But understand this is WotC actually hiring a brand new team of people. This is expensive. They are serious about it.
It might not be as expensive if they go through with firing Sam Stoddard and other items of dead weight on the Future Future League teams.
This new department reminds me of McDonald's advertising their "now 100% white meat chicken". What was there before? They clearly didn't care, and they're now admitting that in the past things were messed up. But now you, loyal consumer, get to have our new and enhanced product! Please ignore all the times you got screwed by us before.
azodicarbonamide? Does that stuff work on chicken protein?
Where did you hear about firing Stoddard and the others?
So let me get this straight.... the cat lady combo was such a grievous mistake that they created a whole department to never let it happen again?
I'm not even sure where to go with this. Playing Standard then any other format is just night and day. Like hitting the Palisades then hitting the bunny slopes.
I really hope Standard improves, but intuition tells me otherwise.
I think it's trying to be a deck thinner. Basically you get the cards you want to play and drop them into your graveyard, then purge your library. Now you're playing with just the key cards and on a clock. I wouldn't play it like that but that's what comes to mind. Way back in the day I used to play a Millstone/Soldevi Digger Tron deck. Back then Magic was slower and this was a nuts strategy. Played right, I've gotten my library down to a key five cards and just locked down my oppoent. Soldevi was restricted because of combos like that. If this card was around, I probably would've used it as a suicidal Plan B if Soldevi or Millstone was destroyed.
Inverter is a one shot, but I thinkt that's what the designers were trying to accomplish. Magic plays a lot faster now. If you're not in a good position by T4, you're in trouble.
That said, it's a lot like a jank Feldon's Cane. A last ditch effort.
Someone suggested I should start playing this in one of my decks. He wouldn't shut up about how great it is. Is it just me or am I misunderstanding the ability?
An emblem for 0 that prevents you from losing the game? A planeswalker that won't die unti the end of turn for 0? 3cmc 5o put him in?
What's keeping his price on TCGPlayer below $20 (as of this post), all the packs still getting cracked? Or is there a limitation I'm missing?
Tried searching for Gideon but the forum keeps saying it's an illegal search term. So ah...
Yeah, but part of the reason it was better before commander is that before commander the cardpool was smaller and people weren't as reprint starved as today on the older cards. The company literally refusing to put out any serious high volume reprints on older sets is killing them slowly at this point just as much as the design issues of standard. Pokemon has basically completely overtaken magic in sales right now and the nearby targets and big box stores have relegated MTG products to a super small section at the front. Heck, Yu-Gi-Oh has more shelf space right now...
Source?
According to ICv2's most recent Internal Correspondence report, Pokemon does outsell Magic in mass market stores... but that's not anything new, as that's been true for years. But Magic's total sales still appear to be higher due to its strong sales in the hobby store area. The only big change I see in the most recent report compared to the previous is that Pokemon has gone from #3 in hobby stores to #2, overtaking Yu-Gi-Oh, but that's not a change in regards to Magic.
So what's your source to claim that Pokemon is outselling Magic? Maybe you only did mean in mass market retail, but as noted, that's not anything new. Pokemon's definitely gaining popularity, but I haven't seen any data that indicates it's actually outselling Magic.
I said the stores nearby where I live seemed to have shifted way more pokemon products and relegated MtG to the dark corners of the front aisle with the weird "Direct from TV" stuff. So my source is anecdotal evidence of walking into a store and making an observation. If a store is putting more emphasis on a product than a competitor product, that's a pretty good sign that product is doing better in that store. I'm starting to notice peoples minds like to fill in gaps on these forums and jump to some implied conclusions about others statements.
Please take this at face value...not as a statement of anything greater or sinister.
A new LGS opened up that sells only cards., MtG, Pokemon and YGO along with two or three others (Force of Will is not amongst them). They recently held a collection of tournaments for the three I mentioned. As best as I can identify the cards, there were about the same number of MtG and Pokemon with a possibility of slightly more Poke players for each of those tournaments. YGO clearly had fewer players but not by much. A variance I wouldn't attribute to a declining game.
What did catch my eye was the display case of singles. MtG had more singles on display divided into Modern and Standard legal cards. YGO relegated to less footage. I'm not familiar enough with the YGO cards to know if they were divided anything fuether than spell/trap/monster cards. Off the top of my head, it was about a 3:2 ratio of display space. Pokemon and others also each had their own display cases, roughly 1 for every 3 of MtG or 2 of YGO.
