war, just thought I'd set the record straight. Also, thought that might add some insight into why LaPille might be moving.
What? You must have never heard of Vincent Baker or Luke Crane.
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Creator of the Vs. Tournament.
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What?
No, Gavin Verhey created Modern.
I don't have any issue with Tom Lapille as a person. However, I will always remember the article he wrote on the state of blue a few years ago; how the entire article was him grasping for straws in defense of R&D's indefensible position on blue. So many obvious falsehoods in that article. I'm certainly not sad to see him go.
(here's the article I was referring to: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/72)
Thanks to Spiderboy4 of [High~Light Studios] for the awesome sig.
Whoever decided to keep and strengthen the reserve list created Modern.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
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do you have a link or more information?
lol, Urza-Masques and MIR-CHK must be very diverse back then.
Here's the article:
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/72
Thanks to Spiderboy4 of [High~Light Studios] for the awesome sig.
Ultimate hypocrite.
thanks
I really liked this part, "I also have one Grand Prix Top 8 finish and a Grand Prix Top 16 finish. I'd be surprised if more than a small percentage of my opponents had similar Magic resumes. "
Elaborate, please?
R Citizen Cane (Feldon of the Third Path)
Seriously he said that ZEN SOM standard was the best standard environment ever? The one that had bannings for the first time since mirrodin kamigawa standard? And even after that, caw blade was still on top of the format. It was just unreal how bad that standard environment was and how many people left because of it.
Good riddance I'd say. Also hate how he's supposedly a hardcore spike but he apparently hates dredge and storm combo with a passion.
Currently Playing:
Retired
Whatever complaints can be leveled against him, it's undeniable that Magic has grown tremendously under his watch. Whoever replaces him has some big shoes to fill.
Good luck in your future endeavors, Tom.
(Occaisional) Writer, StarCityGames.com
You tend to agree with him on most of his controversial subjects, (including that article on blue) but have no reason for why?
Tom Lapille, through that article, tries to explain away the problems with blue in Standard (circa January 2010). Namely, the accusations by many players that blue was too weak at card drawing, counterspelling and blue's overall power level in standard.
He attempts this in a variety of odd ways, including comparing blue in Q1 2010 to blue in 1998. Also, no one thinks Ancestral Recall should be reprinted, and everyone realizes blue was the most powerful color by far in the early years of Magic. That's irrelevant 15 years later.
His article seemed to me to be a grasping at straws in a weak effort to defend R&D's position on the state of blue. He even goes as far as admitting that "blue is probably the weakest of the five colors [in Standard]", though he maintains that blue is fine at a tournament level, because: "I've (Tom Lapille) played in four Pro Tours. I also have one Grand Prix Top 8 finish and a Grand Prix Top 16 finish. I'd be surprised if more than a small percentage of my opponents had similar Magic resumes." Great argument, Tom. Clearly you should never have joined R&D so you could continue your overwhelming success on the Pro Tour. [/sarcasm]
First, he starts off with a straw-man fallacy. No one is or was complaining that the best deck isn't blue. Blue hasn't been the best color in over a decade, and that's fine. He then argues that the two previous best decks in Standard were Faeries and 5-color control. I argue that Faeries was a black based deck, and would never have existed as a top-tier deck without Bitterblossom and Thoughtseize. While this may be hypothetical, what isn't hypothetical is the fact that Bitterblossom is the only Faerie card on the Modern banlist, and Faeries is hasn't been a deck since it rotated out of extended. Faeries is a dumb deck, I agree, but was dumb because of the broken black card: Bitterblossom. Furthermore, Faeries was a creature-based deck, running a heavy number of creatures. As for five color control, you can hardly call a five color deck a blue deck.
Regarding Tom Lapille's position on card draw:
If R&D did not expect Compulsive Research to become the premier card drawing spell in Ravnica block, what card did it expect? Telling Time?
That's nice. Too bad Mystical Teachings, while being a powerful card, isn't a draw spell. It's a tutor.
Ironically, one of the best blue cards in this era was Spreading Seas. Why would that be? Because the lack of blue in the metagame made it basically a Stone Rain for 2 mana, with draw a card tacked on. Lots of decks splashed blue so they could play 4 Spreading Seas... and no other blue card.
So he admits that however illogical it is that people don't like their spells being countered vs destroyed (even though it's actually the same thing), R&D will continue to pander to this notion. Wouldn't it be better to correct people's understandings that in fact your card did the same amount of work being Essence Scattered as it would have being Doom Bladed?
There's a culture of casual players on MTGO who concede to every Discard, Land Destruction, Counter, or "expensive card" that is played against them. This isn't every player on there (I am a casual player and I only concede when I have lost), but it is a large number. Pandering to those people is just wrong. They have their own sense of how Magic should be played, and that's fine. But to force their own arbitrary ban list onto other people is unreasonable.
Very. Though I am more excited about Gavin joining WoTC, even if it is only temporary.
Thanks to Spiderboy4 of [High~Light Studios] for the awesome sig.
The game as a whole may have grown, but that doesn't mean that he (or rather, his team as a whole) did a good job.
Think back about half a year ago, just after the release of New Phyrexia. Not a single major Constructed format was healthy.
Standard was pretty much a one-deck format. New Phyrexia, which we had been told by development would fix the problem, actually made things worse.
Extended was dying slowly. Few wanted to play it.
