MTG Salvation

Quote from TheOnlyOne652089 »

Quote from Xcric »

why would that make it possible?

even if you could prove that the seller searched it, or even resealed it, wouldn't it fall onto the shoulders of the seller of that particular kit and not the manufacturer, assuming you could even prove it?

You can simply build your product to be not searchable in any reasonable manner.

They failed to do that for their most expensive product ever ... if any product needed more care, than its this one.

okay but like... the product isnt unless the third party does it. right from wizards its not searchable and is sealed.

the third party has to open it and reseal it to search it. thats the same as any sealed product anywhere. do you see how thats not on wizards?

further, well... where do they ensure the product cant be searched? randomized contents maybe, but ensuring their independent sellers wont be scum and search it? not really a sure thing. they also dont sell direct but sell instead to a distributor removing them even further from your lgs's bad business practices.

previewing previews got old 5 years ago.

anything to deflect double masters controversies am i right. on to the next shiny thing. dont analyze our products. no time to digest or absorb. forget those flaws. consume. buy. hoard. gamble. get back on the train!

Quote from Ryperior74 »

Well now it's possible

The vip boxes are searchable just like the showcase packs from ultimate masters

why would that make it possible?

even if you could prove that the seller searched it, or even resealed it, wouldn't it fall onto the shoulders of the seller of that particular kit and not the manufacturer, assuming you could even prove it?

believe me, i do feel the product is an exploitation of the customers, i do feel it throws gambling right into our faces like never before, but a lawsuit over the contents, or the ability to search, feels like grasping at straws by a desperate community.

they're beholden to money bottom line. don't buy this product. sell your hasbro stock. stop buying sealed product. write them letters. actual letters, not facebook comments. talk about it in your social circles. talk about it with your shop owners.

if a lawsuit works great, fine, fantastic even... it just feels like its not feasible here for the reasons some are pushing for. i do think a case could easily be made regarding gambling because of this product, and i think that's the angle that really needs to be taken if there's a lawsuit at all. granted i'm not a lawyer, but the gambling side of it feels like a much larger issue here than not getting some shiny rare.

birds of paradise?
razorverge thicket?
sunpetal grove?
bountiful promenade?
mana confluence?

if you just need ww or wg on t2 there's also tithe

i mean, you've got a ****ton of ways to fetch for both types, are you shuffling properly? are you keeping the right hands? not sure why you'd be running into that issue with the mana base you have going

did you guys forget that this has been done already?

all of these arguments, all of these ideas, all of it. every single point. has been argued and proven/disproven already?

the game is old. real old.

reprint into the ground has the exact opposite effect that you think it does. this has been proven. players lose faith in the product, they lose faith in the collectible aspect of the game, and they quit. this is part of how we got the reserved list in the first place. blame that collective of stores all you want, but they saw profits tank and there's a reason for that. this is how the game almost failed at one point.

its also quantifiable that when the cost of entry to standard is low, and the environment is healthy, the game surges. it grows in popularity and new players join in. that means more events fire and more product sells. this is why for years the emphasis was entirely on standard with a predominantly **** you approach to other formats.

this all changed when standard started getting stagnant, or downright toxic and players started looking to other formats instead. we see a huge surge in alternative formats, and the pricing of older cards as their demand increases.

the problem currently is that we have too much value locked into too few cards. the ability to trade effectively has been impaired. its difficult to trade up when almost everything is worthless. the ability to recoup the cost of a pack has been impaired. when you turn packs into lotto tickets eventually people switch to singles. the ability to cheaply enter standard has been impaired. use to be $200 got you an extremely viable deck, an entire deck, these days we're looking at twice that because so much value is tied to just a few mythics that are necessary to be viable at all. we also have the problem of pushing cards in those higher rarity slots as a driver to sell those packs that won't recoup the cost in most cases. this has made for very toxic standard environments that not only are too expensive to enter into but are also just plain not fun to participate in as the format itself isn't balanced. its generally stagnated quickly, or been downright toxic, as only a few strategies are even viable. this has happened consistently for more than the past 5 years.

i've seen people throw entire packs into the trash, literally into the trash, because the entire pack was so worthless and not even the new players wanted the cards. now imagine if every single card had that same value.

reprinting is a delicate balance. it has to be or almost everyone falls off the tight rope.

if we really want to see the game get fixed we need to make an active push for better quality cards across the spectrum of rarities, not just at mythic. we need to make an active push for appropriate reprints in standard legal sets as they happen as well as supplemental products and move away from reprint only supplemental sets - especially ones like this one that exploit the secondary market value in the cards that wotc directly controls the reprinting of. we also need to make a real push for development to get more resources, and be listened to, in order to stop all the emergency bans. its all tied together.

reprint into the ground does not work.

maybe, but at the same time mill is universally recognized within the game already as meaning put the top card into the graveyard and traumatize... well... isn't.

