My impression from the people who are disappointed with the set is different from yours though. I think people are complaining that buying a low number of boosters is much more risky than in regular sets, which you point out in the end:
This means that for people not to lose when buying masters 25 they have to cash out on a box (or something close to that), which is already a high entry barrier for what is supposed to be a celebration set.Buying individual packs is much more of a gamble, given the higher price, but booster boxes will pay out their expected value.
I don't know, just leaves a bad taste in your mouth knowing that WoTC is basically forcing you to spend a lot of money for you to get a decent return on your investment. Not to mention that I'm a bit skeptical about the value retention capacity of many cards from the mythic and rare list after the market gets flooded with more copies. Anyway, I think the conclusion is that if you have the money to buy a box and wants to, there is no harm in doing that, but don't try to gamble on individual packs.
No. Here you're simply doing a basic statistical error. The cards are just a SAMPLE of the whole population of Dominaria, which I'm assuming - for the sake of the argument - holds the same proportion of white/blacks than our real world. You can't just do the ratio of that sample, say that it is different from 15% (which is the actual number, not 12~13), and claim that it is not accurate. Don't you see that, by doing your way, almost all samples would end up different and therefore inaccurate? You have to see what is the chance of having the proportion that we see in the cards with an arbitrary chance of 15% of picking a black person.
If you don't understand that, I can explain it again in other terms.Three-hundred years have passed in a world where I'm sure there are plenty of magical means of transportation. If you assume that people just went ON FOOT at 5km/h walking 6 hours a day, they would cover 30 km in a day. Near 11,000 km in a year. Earth's circunference is 40,000 km. In just 4 years they could have reached the other continent. And I'm being fairly lenient with my numbers here. Even if you want to say that they made stops along the way you can't say that they wouldn't at least get there after a whole century had passed, let alone 3.As a biologist, I can confidently say this is utter horse*****. Human beings are VERY similar to each other across sexes, even if there exists general mean differences. Just as a reference point, the difference between male and female gorillas in bodyweight is about 50% while in humans it is only 15%, and I'm not even gonna get to invertebrates because there is some DRASTIC differences there.
I will stop here because it is no use to address multiple points, becomes tedious. You're being higly inaccurate about the things you're claiming that I know something about, so excuse me if I suspect your claims of things that I actually don't know something about, like the effects of diversity initiatives in comic books and the new pacific rim movie. My honest opinion is that you're looking for something to be outraged about, either because other people influenced you to think that way or because things are changing and people are often scared of change.
From the batch of human cards that we have from Dominaria with artwork, there are 27 human creatures+planeswalkers in total. 18 are white, 7 are black, and 2 you can't say what they are (knight of malice and cabal paladin).
The data that I could quickly find on black people around the world tells me that they make 15% of the population, worldwide and in the US.
I wrote a script on MATLAB that calculates the chances of you picking a particular distribution of blacks/whites (here I'm calling everything non-black as white) with a 15% chance of picking a black person everytime. The chances of you getting a 18/7 representation, after iterating a hundred thousand times, is around 4.4%. If you count both knights as white people (since you think the white people are depicted as bad), the chances go up to about 5.9%. In the latter case, if this was a scientific hypothesis ('black people are being more represented than what is expected by chance'), it would be rejected. In the former, it would be accepted.
That is, however, with the cards that we have spoiled so far. Is that going to change at the end of spoiler season? It is possible. So far, if you count the knights as white people, you have no legs to stand on, otherwise, you might have a chance, heh.
chance = 0.15;
count = 0;
for i=1:100000
numberblack = 0;
for j=1:(white+black)
pick = rand;
if pick <= chance
numberblack = numberblack + 1;
end
end
if numberblack == black
count = count + 1;
end
end
Magic = (count/100000)*100;
end
Such pointless complaints for such a trivial detail of the artwork. The flavor text of the card is, indeed, amazing.
Heh. The classical abzan self-mill legend-ramp archetype.
That said, I really dislike the change in her physical complexion. I think the original art was pretty iconic, and there is the 'slim fit' build which she appeared to have, where you don't need to have tons of muscles just because you're an active warrior, rather being fast and powerful (Bruce Lee style). This change to a schwarzenegger-like build feels completely out of left field.
In short, this is only good if you can realistically do something else with the mana that you untapped, which requires some build around. Otherwise, I'd stick with negate.
Great for copying gitaxian probe I guess.
Or this:
Such a terrible update to a great creature. One of the first that I learned about when starting to play magic. Sad.
Cool art though.
All these legends... nobody will remember half of them after this set is fully spoiled.
Have to grab a foil for my collection of sea creatures.
On that note, card is pretty powerful, though the mana cost is quite restrictive. I can see it becoming a thing, but it will require a very specific shell.