Quote from Decadent_Creed »
This used to be a community that was well moderated and didn't allow stuff like this, much less allow the same people to say the same bigoted stuff over and over with little to no consequences, but that just isn't the case anymore. If anyone can recommend a community withh plenty of discussion that will actually put their foot down when it comes to bigots peddling hate speech left and right, please let me know because I'd like to join.
^^This.
Is MtGNexus any better? I know several of the Reddit communities are a bit of a mixed bag and I'm not sure how I feel about the thread format but there there's gotta be other communities right?
1
Theros has Devotion, which encourages monocolour play. Shadowmoor has a lot of hybrid which... doesn't encourage monocolour play.
Removing much manafixing will, naturally, force players to play with a more colour identity mindset. Similarly, putting in cards with 4-6 hybrid mana as their costs will encourage people to diversify in an attempt to more easily play those cards.
You need a better mix of hard mana cards and hybrid cards. The big splashes should be the top end, feature pieces. For instance, Benalish Marshal encourages more monocolour play than Hearthfire Hobgoblin does, simply for the fact one can only be cast with white, while the other encourages me to seek red cards too.
To really reward players, you'd be looking for 'Chroma' cards, both figuratively and literally. That and Devotion both reward monocolour play. Incidently mana fixing such as Seething Song can also encourage monocolour play in the correct enviroment.
Similarly, it's also worthwhile to minimise the overlap of deck archetypes between colours, which is a little odd as it's the exact opposite of what you normally want to do. So pick five themes/archetypes you want, and then try to build each in monoclour. That's a good thought experiment for testing and figuring out how to make this cube work.
Speaking of which, test regularly. Smaller, tested changes are much better than sweeping, speculative changes, as when something doesn't work it's a lot easier to figure out why.
I wish you all the best of luck, and am sure someone more experienced with Cube may be able to be more useful than me
2
Urza is basically the Batman of the MTG franchise, with the same caveats, story templating, moral ambiquity and everything else that people adore about DC's 'Dark Knight'.
Fin.
1
Not entirely, people have just been thinking about it backwards. Think more like this or that. Cards with two effects that when depleted of loyalty counters, are then flipped into Legendary Creatures.
1
Yeah, however one thing that you seem to have forgotten...
Alike the MCU storyline people aren't following this storyline in a vacuum. Peoples complaint isn't so much the frequency of seeing Jace, it's the frequency of his necessity to the overall, long term plotline.
Jace was one the first five walkers to appear in Lorwyn. At that time, they heavily promoted Jace to an audience that didn't particularly like him, and was more interested in the other four walkers. After that, we had Alara which introduced new thematic walkers (and the return of Bolas). However, that still shoehorned in Jace using a connection to Tezzeret and Bolas. Then Zendikar, which... shoehorned in Jace to the detriment of the story (as I view it).
Then we jumped over to Mirrodin, which brought us reprieve in that we had no Jace, the return and adaption of a favoured enemy and a favoured setting, and a lot of people hated it. The reason? Venser's entire storyline at the time was criticised for being 'too much like Jace'. That may have been forgetten in time as people retrospectively interpret his character, but it was a criticism that was made.
Then we got Innistrad, which was a reprieve from Jace. Momentarily...
Because then we returned to Ravnica, and low and behold, Jace was front and center. What irked so many is that he then became a living MacGuffin. He also (as some view it) stole the literal identity of Ravnica into his own character as a shallow attempt to make people like him. It backfired. More people ended up hating him for being a living macguffin that damaged the identity of their favourite plane.
Theros then gave us a reprieve from Jace, but not from Gideon who was a very polarising character at the time, with some for and some against. Notably most of those against disliked his (then) similarities to Jace in the way his story was handled, which early on telegraphed that the Gatewatch would become a thing.
Then Tarkir happened. Most people forgot the story of this because it handled time travel badly, did major retcon work to Bolas and Ugin (that angered just about everyone), and it's main protagonist was criticised as a lazy pastiche of elements of Jace and Gideon (who were both still disliked by the general audience). It also introduced the wedge plane everyone wanted... to immediately destroy that identity thanks to the Jace pastiche.