Other things I noticed.
More people were buying MtG singles while i was there. Not indicative of trends of course.
More people were buying YGO packs. To the point the YGO packs were largely decimated. But very few seemed to be buying YGO singles.
Conversely, another LGS opened not too far away and I heard the owners opted to sell comics and toys only. No cards of any type.
I know another LGS in the area have reduced their entire YGO (including YGO specific sleeves) and Pokemon stock into a combined space of about 12 feet of glass display, with no counter or wall space. Their MtG stock dominates about 16 or 24 feet of glass case and the entire wall behind the glass case and then some. They have a selection of expensive ABU, AN and Legends they keep but don't display.
I can't comment on the other LGS.
Now the big box store sets aside about the same space for YGO, MtG and Pokemon favoring Pokemon slightly due to the larger display boxes and hangers. And yeah, it's at the front of the store in that weird area no one wantsto be seen in along with the stupid bobble head collectables, trash $1 bulk comics from 10 years ago, sports cards no one wants to buy, junk UP sleevs and binders and the "as seen on TV" stuff. The three TCG games combined occupies roughly 8 or 9 feet of shelving. Amonkhet is completely sold out as of today. And the latest precon of YGO (King Monster or something) is sold out. Everything else is still in stock. Strangely a few boxes of Commander 2015 are still there.
Not all art got more real estate in the new frames. Sorry, I don't quite know how to properly link images, but the Coldsnap precon Ice Age reprints were cropped losing detail. Take a look at cards like Portent and compare the image of the original Ice Age printing and the Coldsnap reprint.
It's interesting to see which card art was cropped losing detail along the bottom and which cards were "uncropped" gaining detail on the sides.
From what I understand. The OP is basically describing a sort of hybrid between split cards and kicker cards. My first impression is like an Urza's Avenger where it has an ETB ability that varies based on the choice of colored mana paid (or none, whatever). Or like Strategy, Schmategy where you choose the effect by paying the appropriate color (instead of using a die).
Then there's the enchantment that turn into creature cards. Another aspect I won't approach.
I want to think there's a better example but I can't seem to search the hybrid cards very well at Gatherer.
I think it's an interesting mechanic but I feel the split cards are irritating as heck as it is. I feel a hybrid split card cast as an enchantment or creature with a scalable kicker based on color paid would really quickly go overboard. Either it would be a wildly powerful and flexible mechanic or WotC would reign it in so much it would prove a boring and impractical mechanic.
The bad cards are predictably bad and the good predictably good.
If you didn't say this then it would be more agreeable, but just look across this forum. 'Good' cards are still not obvious and 'bad' cards aren't either. Each spoiler season we have many cards defy the general expectation of this site. Just look back to Chandra, Torch of Defiance. If you mean the extremes, such as draft fodder being obvious draft fodder then its harder to argue but I still don't think the good cards are predictably good.
Not so much as unpredictable but rather where you find the good cards. Good common cards? Not so much. Good Mythics? Yep. But there's so much chaff that the number of good cards at Rare and Mythic are few and far between.
Sure, you get a few gems here and there. But WotC is so fearful of good cards at common or uncommon that they refuse to print them or just outright ban them.
This caution hurts the sets in terms of power level and theme. Not reprinting Desert in Amonkhet is a solid example how far Magic moved away from its core game play. The avoidance of long term core cards like Lightning Bolt and Counterspell is another.
The whole concept of needing bad cards to make good cards good is all and fine, but completely pointless when there are so few good cards at all.
I think the NWO/Limited First has severely hurt the game.
Most decks are comprised mainly of outrageous manabases fueling playsets of Mythics and Rares, with the occasional Supergood Uncommon. I began playing in Revised, and many "good" staple cards were common or uncommon: animate dead, dark ritual, counterspell, prodigal sorcerer, Llanowar Elves, giant growth, lightning bolt, shatter, swords to plowshares, serra angel. You could build a perfectly servable deck with mostly C and U cards splashed with goodstuff rares and artifacts. (Manabases were still expensive though; stupid dual-lands). How many of those cards cannot be produced by being too good; how many are given away in intro decks for being too weak...
Look at the top standard decks today; how many play commons or playsets of uncommons? How many staples (like removal, ramp, counter, or burn) are overpriced except at mythic? How many are draft-fodder rather than the backbone of a good constructed deck? Look at a Planeswalker deck; a collection of 2 color C, U, and a few R cards in two colors (with dual land fixing), including a PLANESWALKER, that is utterly unplayable except against another PWD?
