MTG Salvation

I remember playing during Kamigawa-Rav Standard, and there were all kinds of different strategies you could play. Aggro, control, combo, aggro-control, LD, etc. I would go to FNM and there would be 30 people there and probably at least 15-20 unique decks. I LOVE to play LD, and so I did. Nobody talked about it being "unfun" to play against, rather they tried extra hard to destroy me and were twice as happy when they did. I died to several Sacred Grounds being played against me, and I still had fun.

What is upsetting to me is that Wizards (and it seems like MaRo in particular) just takes things away that were a part of the game since before I started.

No more LD
No more Mana Leak
No more *** effects
No more core set

Everything is TOO POWERFUL!!!111!!! now. Seriously, read some of the stuff MaRo says. Pyroclasm is too strong, but getting over half my life total taken from Mardu Vehicles by t3 isn't? *** is too powerful, but vehicles-a subtype that literally hoses sweepers-are completely fine?!

Stop worrying about "unfun" and stop micromanaging for draft. If you have boosters with 15 cards in a pack, people are going to draft them. Forget "as-fan", forget micromanaging card designs for "limited".

And STOP telling me that things are "TOO POWERFUL!!!"

::Edit::

In response to SuperHans99

I agree completely. But MaRo and his "market research" has assured us several times that nothing like that will ever happen again. One of my favorite things in mtg ever, and he was just like "nope, newer players didn't like it".

Uhh....I started playing during Onslaught-Mirrodin standard, so I was still relatively new, and I LOVED getting to play with mechanics and cards that my cousin (who got me started in mtg) and all of our teammates talked about "back in the old days". I actually got to cast Akroma in standard, that was fantastic. But nope, MaRo says never again and so it will never be...

Another issue is the micromanagement of limited. Create the cards for constructed, and drafters willl still draft the set. But design for limited and you end up with limited-fodder standard with a couple bomb mythics thrown in.

I agree with every sentiment in this thread so far, and I've asked myself several times if I'm looking through rose-colored nostalgia glasses, and the answer is simply "no". The problem is that everything has become too formulaic, and they are so focused on newer players that older players are never thought about. I've been playing this game since I was 15 years old, and I'm going on 30 this year. And yet, all of the things I enjoyed playing (sweepers, land destruction, etc.) is completely gone. It is now "Battlecruiser Magic" where my big guy slams into your big guy, and it just isn't interesting. SaffronOlive over at mtggoldfish brought up a good point recently where he said that an issue was that Wizards was trying to eliminate "unfun" ways to lose, but the problem is, ALL types of losses are unfun. If you lose to counter.dec you're going to say "I hate counterspells"! and then in the same tournament if you lose to aggro you're going to hate aggro.

The format NEEDS all of those strategies to thrive. Look at the diversity from Mtg's past vs. today and that gives a little glimpse as to what the problem is.

Comment Hidden

There is an Intel ad with a woman with red lines on her face that is popping up when I first get to the site. It takes up the whole page, and since I'm on my phone if I'm zoomed in looking at the spoiler or most recent topics it locks me up and I can't even close the page. Very annoying

/in (how could I resist a mafia related to music?!)

1. Not as much as I used to, but I'll go with: Snoop, Eminem, 50 Cent, Lil' Wayne, The Lonely Island
2. Negative
3. None
4. I've played in 3 or 4, so I'm somewhat experienced.

My vote has to go to Norin The Wary

Actually Wizards have specifically aimed at appeasing the casual crowd in many ways, and have actually hurt the mid-level competitive game as a direct consequence of many of their decisions.

They have introduced "bricks and mortar" policies, taking the game away from independent TOs that run competitive MTG. Bricks and mortar stores are full of people who move from game to game, who are hard to build a competitive environment with.

They have put even more focus on the story (and specifically the planeswalkers). Competitive players don't give a toss about the poxy story, and never had, but here it is taking pride of place at the front of Wizard's marketing and thinking, aimed fairly and squarely at casual players with their "immersive experience".

They went away from the K ranking system that attempted to quantify how good players were (and did it roughly at best) and replaced it with a system that does not even try and instead measures consumption- they called it "planeswalker points". The new system, complete with the embarrassment of "levels", resets periodically, so you can drop in and out at will. Casual players don't really like to be ranked in order of how good they are, competitive players do. Casual players were at best excluded from the old ranking system, and ignored it, or they were actively given a ranking and told "you are worse than all these players above you".

They have jumped on the EDH bandwagon, the ultimate casual format.

They removed States from most parts of the world, and later PTQs and replaced them effectively with PPTQs and RPTQs. PPTQs attracted 50 players for the first one at my LGS. Now they get 8, whilst the commander tables are full.

They have gone after the casual market, and fragmented the serious market at the low to mid-level, whilst at the top end have backed the big time events so that to a large extent no one really notices, beyond those who turn up to the myriad of small non-firing FNMs and weekend events that used to be 20-30 players travelling from distances, and are now basically gone.

They removed Modern pro-tours to stop the pros "solving the format" and thus keeping it a bit more open for casual and serious players alike.

Do they "kill formats" for casual play?. Well, they did not kill EDH, they started designing cards for it. It is true they do not want more formats, and they do not want cheap, accessible eternal formats where people do not have spend much to keep up. They want eternal formats to be more expensive than Standard. But actually nearly every decision they have made in the past few years has been to the benefit of the casual player. The sort of player who turns up randomly in a store with bunch of decks of different formats, plays a couple of hours, likely Commander, but passes on FNM to go and get some food.

Quote from theMarc »

Quote from Magicman657 »

Typical WotC apologist BS.

Oh, so because I think that people should hold off judgement until they have all the information, I'm an apologist? Good to know.

The MTGS community is pretty consistent about completely misjudging cards and sets at first, so I think it's pretty reasonable to say that you guys should play first, form opinions second.

Sorry buddy, but the set is crap and the cards that aren't green and white are crap. There's no misjudging poor design and blatantly, pushed and overpowered cards.