During that time however we had side stories happening that was supposed to follow Ral. Unfortunately this quickly devolved into Jace + Jace, as he got shoehorned in there (with Gideon) in the worst plot setup for a set I've seen in a while, which wheeled into Eldrazikar. This is when the pattern really begins to set in: another fan favourite plane (not mine, I hate it), that involved Jace (or a pastiche of him), and involved a fan favourite setting being irrevocably destroyed or it's identity forever changing. This only fanned animosity for Jace, especially with the perceived ease he defeated the Eldrazi. Oh wait, what happens next...
We go back to another fan favourite plane (also not mine, I hate it) and low and behold, Jace is there. Now previously, it's been one block on (Jace) and one block off (pastiche), but now they're just forcing him down the audience's throats. And low and behold, the core of the story is the plane's identity being irrevocably changed and Jace having a hand in it and/or being the one to solve the problem. Nevermind that you had Tamiyo there, the fact she was an afterthought as compared to Jace's necromantic booty obsession and the criminally overlooked Nahiri/Sorin story, in the end it all came down to 'Jace Kaioken x10'.
From there we went to Kaladesh, and while supposed to be an artifact set involving rebellion, drama, social politics and everyone's (modern) favourite artifact baddie Tezzeret, even with a big Ajani plot point, most people criticised it for Jace. Because despite the fact he could of had no screentime, they had to shoehorn him in anyway. Oh and look, the pattern continues of plane everyone enjoys... with it's identity completely destroyed. Hmmm.
Then we go to Amonkhet, another plane everyone loves the world of (despite it being a fascist military meritocracy). Now this one we 'knew' was going to be destroyed, so any audience member surprised here when it's completely torn asunder is just naive. In fact, it's main approval was watching the Gatewatch get bodied by Bolas, because people were generally sick of the Gatewatch at this point (yet notably only when it involved Jace). Gideon got substantial character development in this set that truly distinguished him from Jace and gained his own audience.
From there we got Ixalan, which makes four Jace sets, yayyy. It also brought people pirates, so if you're a fan of those, great! If you're not? Sucks to be you! Sadly those pirates got Jace'd, which ruined the pirates for a considerable portion of their fans. We also got the return of Azor, a huge piece of fan service... that Jace exiled into plot irrelevance reminding everyone of how Jace disregards the general plot (being the GuffinPact). Notably Ixalan's biggest criticism is Jace and his superficial character-centric plot, while it's most applauded notion are the Pirates, Dinosaurs and White Vampires.
From there we went to Dominaria, return to a plane people adore and with no Jace. And people went wild. They loved seeing the return of characters that were similar but distinct to the Gatewatch members. It capitalised on Gideon's improved character, continued Lilith's story, and didn't involve Jace... until it did, in the most criticised part of Dominaria, which is the Jace cameo. Which also added precisely nothing to the story as it was redundant in respect of the future Project Lightning Bug. Fortunately as Jace didn't stick around, Dominaria didn't have it's audience identity completely destroyed.
Oh, nevermind, they rammed out a Spellbook thing based on Jace. Which received criticism because it could of been any other PW, but no, they had to ram Jace in, because you can't be allowed to forget that Jace is plot-armor superion of audience upset.
Then we're back to Ravnica, and thank goth that there has been no Jace. We got to focus on the Guilds, and how things have changed precisely because Jace isn't in the one place he should be, and it's causing the systematic destruction of another fan favourite plane...
And then we will have War of the Spark, where it's heavily suspected that instead of Ajani, who was originally set up to combat Bolas, we're going to quick swerve to Jace being the hero. But not after the entire identity and culture that the audience loves about Ravnica is completely destroyed. In a set that should be about a planeswalker war, instead it's increasingly likely to be all about a war over Jace's guildpact infused spark. So he can go on to be Guildpact of the Multiverse, because we needed an Adam Warlock Above All in MTG, that can be used to simply reset problems in the multiverse so nobody has to write convincing endings. And sure, it has parallels to Azor's naive rigidity and Liliana's selfish pursuit of her own goals despite the consequences, but it's also shallow.
And yes, while there is going to be a new weatherlight, because Magic repeats it's story beats over and over with different gloss in the hope you don't notice, it's not unpredictable and isn't particularly fun for the audience, especially when a pattern has existed of destroying the fan favourite planes for a cheap emotional reaction now in trade for long term audience respect, investment and story potential.
Case in point: Marvel made the same mistakes and had to run a series called Time Runs Out, and then Secret Wars 2015, so they could restore all their fan favourites (or adaptions of them) after angering many of their audience members. Similarly they did this with House of M as well in regards to their various mutant-X teams.