if anything the word traumatize is more recognized in association with the card and believe it or not there would be a ton of casual players who would think the keyword does what the card does. no i don't have statistics on that, but if you want real proof just hang out on any casual magic facebook group and look at the rules questions that come up daily.

i dunno man, i've played a real long time and i find mill pretty elegant. yes, this does mean i was around when the term was first coined and will probably grasp it better but at the same time i've never been a part of a playgroup that doesn't understand what mill means. the word mill being only 4 letters long also freed up a ton of space in the text box.

so like, while i see the point about it not being as immersive into the fantasy side of the game i think this is one time where that's okay

yeah it really has no place in a mono colored build. there's almost zero benefit. if you're worried about land hosers you wer going to get blown out by those anyway and command tower is going to stop that - plus there are plenty of nonbasics out there in every single color that can take that spot and do something more even

i'll say the same thing i've said almost all year, but maybe i'll say it a little louder this time:

more resources need to be poured into development. not just design. they also need to nail down the disconnect between design and development. these types of bannings should not be happening this frequently. let design go ham, but development needs to reign it in and achieve balance. they haven't been doing that. the long term health of the game, and faith in the product, erodes the more frequently this happens.

that said, some of these were LONG overdue. i also feel ugin and uro both need to go too, but i'm sure we'll see them hit with the ban hammer eventually.

Quote from SpeedGrapher »

Quote from TheOnlyOne652089 »

We got to a point where the chinese proxy fake cards have a BETTER quality than the actual real cards.

Yea, thats just pathetic and sad.

Yeah, you're right. If you take an old swamp you can do the bend test or just get a good flex. Today if you bend any card you will destroy it. The cards quality is erratic too. Sometimes you get high end cards. Sometimes you get thin garbage with bad printing. Or you get the middle level which is still doesn't compare to an old swamp. They have very high margins now for their product line. That can easily afford to get the old print quality back.

I don't think they need to be sued for anything though. If we are talking about suing a collectible card game company that is a bridge too far. The game will start to implode on it's own if people are that angry. They sure over priced this double masters product. I get that the old suggested retail for a booster box was around $140-$150. But that's crazy, no one ever paid that. It was $90 about for forever. So if we do the old retail then sure it's $300. But it should be more like $180. You get minimum 2x the rares plus some extra. If you feel you need to sue then you probably need to stop playing and find something else to do, because it's not fun anymore for you. I'd suggest completely getting out of tournament play. There are hundreds of sports out there that cost less money that are competitive if that's what people want.

i disagree, while i don't think a lawsuit is entirely necessary here, they do seek to correct aberrant behaviors before things progress too far. for instance, were some lawsuit to arise over this it would send a very clear message the player base does not want this kind of precedent for product set. that they won't tolerate it. all without having to sacrifice sales in a dramatic way in the future. it's far too easy to just stop buying and watch as things deteriorate without a clear solution. case in point the novels, they became a self fulling prophecy. quality declined, and declined, and declined, and then so did sales. then poof no more novels and we're all left wondering wtf happened. i'm not saying a lawsuit would have solved that, or that they can solve everything, i'm saying they do have their place in allowing voices to be heard when there is no other option.

further, lets be real. the precedent IS now set. this set will sell. bottom line doesn't care how or to who. so if whales and stores buy up all the product to crack or flip, its still sold. product did its job. lets do it again.

Quote from Flisch »

Quote from Xcric »

i'd wager they solve that hole eventually by saying the oil was mutated by exposure to something on mirrodin. the mirrari or karn's spark probably. giving us its current incarnation and explaining away why it didn't have those effects in the past.

It was explained that the glistening oil which corrupts and multiplies by itself was actually a secret weapon planned to be used in the late stage of the invasion against Dominaria. Yawgmoth never got to use it and somehow the oil ended up on Karn, which is why he was the only remaining vector for the phyrexian disease, apart from potential new portal technology the phyrexians develop.

so it was indeed a *****ty retcon

though you could argue that was his plan all along. out play urza. corrupt his greatest creation as a means to finally win.

that said, i feel all the points still stand just fine as even if it was a secret weapon that was never fully implemented because... well it was never fully implemented. we also don't really know how effective it is on organic material that doesn't incorporate the inorganic. everything on mirrodin is suffused with inorganic parts, unlike natural planes.

though it does really point out poor writing in just what the **** was karn thinking. he has glacian and urza within him, saw everything the phyrexians did, and then decides to run off and make a mechanical paradise. while it didn't originally have organic life on it... well... seriously what the **** did he think would happen? anyway i've derailed the topic at hand

if emrakul were to actually corrupt a walker i see nahiri or tamiyo as the two most likely targets. nahiri because of her extended time on zendikar and single minded madness on exacting revenge on sorin, and tamiyo because of how obsessively she studies moons - which emrakul is now trapped within. while i didn't necessarily like the return to innistrad with the eldrazi plot, that could be an interesting twist in the future that still maintains the eldritch horror side of things with traditional horror elements. a corrupt walker trying to release emrakul from her prison.