Maybe I'm being the grouchy old man, but I find I'm unable to get back into Magic and construct a playable deck without taking out a small loan to pay for it.
Exactly. I recall narrowly winning a match the first time I saw Juzam Djinn. We both managed to get down to 5 life and my opponent cast Juzam. In desperation, I cast Hypnotic Spector to chump block. Next turn, I drew Animate Dead to bring back Sengir Vampire for another chump block. My third turn, I drew Lightning Bolt and finished. I managed to beat out a much better deck using a deck consisting largerly of Commons and Uncommons. I had Demonic Tutor to dig for answers (my most expensive card at the time I think) but couldn't draw it. I took pride in the win because I knew the oponents deck was far more capable and the player much better.
Do I see plays like that with the current sets? Not really. Seems like everyone races to get the Rares and Mythic centric decks built. Vehicles is a thing I guess but it feels.... forced. Like Wizards wants us to try this really cool mechanic or die.
The old frames did a better job evoking the different... let's just call them "elementals".
In the examples you gave, the old green frame is paper-like, blue frame has a watery look, and artifact has a stone like appearance. The text box and the colored bordered work together, it's not just the text box. Couple this with the vastly different art styles from each artist and you have the sense that you're looking at pages of a tome intended for the target spell caster. Each page or "vision" recorded by someone else and you're learning then playing the spell.
It's obvious the designers keep heehawing over the design such as their treatment of lands like the classic Duals. But the intent seemed to be there.
The new frame did away with the stylized text boxes, shrunk the borders and added a sort of embossed frame. Even the artwork was modernized into a "wide screen" format and forced into a consistent style. To me, I'm just looking a futuristic viewscreen looking at the Discovery Channel. It doesn't feel like a collection of spells that survived the ages, but more like I'm using a Pokedex and all my stats and details are spoonfed to me. Devoid of any character. Look at the drawings of a Dodo bird. All of them, every single one is an artistic rendition of an extinct species drawn from differing viewpoints and skillsets. That's what magic should feel like. Understanding the story of Urza and Mishra through word of mouth and lore. Tainted by generations and altered through distance.. Instead we get Jace spoonfed to us like watching the six O'clock news. Less mystical and more "exact". Science and technology instead of Magic.
The different versions of Ornithopter is a great example of something whimsical and magical morphing into something we see every day.
The bad cards are predictably bad and the good predictably good.
If you didn't say this then it would be more agreeable, but just look across this forum. 'Good' cards are still not obvious and 'bad' cards aren't either. Each spoiler season we have many cards defy the general expectation of this site. Just look back to Chandra, Torch of Defiance. If you mean the extremes, such as draft fodder being obvious draft fodder then its harder to argue but I still don't think the good cards are predictably good.
Not so much as unpredictable but rather where you find the good cards. Good common cards? Not so much. Good Mythics? Yep. But there's so much chaff that the number of good cards at Rare and Mythic are few and far between.
Sure, you get a few gems here and there. But WotC is so fearful of good cards at common or uncommon that they refuse to print them or just outright ban them.
This caution hurts the sets in terms of power level and theme. Not reprinting Desert in Amonkhet is a solid example how far Magic moved away from its core game play. The avoidance of long term core cards like Lightning Bolt and Counterspell is another.
The whole concept of needing bad cards to make good cards good is all and fine, but completely pointless when there are so few good cards at all.
I don't buy packs anymore, I learned years ago it's cheaper in the long run just to buy the singles for your deck. I did crack a lot of packs back in tempest looking for Cursed Scroll and tradewind rider, I should've been hording up wastelands.
I think we're all guilty of stupid behavior at one point or another. I cracked about three or four boxes of Ice Age going after Necropotence when i should've used that money for ABU duals or Power 9.
On the topic of LGS.I just swung by a smaller LGS because I didn't want to drive an extra five minutes out of my way to buy sleeves for a new deck. The LGS had closed and the location reopened under new ownership. The new owners don't have any comics yet so they're focusing entirely on TCG and CCG. I didn't ask but it looks like a mother/son operation. The last owner had lost interest in MtG and had lost his sanction and purged nearly all of his singles focusing entirely on Force of Will.
I had expected him to close his doors but had not expected a new owner to pick it up. I wish them luck.
