They might be deprioritizing responding to this leaks because most of these cards might not even be included in spoiler articles, so it wouldn't change any of their plans. For the most part these are the kind of cards that get revealed at the end in the full spoiler, so it might not even matter to them they were accidentally revealed too soon.
Core sets are definitely needed. The last few years of almost zero reprints and basic cards made the game worse in the end. They are bringing them back because we need a place for steady reprints for Standard. You can't reprint many cards in most Standard sets and a Core set is where that can happen.
They tried all sorts of gimmics (slivers, cards designed by non-magic people, flipwalkers) to sell core sets before discontinuing them anyway because their vision of what a core set should be was nigh unmarketable. And now, judging by the leaked cards, they bring core sets back with little to no change to that vision. I have no idea why they try to push the idea of a simplified set made with new payers in mind when such sets have been underwhelming for decades. One can make a case that new players are scared by complexity, but opening a booster pack with ten unplayable vanilla-ish commons is an all alround feel-bad. I mean, yes we need reprints and safety valves, but Cancel is no safety valve and the kind of reprint nobody wants.
I don't believe these Core sets are made for new players, at least I don't remember reading about that. In addition the lack of Core sets didn't make normal Standard any better. In fact Standard was at its worst during this time. Close to zero reprints to speak of, meaning Masters were looked to more and those didn't do well either, control cards of all forms were terrible, the game became all about creatures, story cards, and planeswalkers.
I can't imagine the game becoming worse than the years between BFZ and Ixalan when Core sets come back. There's a reason people called for them to come back.
Providing a stepping stone for newer players into the game has always been a goal for core sets. They even used to have difficulty levels in which Portal was beginner, # edition sets were intermediate, and all block sets were expert. More recently, Maro said in metamorphosis 2.0 that they're putting a lot of importance on helping newer players for the new core sets, and are trying to avoid the gimmicks that got out of control with the previous M series.
My big hope is they undo the death spiral we were in for years where one thing after another got decreed to strong for standard, culminating in divination, of all things, getting the axe. I don't expect to see a ton of interesting, complex cards like we got in Dominaria, so these commons aren't too discouraging or unexpected. I really think they need to include some powerful staples like rampant growth so that all the different archetypes have a good baseline viability for standard.
As others have said this seems to be a problem with expectations for the format. In multiplayer, degenerate decks like Baral have to fight through aggression from multiple other players, which naturally balances the format. As a result there are large differences in the banlists for 1v1 and multiplayer EDH. So if you want brawl to be a healthy multiplayer format, then you probably should never hold these competitive 1v1 tournaments. Banning Baral may be appropriate in the end, but it could also set a dangerous precedent in which cards that are fine in multiplayer get axed for being degenerate in 1v1. Similarly, there could be big, clunky cards that would never see play in 1v1 but are oppressive in multiplayer. A messier, but ultimately more appropriate solution might be to start separate banlists for 1v1/competitive and multiplayer/casual brawl, as exists for EDH.
I have a Nicol Bolas EDH deck that exists solely to cause chaos and randomness and never tries to win the game. It usually survives a while because I have some anti creature measures and the deck doesn't directly threaten anyone. This occasionally results in board states so confusing that people quit because they aren't in control of their own deck anymore. The dream scenario is to have leyline of anticipation and omniscience out, then cast Enter the Infinite. At that point I put 20+ spells like grip of chaos, timesifter, shared fate on the stack, then decree of annihilation, then time reversal, which puts everyone to 0 resources and a completely inscrutable set of extra rules to deal with. It's happened a couple times and I still think it's the funniest thing in the world.
Well that is because its not impressive feats of note.
Taking out mooks is not impressive.
True, but also because it's more of the same. Like if you're going to serve me roasted Kobold at least give me Jaya doing the cooking, with her signature sass and one liners of course. We've been reading about Chandra throwing fireballs for years and this space could have been used for something far more interesting.
It seems like the action scenes (Chandra blasting Kobolds, Teferi playing with blocks) in these stories are overvalued by the author and/or the creative team. This was also a problem with the BFZ story where every week we had to read through Gideon whipping his sural. I think these scenes aren't engaging to me because they don't seem to advance the plot much, whereas some of the better action scenes in the mtg story have coincided with pivotal advancements in the plot, such as Sorin vs Nahiri, Gatewatch vs Nicol Bolas, or even crazy Jace vs Liliana.
I feel like this story was somewhat underwhelming and light on progression. It feels like the big reveal that Mother Luti was Jaya was supposed to carry more weight, but that was the predominant theory people had going into this story. So what I really wanted to know here was how Chandra reacted, why Jaya decided to go into hiding (essentially), and the backstory for Jaya and Karn's relationship, which unfortunately didn't make it into this story.
I'm hoping we get a big reunion soon, with the older characters reconnecting and Jace 2.0 showing up at some point. It also sort of feels like the ending is going to be somewhat rushed. It'd be really cool if they find room to shed some light on Belzenlok's backstory, the war of the abyss, and how he/Bolas brokered Liliana's contract.
