- Card Slinger J
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Member for 18 years, 2 months, and 4 days
Last active Tue, Apr, 23 2024 18:36:40
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SilvosRogueElemental posted a message on Gavin Varhey confirms change of course for Masters sets.I really hate the design philosophy of the Masters sets. They’re dishonest, cynical and greedy. The inflated price is absolutely absurd. The promise of making entry to the most expensive formats easier and cheaper is a complete lie. They promise tons of value to justify the price but when the value isn’t there or the utility of the cards as an entry point to expensive formats isn’t there they say “Hey, this is just a draft set, guys! That’s all! Please buy more to get the full picture!” Which is doubly dishonest since the Conspiracy sets are much better for draft and don’t come at inflated prices.Posted in: The Rumor Mill -
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Colt47 posted a message on Is Magic Attendance and Sales dropping?The things I can't figure out about the Design of Magic:Posted in: Magic General
1) Why would someone ever make a set with the intent to have certain color pairs work together, then fail to print the mana-base to support them? Bad mana fixing does not balance the game. It makes people hate you.
2) Why print half a cycle of lands each set? RtR block did it right along with Theros block. The sets that came after are kind of a joke in hindsight.
I sub in hinterland harbor and lumbering falls in merfolk and the deck runs buttery smooth without having to have a goofy tribal land taking the majority of slots. It's not a stretch to say that the tribes would be a lot more enjoyable to play with the right lands actually printed. -
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Ashiok posted a message on Is Magic Attendance and Sales dropping?Heads up to everyone following this thread: I updated the initial post to add all the complaints and testimonies of everyone that posted here so far.Posted in: Magic General
I don't quote people that discuss the reasons as to why things are going bad, even though I think this is a valid discussion to have here. I just wanted to organize the data because it was all spread out in this thread. -
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Hermes_ posted a message on Is Commander killing Magic?I think what really is killing magic are those collectors who played Magic: The investment over Magic: The Gathering....Posted in: Commander (EDH) -
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Colt47 posted a message on Is Magic Attendance and Sales dropping?Yeah, I feel that I missed the best time in Magic since I left at the start of innistrad for a bit after returning during the end of Scars. After I settled into a job I got hooked again by my coworkers at my first job and went into playing magic during the end of Kahns block. From what I've heard, I don't think anyone was really upset at the formats that were around with RtR -> Kahns until the fetchlands and expensive manabases drove people away. In retrospect that was probably a minor offense compared to what is going on now.Posted in: Magic General
WoTC has a really big problem understanding what people actually want vs what they say they want as they ask the wrong questions all the time. When they were focus group testing for Ixalan, I'm sure that during those conversations they were asking people if they liked the idea of playing tribal and what kinds of tribes they were into. What I'm betting they didn't ask is what kind of tribal cards do you remember that you liked. If someone asked me what my favorite cards from the Lorwyn -> Eventide Era were, they'd be Firespout, Wilt leaf liege, Runed Halo, Unmake, Nettle Sentinel, and probably Ponder. So what they could take away from that is people want to play tribes, but they probably don't want to play non-creature spells linked heavily to tribes. Faerie Trickery was definitely not a thing and neither was Eyeblight's ending, as those cards were expensive for what they did and they were unreliable due to being closely tied to their tribes. -
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arrogantAxolotl posted a message on Is Commander killing Magic?Posted in: Commander (EDH)
Forgive me if I'm misinterpreting you here, but I think you misunderstand what Commander is fundamentally about. Games of Commander aren't about winning. That's what the competitive formats — standard, legacy — are about. Games of Commander are about telling stories together.Quote from Akki_Akki »Unless someone plays Divine Intervention and gets it to go off, Commander at the end of the day is about being the last man/woman standing. You can form all the social contracts with the table that are taller than a skyscraper that you want, but the game has to end eventually. But just because a game might end earlier than expected doesn't mean you can't go for more rounds. See that is where I never understand people who get upset about a quick victory, its poor sportsmanship to gripe about another person's fair earned victory.
Perhaps the biggest reason people get upset after a game ends quickly isn't because they're poor sports. It's because they feel slighted. When players sit down to enjoy a game of Commander, they usually have an idea about what kind of a game they would like to create. For some players, it's a ruthless, combo-infested environment. For others, it's a grinding five-hour escapade. Regardless of what someone's looking for, when the interests of one player don't align with the interests of their opponents, people tend to get salty. People tend to feel as though they've had their time wasted because the game they sat down to play was not the kind of game they thought they signed up for. This is especially evident when one person ends the game as quickly as possible. It isn't that quick victories are wrong. It's that Commander isn't advertised as a competitive format. It's intended to be a beer and pretzels format. As such, players typically don't expect to walk into those sorts of games without warning, and those who do are frequently miffed as a result. It isn't that they're upset the game ended. They know all games must come to an end sometime. It's just they're upset about how the game ended.
Again, I think you're really misunderstanding the point of Commander as a format.Quote from Akki_Akki »Toning your deck down or swapping to a less powered deck is usually something to do for new players or those on a budget. Even then, you can always loam a player a spare deck that is high power deck. Also yea I do enjoy high power decks just like how I enjoy low power decks but usally low powered decks are gimmick deck that uses a very niche area for "lols".