I'll refrain from giving opinion consisting of a variety of expletives of Wikipedia but I will point out that Wikipedia tends to consist mostly of people who think they know anything but end up knowing nothing. This hobbles first order sources. It also causes weird problems since no one is an expert.
Case in point, Wikipedia maintains a nice list that cross referenced in several pages. Someone deleted all of the cross references essentially oprhaning the list. I reverted the edits and cited why the cross references were valuable. Long story short, the list remained and ended up expanding into three distinct lists. I think the problem was the individual couldn't or wouldn't understand why a list would have any value at all.
Sounds like the same here. A list of both would have its own merits. Chronological list is invaluable for release dates but a block list would be invaluable to anyone wanting to build decks for a specific block. Or in this case, understand why Clodsnap was released so late for a block.
azodicarbonamide? Does that stuff work on chicken protein?
Where did you hear about firing Stoddard and the others?
I'm not even sure where to go with this. Playing Standard then any other format is just night and day. Like hitting the Palisades then hitting the bunny slopes.
I really hope Standard improves, but intuition tells me otherwise.
Inverter is a one shot, but I thinkt that's what the designers were trying to accomplish. Magic plays a lot faster now. If you're not in a good position by T4, you're in trouble.
That said, it's a lot like a jank Feldon's Cane. A last ditch effort.
Based your card selection, that still seems out of budget. I just figured you might want to know.
Someone suggested I should start playing this in one of my decks. He wouldn't shut up about how great it is. Is it just me or am I misunderstanding the ability?
An emblem for 0 that prevents you from losing the game? A planeswalker that won't die unti the end of turn for 0? 3cmc 5o put him in?
What's keeping his price on TCGPlayer below $20 (as of this post), all the packs still getting cracked? Or is there a limitation I'm missing?
Tried searching for Gideon but the forum keeps saying it's an illegal search term. So ah...
Please take this at face value...not as a statement of anything greater or sinister.
A new LGS opened up that sells only cards., MtG, Pokemon and YGO along with two or three others (Force of Will is not amongst them). They recently held a collection of tournaments for the three I mentioned. As best as I can identify the cards, there were about the same number of MtG and Pokemon with a possibility of slightly more Poke players for each of those tournaments. YGO clearly had fewer players but not by much. A variance I wouldn't attribute to a declining game.
What did catch my eye was the display case of singles. MtG had more singles on display divided into Modern and Standard legal cards. YGO relegated to less footage. I'm not familiar enough with the YGO cards to know if they were divided anything fuether than spell/trap/monster cards. Off the top of my head, it was about a 3:2 ratio of display space. Pokemon and others also each had their own display cases, roughly 1 for every 3 of MtG or 2 of YGO.
Other things I noticed.
More people were buying MtG singles while i was there. Not indicative of trends of course.
More people were buying YGO packs. To the point the YGO packs were largely decimated. But very few seemed to be buying YGO singles.
Conversely, another LGS opened not too far away and I heard the owners opted to sell comics and toys only. No cards of any type.
I know another LGS in the area have reduced their entire YGO (including YGO specific sleeves) and Pokemon stock into a combined space of about 12 feet of glass display, with no counter or wall space. Their MtG stock dominates about 16 or 24 feet of glass case and the entire wall behind the glass case and then some. They have a selection of expensive ABU, AN and Legends they keep but don't display.
I can't comment on the other LGS.
Now the big box store sets aside about the same space for YGO, MtG and Pokemon favoring Pokemon slightly due to the larger display boxes and hangers. And yeah, it's at the front of the store in that weird area no one wantsto be seen in along with the stupid bobble head collectables, trash $1 bulk comics from 10 years ago, sports cards no one wants to buy, junk UP sleevs and binders and the "as seen on TV" stuff. The three TCG games combined occupies roughly 8 or 9 feet of shelving. Amonkhet is completely sold out as of today. And the latest precon of YGO (King Monster or something) is sold out. Everything else is still in stock. Strangely a few boxes of Commander 2015 are still there.
Robert Bliss' art is probably one of the most talked about that I can remember.
Then the tribal themes would be Chickens, Clams, Little Girls and.... I dunno... B.F.M.s?
Maybe even cards that use pink mana?
It's interesting to see which card art was cropped losing detail along the bottom and which cards were "uncropped" gaining detail on the sides.
Or maybe Figure of Destiny where you pay for ability as an ETB.