Quote from 5colors »

Quote from Flisch »

Spatial Contortion's flavour text seems to imply that planeswalkers are immune at least to some of the effects of Eldrazi. Whether that extends to the corrupting power of Emrakul (or whether the flavour text is even canon) is anyone's guess.

From a meta standpoint, I would assume planeswalkers are immune, similarly to how they are immune to phyresis, even though the reasons are different. Being immune to phyresis allows planeswalkers to interact with phyrexians without having to explain every time why this and that character survived unchanged and why Phyrexia doesn't simply just use these as infection vectors for other planes (like they used Karn). For eldrazi it's simpler: There's no point. Eldrazi can already move to other planes. Corrupting a planeswalker into an eldrazi adds nothing of value to the story.

Neo walkers aren't immune to phyresis tho. Old walkers where since they didn't have a body that could transformed but its suggested neo walkers aren't as lucky. I even wanna say they said Melira gave Elspeth and her group her immunity as well as Tezzeret.

Tho similar to phyresis Emrakul corruption was said a few times said to effect peoples souls and any damage to a soul can harm the spark.

well... phyresis was kind of retconned with new phyrexia and didn't really exist in that form prior.

old walkers weren't so much immune to it because it just wasn't how anything was "compleated" at the time. back then it was a much more physical process. at the same time, in the novel planeswalker urza gets extremely sick from just setting foot in certain parts of phyrexia which is how he and xantcha end up on serra's realm. this too is described as more of a befouling of the plane introduced by black mana (which later destabilizes the plane as it was a plane created and subsisting only from white mana) than the compleation process as described on mirrodin. if i recall the phyrexian forces introduced to the plane arrived via portal technology as well. further, urza later builds the titan suits during invasion in order to protect the other walkers and himself from the pollutants on phyrexia. this was more to do with pollution and corrosive atmosphere in some spheres than the phyresis process later described on our second visit to mirrodin.

point is that walkers weren't immune to the process because it was a completely different process back then.

its also important to remember that back then more than a few people, and walkers, frequently traveled to the first sphere without any negative consequence. leshrac at one point was imprisoned there, and jarsyl documented quite a bit of the first sphere at one point even remarking on the oil raining from the sky.

during the thran we're not really given much in regard to the actual process, but we can probably assume the process is more surgical from the healing pods utilized by the hospital on phyrexia's first sphere and yawgmoth's general experiments into dissection.

newts, like xantcha and k'rrik, while produced by phyrexia in flesh vats also strove to be compleated too, having to incorporate real modifications rather than anything oil based transforming them. this was also a major point in planeswalker.

additionally rath, which was created in the aether by phyrexian technology, borrowed races from all over the multiverse. not one of those people were compleated in the manner we see on mirrodin despite phyrexian tech, including nano machines (flowstone) being literally everywhere on the plane. many other people also travel to this plane with no negative consequence.

on top of that; phyrexia did have limited portal tech. it was extremely resource heavy to use, and easily destabilized (referenced in planeswalker). they chased urza all over the multiverse, and explored in a limited capacity to acquire new tech and biomatter. this means that if phyrexian oil existed as it does today, with the same effects, there would be countless worlds (including dominaria and mercadia) that would be phyrexianized.

i'd wager they solve that hole eventually by saying the oil was mutated by exposure to something on mirrodin. the mirrari or karn's spark probably. giving us its current incarnation and explaining away why it didn't have those effects in the past.

as an aside: walkers weren't actually gods until they forgot how to write them, which was sometime after invasion block. prior to that point they were very killable and didn't even have unlimited power. dyfed is stabbed in the head and gets her brains scrambled. it takes all of serra's power to hold her realm together, and she eventually gets stabbed by a thief (though i think that was retconned recently too). urza is laid low by sickness, and repeatedly almost dies to things like negators, gix, k'rrik, and radiant. in the early days walkers die all the time to mundane things even.

regarding if they're immune to emrakul... well i think it would be really cool if they weren't but we weren't given a lot of information. i do think it was a missed opportunity to not have nahiri or even tamiyo be transformed by emrakul. perhaps in the future we'll get a walker that was residing on innistrad, or has been studying the moon, and has slowly been warped by emrakul despite her being trapped in the moon.

Jalira, Master Polymorphist was my first thought

or the vanguard card version of barrin was also a thought

Remember when maelstrom pulse was worth something and not reprinted into the ground?

Good times.

Quote from Melkor »

Echoes is a solid reprint, but it would have been nice to have it at Rare. it feels like a card that would be actively fun and not overly busted to draft with

especially when its not likely even without canceled events that much of anyone was going to draft this set at all.

Good reprints, of course echoes got upshifted...