The problems with the other formats had driven many players to Legacy. However, this was causing prices to skyrocket out of control due to very limited supply of key staples. Further, New Phyrexia brought Mental Misstep, which was intended to make Legacy healthier but ended up doing the exact opposite.
Taken as a whole the constructed environment was arguably at its lowest point since the early days of the game.
Facing a crisis which could cause serious and permanent damage to the game, they took emergency action. They used the banhammer in Standard for the first time in years. They banned Mental Misstep from Legacy mere months after it had been released. They effectively killed Extended in favor of Modern, marking the first time ever that a major tournament format had to be abandoned.
So they averted the crisis. But the logical next step is to make sure it doesn't happen again. The current development team had not only allowed it to happen, but had made it worse with their attempts to make things better. So staff changes would be the rational thing to do at this point.
We'll probably never know the true story behind this, but it wouldn't surprise me if Tom was basically forced out.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
No, absolutely not. Games can't fight human nature. They CAN'T correct people's feelings of frustration on having a Counterspell land against them.
If they print enough Counterspells, they can make it so that Magic players like having counterspells flying around. This will have been achieved by forcing out everyone who doesn't like it, though, not by converting them.
I don't think it's that big of a problem. At least in my experience most players are fine with counterspells and understand why they are needed once they have enough experience with the game.
The uber-casual players that will never be ok with counters or land destruction or combo will just play by their own rules with their casual friends anyway so it seems useless to ruin the game for everyone instead of letting them play their own variants.
That's the thing, though. The information R&D is using to make these judgments is waaaaay more far-reaching than your own experience, or mine. I'm not going to trust anecdotes and the like to give me a better picture of the reality of what Magic players as a whole enjoy over information gathered from a far wider spectrum of people and in far greater numbers than I could ever have contact with.
R Citizen Cane (Feldon of the Third Path)
THAT is possible. If he's just wrong that countermagic is so reviled, then there's no reason to weaken it.
If he's right about the facts - if he's right that countermagic elicits that response - then they're right to reduce the rate at which they print it and reduce the overall power of it. Purity be damned, Magic is a game and if they've got strong data that says that the game is being made less fun for large segments of their playerbase by a single mechanic, I should hope they would act on that.
Gavin Verhey created Overextended, which was not the first fan format of its sort. (Hell, the idea of a smaller eternal format was considered internally the first time Extended rotated, though at that point they decided that turning Type 1.5 into Legacy was a better idea.) It was the first to become really popular, which may very well have influenced Wizards to create Modern (given that they hired him, I'd imagine someone in there was reading his articles). Tom was, by all accounts, the one who pushed for Modern as a sanctioned format inside Wizards. Whether he was the original one to suggest the idea we don't know, so I suppose my original statement wasn't quite right in that respect, but the point is that it's silly to say that Modern would have been better off without the person largely responsible for its existence; if he really was the driving force behind some of the bannings then perhaps it would have been better off if he'd left immediately after its creation, but that doesn't cancel out the fact that the format wouldn't even be there without him.
The reasonable thing to do after what happened earlier this year is have an internal investigation. Look back through the decisions which led to the problem and see what went wrong. They may have concluded that he was significantly at fault for what happened.
It's also possible that other developers may be leaving too and they just chose to stagger the departures.
This is just speculation, of course.
He didn't create it.
After the reserve list was strengthened, there were some suggestions of something like this from the community, but nothing that got much attention. Then, in the middle of 2010, there was a post on this forum claiming that Wizards was going to create such a format that year. This got the community's attention and there was much discussion about it. Someone (I think it may have been Evan Erwin) coined the name Overextended.
As time went on and the problems with Extended/Legacy grew, Overextended grew as a fan format. Gavin was arguably the biggest advocate for the format at this stage.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
He played Kibler's counter cat.
edit: so I'm excited to see him go. Especially because of his ridiculously condescending articles.
Legacy URDelverUR 11-2
M15 Limited format 32-7
They see me trollin...
I have reasons. I just felt this wasn't the appropriate thread to debate the issue. But since you mentioned some specific points, I'll address them.
You are taking things out of context. Yes, Tom mentioned Ancestral Recall because that was the starting point of the problem with blue card drawers being overpowered. However, he went on to mention more recent and relevant blue cards from Ravnica block, Time Spiral block, and Lorwyn block. All three cards he mentioned (Compulsive Research, Mystical Teachings, and Mulldrifter) are very powerful because they are very good at generating card advantage for the blue player.
He also admits that all three cards were underestimated in development. His point here is that evaluating the true strength of blue card drawers is difficult. If you want to fault him for that, that's fine. However, underestimating blue cards is a fault shared by many, many developers through the years.
Again, you are taking his statements completely out of context. Tom said he was testing blue decks against other players online. While some of his success can be attributed to his higher play skill and experience compared to the average MTGO player, Tom's point was that his play skill was NOT the only reason he could win online. He was trying to say that the blue decks he was using in that Standard were very strong.
At this point, I feel I am just wasting my time responding to you. You constantly take things out of context and now you seem to be suggesting that Faeries wasn't a blue deck. I'm not sure I can provide any rational argument to change your mind, because your thoughts seem so irrational to me.
How is this any different from trying to correct people's understandings that counterspells are "in fact" no more fun than playing creatures?
Hint: neither are actually facts.