Interesting although I suppose only Innistrad is immediately relevant since it takes usually 5-6 years to return. Although I think Theros and New Phyrexia are far more likely returns.
Is this still true under the new blockless system? If they go through planes faster, it stands to reason that returns will happen sooner if they want to keep the 50/50 ratio of new planes and returns. Unless, of course, we get more Ravnica-like visits and less one-shots.
I wouldn't mind another Ixalan set or two in the future. I want to see more of Huatli (though honestly, she should show up on other planes), and the setting wasn't bad. I liked the story just fine, too (certainly a lot more than the Guilds of Ravnica story).
Huatli can show up anywhere, she has plausible ties to the Gatewatch through Saheeli (Give me clockwork dinosaurs!) so it will be easy to just plug her in. In fact, it's more likely that she will travel the multiverse gathering stories than just sit at home.
I have heard some players talk about some of the guilds might team up in the battle with bolas. I personally love Sultai but now that golgari and dimir are split that won't happen. So I started thinking about Jund when I realized there is the perfect chararcter to see in the battle. A character who lives on Ravnica, loves wars, and is Jund.
I could see UR Giants being a tribal theme, representing the ice and fire giants. Elf and Dwarf tribal are also must-haves. Bird tribal could play into Odin's association with ravens (a raven man? Hmmm... ).
Now you got me thinking. The Raven man being the Odin stand-in from a Norse pantheon who somehow managed to have interplanar influence would be cool. And also fitting, mythological Odin is an old scheming bastard who doesn't hesitate to trick others to further his own interests. Well, unless he takes a break to troll Thor while disguised as a ferryman, but I don't think this particular song will get its counterpart in Magic...
From what I have heard the set did not sell as well as other sets, not a lot of people wanted to open the boxes. So there is a chance it is going to see a similar fate as Kamigawa and Lowryn.
But the setting, disconnected from gameplay, was popular, wasn't it? Kamigawa failed in both gameplay and worldbuilding.
The third Ravnica set might be an ideal place to fit them. Think about it - it was said that Ajani recruits dozens of planeswalkers to the cause, so there's absolutely no way to fit them on cards individually. Bolas might (or might not) do something similar. And to add the final touch, Unstable successfully tested the multiple arts on one card, which was even replicated with the guildgates. So, in conclusion, I think the chances are pretty high that we could get nonlegendary "Gatewatch soldier" and "Bolas agent" planeswalkers, each featuring several different minor or unnamed characters as alternative arts. Thoughts?
Ugh. I hate the terrible UI for this game. It just cost me a game because I tried to do a Vicious Offering on their Bristling Boar, kicking it by sacrificing a Saproling. But it just refused to target the Boar and just killed my Saproling for no reason whatsoever. That and the matchmaking are Blizzard-level garbage. It's getting harder to enjoy this game.
She hasn't posted a decklist anywhere, but as I said, she streams Arena two to three times a week, so you may be able to put it together by watching her VoDs.
I checked the videos and a few of the others running similar lists, so I have a better idea now. I may try to put something together along those lines. If I can get past my sheer frustration with this game's terrible UI and matchmaking.
Yeah, the UI is weird sometimes, you need to pay close attention to what you are doing or you might end up accidentally targeting your own guy with a kill spell. UI should be intuitive and this clearly fails in this regard. That said, if you are careful, it is just a nuisance. The matchmaking is imo a much bigger problem, fighting the same decks gets stale quickly, especially when some tend to get unfavorable matchups all the time. I don't understand why even make the matchmaking care about colors in the first place, the work put into this would be much better used somewhere else.
The biggest problem with Arena trying to have PvE content made itself glaringly obvious to anyone who did the tutorial - for all of the rules awareness and ability of the system to keep the game working in PvP, PvE forces the game to rely on a script. Every draw was controlled, every action was controlled, and even Life totals and starting cards in hand had to be controlled just to make sure that the player can't accidentally kill themselves. Making PvE content that isn't equally as scripted just does not seem feasible on a logistical and technical level without some really impressive AI. I can't imagine it would be any more fulfilling than the tutorial, which was more useful to learn the controls of the game rather than the rules.