I consider myself to be a competent Magic player, but I deliberately play with a low-powered deck. That isn't something I do because of new players, and it certainly isn't something I do because I'm on a budget. Hell, my deck probably totals to about one and a half grand. The reason I play with a low-powered deck is because the games of Commander I'm trying to create don't involve mega powerful cards. The games I find most enjoyable are the ones where players are engaged in a boxing match instead of a shootout. That's the norm for Commander, the sort of games the Commander Rules Committee encourage, and the sort of games players expect out of playing Commander. -
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Greyimp posted a message on Is Magic Attendance and Sales dropping?Maro has a lot of input into marketings questionnaires which people take off the WotC website.Posted in: Magic General
Apparently there was lots of whining and data pointed them towards 'don't kill my fatty'.
WotC is also under pressure to make more money. This change in design philosophy for standard comes from bad questions, the wrong pool of people, and a bad decision.
Did they ask people at FNMs to give them data? No.
Did they direct people at FNM's to go to the website and give them data? No.
I bet they didn't even urge pros to give them data.
Who designed the questions? I took those surveys (randomly stumbling on them using gatherer) and I have to tell you they were flavor, art, and non standard centric questions which Maro then took and applied to Standard sets to 'make cards people want to buy'. That's a quote from his twitter.
You can't take a random pool of input and get data that tells you anything. Flawed method + flawed data = flawed result. Maybe they had more Commander players take the surveys than anyone else. Maybe more 15 year olds with less than 2 years experience. Who knows?
They could use someone who knows science and math to help them with data collection if that's the model they want to use. And hire someone who knows marketing with data driven customer modeling.
Result is evident in the sets.
Counters are much weaker.
Removal is much weaker and specific.
Creatures have body + resource + effect.
They are spoon feeding us decks and over powering mechanics.
If every creature is 2 or 3 + for each resolve how can counters or answers that only do one thing keep up? Vraska's Contempt is a step in the right direction but CMC is too high and it's only 2 things where you have cards like Rogue Refiner that aren't even primary threats that completely outpace you. Maro has admitted that he made mistakes and they are 'fixing it' but from the look of these sets where fixes are supposed to be in Maro doesn't believe that he's completely wrong. He just thinks they went too far. That's the only explanation I can get from the weak sauce removal and counters we see.
Hell RIX gave aggro a counter bump Admiral's Order and nothing significant for actual control. Dispel anyone?
Maro needs to believe that the new philosophy will not work. They don't have to reinvent the wheel. The game was popular and successful not that long ago. Go back to sound principals and stop refusing to reprint cards just to milk Modern Masters!
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crimhead posted a message on Is Magic Attendance and Sales dropping?Posted in: Magic General
There are 2 major problems with sanctioning EDH:Quote from Card Slinger J »
It doesn't that's why Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro needs to officially sanction it like they recently did with Pauper.Quote from Greyimp »I wasn't aware that Commander had sanctioned events anywhere.
- Multiplayer games are poor for competitive play because collusion is a big problem. They would therefore have to sanction 1vs1 EDH only, and there is a very small base to build on as most Commander players are casual and prefer multiplayer.
- Competitive EDH decks are easily as expensive as Modern decks, and there are tonnes of RL staples. To make this a flagship competitive format, they would need to vastly expand the banned list, or else rule out old sets altogether to divide EDH ala "type one" and "type two" back in the 1990s. Neither of those would likely go over well with the Commander base.
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Greyimp posted a message on Is Magic Attendance and Sales dropping?Posted in: Magic GeneralQuote from Colt47 »The thing is that I've read up on Chris Cocks and I got a good feeling for why they replaced Greg Leeds. First, the potential growth in digital far exceeds anything in paper. Even if others on the inside are strong supporters of paper magic, Chris Cocks will be very persistent on pushing digital over paper by default, and it's very likely they will succeed at converting the game to digital with him at the helm. The other thing about Chris is that he is going to be very aggressively against the pro-tour. I don't care what MaRo says in his public tweets or what some weird guy says on Reddit, the guy has very little in the way of motivations to want to keep around what would be considered an archaic system, especially considering even Greg Leeds wanted to push to get rid of the pro tour.
Your logic here is pretty sound, I have to only hope that Chris Cocks isn't that short sighted. Can you imagine how pissed off every collector of paper would be if they just stopped printing cards? How many of those people do you imagine would ever... EVER play any MTG or WOTC product again? Even a lot of people who play the awful MTGO are in that boat.
Pushing a better digital to make more money makes sense. More power to making a better game yay. BUT how do they think a digital game with crap design is going to go over. If people aren't playing the paper game because it's stagnant and badly executed why would they bother with digital?
A healthy paper game in stores will only make them MORE money from digital from those who can't get their fix from enough kitchen table, FNM, or other play. Without the paper lead in, and without better and balanced game design they will fail. Screwing over the card stores and paper players will blow up in their face if they're actually doing these things (taking away promos, trying to force people to play on different days) on purpose they're dumber than I was thinking they are. They don't need less ways to play magic. They need a better paper and digital experience.
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Greyimp posted a message on Is Magic Attendance and Sales dropping?They would lose big time if going straight digital is their objective and frankly that seems to be a fringe theory to me.Posted in: Magic General
Why wouldn't they just reprint anything and everything and sell the packs for normal MSRP if they're not making any effort to protect card values while still helping people get into older formats? Ditch paper when it's a huge revenue stream at a time when revenue is down? Have you noticed that their paper product releases are up? More likely their advertising team are morons and pushing big box store type Pokemon products is an effort to branch out.
I hope their 'holiday blister pack' sits on the shelves and doesn't sell at all. It's a terrible change from the holiday gift boxes which had value for a multitude of reasons.
I know a great many players who only play paper (myself included) and would just quit if paper went away, not to mention the tank in value to all the collectors who'd be mad as hell.
Makes no sense.
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