Then there's the enchantment that turn into creature cards. Another aspect I won't approach.
I want to think there's a better example but I can't seem to search the hybrid cards very well at Gatherer.
I think it's an interesting mechanic but I feel the split cards are irritating as heck as it is. I feel a hybrid split card cast as an enchantment or creature with a scalable kicker based on color paid would really quickly go overboard. Either it would be a wildly powerful and flexible mechanic or WotC would reign it in so much it would prove a boring and impractical mechanic.
Exactly. I recall narrowly winning a match the first time I saw Juzam Djinn. We both managed to get down to 5 life and my opponent cast Juzam. In desperation, I cast Hypnotic Spector to chump block. Next turn, I drew Animate Dead to bring back Sengir Vampire for another chump block. My third turn, I drew Lightning Bolt and finished. I managed to beat out a much better deck using a deck consisting largerly of Commons and Uncommons. I had Demonic Tutor to dig for answers (my most expensive card at the time I think) but couldn't draw it. I took pride in the win because I knew the oponents deck was far more capable and the player much better.
Do I see plays like that with the current sets? Not really. Seems like everyone races to get the Rares and Mythic centric decks built. Vehicles is a thing I guess but it feels.... forced. Like Wizards wants us to try this really cool mechanic or die.
In the examples you gave, the old green frame is paper-like, blue frame has a watery look, and artifact has a stone like appearance. The text box and the colored bordered work together, it's not just the text box. Couple this with the vastly different art styles from each artist and you have the sense that you're looking at pages of a tome intended for the target spell caster. Each page or "vision" recorded by someone else and you're learning then playing the spell.
It's obvious the designers keep heehawing over the design such as their treatment of lands like the classic Duals. But the intent seemed to be there.
The new frame did away with the stylized text boxes, shrunk the borders and added a sort of embossed frame. Even the artwork was modernized into a "wide screen" format and forced into a consistent style. To me, I'm just looking a futuristic viewscreen looking at the Discovery Channel. It doesn't feel like a collection of spells that survived the ages, but more like I'm using a Pokedex and all my stats and details are spoonfed to me. Devoid of any character. Look at the drawings of a Dodo bird. All of them, every single one is an artistic rendition of an extinct species drawn from differing viewpoints and skillsets. That's what magic should feel like. Understanding the story of Urza and Mishra through word of mouth and lore. Tainted by generations and altered through distance.. Instead we get Jace spoonfed to us like watching the six O'clock news. Less mystical and more "exact". Science and technology instead of Magic.
The different versions of Ornithopter is a great example of something whimsical and magical morphing into something we see every day.
Not so much as unpredictable but rather where you find the good cards. Good common cards? Not so much. Good Mythics? Yep. But there's so much chaff that the number of good cards at Rare and Mythic are few and far between.
Sure, you get a few gems here and there. But WotC is so fearful of good cards at common or uncommon that they refuse to print them or just outright ban them.
This caution hurts the sets in terms of power level and theme. Not reprinting Desert in Amonkhet is a solid example how far Magic moved away from its core game play. The avoidance of long term core cards like Lightning Bolt and Counterspell is another.
The whole concept of needing bad cards to make good cards good is all and fine, but completely pointless when there are so few good cards at all.
I think we're all guilty of stupid behavior at one point or another. I cracked about three or four boxes of Ice Age going after Necropotence when i should've used that money for ABU duals or Power 9.
On the topic of LGS.I just swung by a smaller LGS because I didn't want to drive an extra five minutes out of my way to buy sleeves for a new deck. The LGS had closed and the location reopened under new ownership. The new owners don't have any comics yet so they're focusing entirely on TCG and CCG. I didn't ask but it looks like a mother/son operation. The last owner had lost interest in MtG and had lost his sanction and purged nearly all of his singles focusing entirely on Force of Will.
I had expected him to close his doors but had not expected a new owner to pick it up. I wish them luck.
Case in point, Wikipedia maintains a nice list that cross referenced in several pages. Someone deleted all of the cross references essentially oprhaning the list. I reverted the edits and cited why the cross references were valuable. Long story short, the list remained and ended up expanding into three distinct lists. I think the problem was the individual couldn't or wouldn't understand why a list would have any value at all.
Sounds like the same here. A list of both would have its own merits. Chronological list is invaluable for release dates but a block list would be invaluable to anyone wanting to build decks for a specific block. Or in this case, understand why Clodsnap was released so late for a block.