But that was the tutorial, players accidentally killing themselves isn't a problem in regular PvE. And they made the AI work acceptably in Duels, so at least the basic framework is already made. Also, playing against a scripted opponent (or a random choice from several variants thereof, to keep some variation) isn't necessarily a bad thing either. It prevents easy, unskilled wins, which is important for PvE content.
Fateseal has been tested and proven to be incredibly unfun, according to WotC
I think the popularity of Lantern Mill in Modern should also demonstrate something of the unfun-ness of Fateseal.
Personally, I don't necessarily think the name is a strike against it, given that most people probably don't even know the word 'scry' outside of Magic anyway; however, the graveyard synergy is pretty problematic.
It's not problematic when you think about it, without any graveyard synergy it is just scry. Barring some fringe cases, the card is just as dead in your graveyard as it is on the bottom of your library. The problem is that many people don't think much and dumping something into the yard would feel worse for them...
Think of it this way. Every once in a while they make a graveyard set, or a set with a graveyard component. Having this as an evergreen mechanic severely warps that environment in that new mechanics need to be limited or depowered. Scry as a game component is much less intrusive to new set mechanics, one of the reasons it works so well.
Yeah, that makes sense. I misunderstood at first and had it the other way around, thinking that the complaint was that surveil would be bad in sets without graveyard synergy.
Anyway, that still doesn't prevent both scry and surveil becoming deciduous, in a "one or the other" fashion. Surveil is a great tool and it would be a shame not to use it more.
Strange, in my experience, on the low ladder ranks, people run mostly the precons or slight modifications of them, so I have around 50% win rate with them as one would expect (not actual statistics, just a feeling). Just steer clear of the limited event until you expand your collection and build something good, the power level is much higher there and you would just end up wasting coins.
I have a feeling they are still running that rigged matchmaking thing they ran in closed beta where it compares "deck strength" or something. I have been playing a JANKY G/B deck and all I am facing at bronze is complete stompy decks, complete control decks and complete W/G token decks. I literally just played like 5 games tonight and 4 were against this deck like 100% complete with every single card.
Yeah, the matchmaking is weird in this regard. It seems that I keep getting specific types of decks depending on what I am running. Today I took out green stompy for quests and kept getting matched agains WB lifegain, to the point where I was almost rage-quitting every time I saw Ajani's welcome...
Strange, in my experience, on the low ladder ranks, people run mostly the precons or slight modifications of them, so I have around 50% win rate with them as one would expect (not actual statistics, just a feeling). Just steer clear of the limited event until you expand your collection and build something good, the power level is much higher there and you would just end up wasting coins.
Fateseal has been tested and proven to be incredibly unfun, according to WotC
I think the popularity of Lantern Mill in Modern should also demonstrate something of the unfun-ness of Fateseal.
Personally, I don't necessarily think the name is a strike against it, given that most people probably don't even know the word 'scry' outside of Magic anyway; however, the graveyard synergy is pretty problematic.
It's not problematic when you think about it, without any graveyard synergy it is just scry. Barring some fringe cases, the card is just as dead in your graveyard as it is on the bottom of your library. The problem is that many people don't think much and dumping something into the yard would feel worse for them...
I think there is a good chance. Bolas could summon them to reign supreme on Ravnica and defeat the Gatewatch. Also, people have been asking for them to be reimagined as legendary creatures for awhile now.
First off, several are already dead, if not all of them. Secondly, Bolas already defeated the Gatewatch on Amonkhet. After all this build up, not to mention the implications that we won't be coming back to Ravnica for a good, long while, they'd better damn well not force feed us another Gatewatch loss. I'm getting really tired of Bolas coming out on top and I'm getting really tired of Gatewatch hate. I want the Gatewatch to kick Bolas' ass good and hard this time. Yeah, it probably means I'll have to put up with more Gatewatch and Jace hate rants afterward, but quite frankly, I don't freaking care as long as I get a satisfying ending. Amonkhet was a letdown for me, I want to walk away from what may be our last trip to Ravnica feeling victorious with the Gatewatch.
And why does Jace have to bite it? What about Jace makes him such a badly written character that he must die?
Gods, the constant Jace and Gatewatch hate I've been seeing on this forum has become a major peeve of mine.
You know, I didn't care much about any of these characters until I started reading the Gatewatch stories. Before, they were just more of the same, tired old "morally ambigious comic book plot" characters where everyone has an agenda and there are no clear good guys. Now that we've seen some real character development, I'm actually invested in these characters and their stories.
So I vehemently oppose all the Jace and Gatewatch hate. Quite frankly there's nothing wrong with the new generation characters that wasn't wrong with the old characters. In fact, I think old Magic story was downright crappy compared to modern Magic, because back then planeswalkers were godlike beings and thus far less compelling as they didn't have any of the needs or vulnerabilities of a well-rounded mortal. It says something that the Weatherlight saga, which centered more on non-planeswalker characters, is the story most discussed by longtime fans, most likely because the lives and adventures of Gerrard, Hanna, Sisay, and the rest of the crew were far more compelling than the chess games played by the oh-so-mighty and godlike planeswalkers. And that saga had a disappointing ending with all but four of the major heroes dead, including the leads. The story didn't end on a note of triumph but a note of bleak bittersweetness.
And after all the hardship and disappointment I've had to put up with in my life, I'm ****ing tired of bleak, bittersweet stories where good guys die and bad guys get away. I'm sick of stories confusing "morally ambiguous" with "compelling and captivating". I'm sick of people whining about Standard power levels versus Modern or Legacy. I'm sick of comments that a card should "cost 1 less" so it compares to undercosted trash of the past. I'm sick of comments including the words "jank", "trash", or "hot garbage" as pejoratives for cards that weren't even designed to be competitive to begin with. And I'm sick of all the incessant hate towards the Gatewatch, Jace, and everything else current about the game.
It's the hateful and cutthroat players that I despise most about MtG. Their negativity and soulless focus on efficiency ruins what is supposed to be a game about fantasy, about telling a story through gameplay. Half the time I wonder why I even bother sticking around this forum, if only so that I'm not letting a bunch of killjoys push me away from what small parts of the game I still get to enjoy. I haven't played Magic in a long time due to financial concerns about going to FNMs and prereleases all the time. Getting to talk about the cards, and sometimes, design cards and build decklists, on this forum is 80% of my Magic involvement at this point. And half that time, my fun is tainted by the excess negativity I've seen plaguing this website.
Oh, sure, I could just ignore all the users who say things that irritate me, but I've already ignored so many users and I'd prefer not to limit the number of users that I see to a handful because, believe it or not, I do care about the opinions of others. I'm trying not to block out opinions just because they disagree with my own, and I'm not just looking for a bunch of yesmen who automatically agree with and compliment everything Wizards does, because even I dislike some of the things they've done. But **** **** it, if everyone else around here gets to harp on and on and on about Jace, the Gatewatch, and everything else they hate about the game, then once in a rare while I'm going to rant about how much I dislike the haters, because I can only read so much negative, repetitive, and annoying drivel before I get ****ing sick of it.
It's one thing if the character is meant to be hated, like Baral, but Jace is a freaking protagonist, and like it or not, the majority of players like him because he's an intellectual who prefers to solve his problems without punching a hole in them, in a series where players so often like to complain that the game's all about creatures smashing into each other. If one must complain about some aspect of the game, then I ask that you try to suggest an actual improvement rather than just "remove this thing I don't like from the game" because that's frankly no different than me ignoring your comments just to block out the noise. It's the easy thing to do, but is it necessarily the right one?
Sigh...anyway, no, I don't think the Nephilim are coming back. The only thing most players actually found notable about them was that they're four colors, and they were random and pulled focus away from a story that should have focused on the guilds themselves.
Except the "defeat" turned out to be mostly beneficial, and Jace in particular actually got rid of his character-defining flaws - his amnesia and physical weakness - pushing him further towards the Mary Sue territory. The closest thing to defeat so far came when Lili got bound to Bolas, that's some real consequence and could turn out interesting. But to me, the Amonkhet finale feels as if Boromir sprang back to life, said he learned an important lesson and carried on...
And Jace shouldn't die. Lavinia should nail his balls to a chair so he finally stops neglecting his duties. If the system survives on Ravnica, that is...
Is this still true under the new blockless system? If they go through planes faster, it stands to reason that returns will happen sooner if they want to keep the 50/50 ratio of new planes and returns. Unless, of course, we get more Ravnica-like visits and less one-shots.
Huatli can show up anywhere, she has plausible ties to the Gatewatch through Saheeli (Give me clockwork dinosaurs!) so it will be easy to just plug her in. In fact, it's more likely that she will travel the multiverse gathering stories than just sit at home.
Then it will be Shattergang brother. We got Pia and Kiran and later a sad and lonely Pia, now we can get one
sadangry and lonely goblin.Will they all be named, though? It was said that Ajani recruited dozens, that would be even bigger mess that the dwarves in the Hobbit...
Now you got me thinking. The Raven man being the Odin stand-in from a Norse pantheon who somehow managed to have interplanar influence would be cool. And also fitting, mythological Odin is an old scheming bastard who doesn't hesitate to trick others to further his own interests. Well, unless he takes a break to troll Thor while disguised as a ferryman, but I don't think this particular song will get its counterpart in Magic...
Yeah, but a grand planeswalker showdown like in the third Ravnica set is basically the only setting where it could make sense.
But the setting, disconnected from gameplay, was popular, wasn't it? Kamigawa failed in both gameplay and worldbuilding.
Yeah, the UI is weird sometimes, you need to pay close attention to what you are doing or you might end up accidentally targeting your own guy with a kill spell. UI should be intuitive and this clearly fails in this regard. That said, if you are careful, it is just a nuisance. The matchmaking is imo a much bigger problem, fighting the same decks gets stale quickly, especially when some tend to get unfavorable matchups all the time. I don't understand why even make the matchmaking care about colors in the first place, the work put into this would be much better used somewhere else.
But that was the tutorial, players accidentally killing themselves isn't a problem in regular PvE. And they made the AI work acceptably in Duels, so at least the basic framework is already made. Also, playing against a scripted opponent (or a random choice from several variants thereof, to keep some variation) isn't necessarily a bad thing either. It prevents easy, unskilled wins, which is important for PvE content.
Yeah, that makes sense. I misunderstood at first and had it the other way around, thinking that the complaint was that surveil would be bad in sets without graveyard synergy.
Anyway, that still doesn't prevent both scry and surveil becoming deciduous, in a "one or the other" fashion. Surveil is a great tool and it would be a shame not to use it more.
Yeah, the matchmaking is weird in this regard. It seems that I keep getting specific types of decks depending on what I am running. Today I took out green stompy for quests and kept getting matched agains WB lifegain, to the point where I was almost rage-quitting every time I saw Ajani's welcome...
It's not problematic when you think about it, without any graveyard synergy it is just scry. Barring some fringe cases, the card is just as dead in your graveyard as it is on the bottom of your library. The problem is that many people don't think much and dumping something into the yard would feel worse for them...
Except the "defeat" turned out to be mostly beneficial, and Jace in particular actually got rid of his character-defining flaws - his amnesia and physical weakness - pushing him further towards the Mary Sue territory. The closest thing to defeat so far came when Lili got bound to Bolas, that's some real consequence and could turn out interesting. But to me, the Amonkhet finale feels as if Boromir sprang back to life, said he learned an important lesson and carried on...
And Jace shouldn't die. Lavinia should nail his balls to a chair so he finally stops neglecting his duties. If the system survives on Ravnica, that is...