Two years is not actually a hard and fast rule. There were several times maro and others referenced last minute changes to amonkhet-ixalan in response to standard problems. For example, in this article:https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/latest-developments/amonkhet-and-standard-mailbag-2017-05-26 they talk about changes to amonkhet and hour of devastation in response to the change from 18 month to 24 month standard rotation. Assuming they made this decision sometime during SOI/EMN standard, this means cards were changing ~1 year prior to release. Because these promos aren't developed with the rest of the set, they may be finalized even later, in which case we could see the return to normal buy a box promos much sooner than two years.
Feels like this is being pulled in too many directions at once. Depending on which formats you play you'll probably care about half the cards and be looking to trade away the rest. Also I really don't understand why they keep reprinting blue elemental blast. On a high note this is a really good idea for distributing foils in commander and other precon products.
A big problem with masters sets going forward seems to be that they've set in stone both the price point and amount of value each set is supposed to have, but not every theme will have the same requirements to execute properly. Iconic masters was supposed to be the set full of "iconic" creatures, but because it had to fit with the previous pricing/value model for masters sets it had cards like mana drain thrown in to increase the EV. I'm all for reprinting these cards, but mana drain isn't really on theme for the set, and if you showed this list of cards to a magic player without stating the theme, they probably wouldn't guess "iconic creatures." Really this set probably should have cut out the more expensive cards, had something like a 4.99 per booster price, and gone much, much more hardcore with angels, demons, dragons etc. The result right now is that opening a $10 booster is full of feel-bad moments because there's such a huge price discrepancy between the most valuable cards and the least.
On the other side of the coin, Masters 25 was trying to execute a nostalgia theme and really wanted to have a lot more value. People remember powerful cards, and the theme would come through much more strongly if cards like red Akroma, Tree of Redemption, and Triskaidekaphobia had been cut for cards that were actually impactful in their time. The problem is if they loaded up Masters 25 like this, it would make all the other 9.99 masters sets look bad. Hopefully they'll actually listen to feedback and make some changes but it isn't likely. After all in the recent article looking back at masters sets, they both listed MM15 as an unqualified success, which it wasn't, and promised Masters25 would be the nostalgia set people wanted Iconic masters to be, and it wasn't.
A big problem with removal in standard recently is that it matches up very poorly with vehicle aggro decks. The red removal that was instant speed doesn't hit hard enough to take down a Heart of Kiran or Aether Harvester and artifact removal was weak due their previous philosophy of not printing cards good against the block theme. "Premium" black removal was either expensive or sorcery speed, with grasp as an exception. Fatal push is good against aggressive vehicle decks, but it suffered for a long time due to a terrible interaction with saheeli/cat and aetherworks marvel combo decks. From the looks of it, Hour of Devastation does do a lot to fix this problem. Abrade is an excellent red removal spell that also hits Heart, unsummoning a vehicle nets you even more tempo than usual, and Hour of Glory probably pulls its weight as a 1-2 of catch all answer. We're also getting an excellent counterspell in the form of Supreme Will, and Nimble Obstructionist is some solid interaction against both planeswalkers and vehicles.
IMO vehicles are probably a good thing to have in Magic, since they give aggro decks game against control so they aren't just dead to a sweeper. The problem is the first vehicles were pushed a tick too far during a time when removal and wraths were at a more restrained power level than ever before.
Seems likely he'll get banned in EDH. The same type of cutthroat shells that could power out Griselbrand can do the same with Razaketh. While Griselbrand drowned your opponents in card advantage, Razaketh can cut right to the chase and fetch up a combo to kill the table, or whatever interaction you need. Killing him does nothing because you can fetch up either a combo or reanimation spell(s) to get him back. It would be weird if he didn't get griselbanned.
I'm optimistic that this will also let R&D explore some themes that maybe they were reluctant to dedicate two sets to. Fingers crossed for enchantment world (for real this time) and instants/sorceries world!
Just because there are problems with the two-set block structure right now doesn't mean WOTC is just going to forget about the systemic flaws of three-set blocks. It would be very surprising if they reverted to the old system full-stop, but they could bring back something like the core set. It would be cool if we had an origins style set every year that flavor wise was sort of a "meanwhile on X" series of vignettes. The new play design team might also need a set that isn't encumbered by all the restrictions of block-sets to dump the reprints they want each year.
A yearly callback set that is standard legal and released in place of the masters series set could work. The real issue with old core sets is that they were often boring to draft, so if they work out that issue and maybe bring back old mechanics that work with the current grouping of mechanics, such as wither / infect for the current block, things would be more interesting. WoTC really shouldn't get too tied into having to have each set thematically blend flawlessly because it will limit what they can print beyond simply game balance. That and a ton of players don't really care about the story enough to want to compromise their game night for it.
I completely agree that core-sets were boring draft environments, but that might actually be a feature as well as a flaw. Because not much was expected of the set draft wise, WOTC might have more liberty to print cards like doom blade and lightning strike that are good to have in standard but they would be too skittish to print in a fall/spring large set.
Providing a stepping stone for newer players into the game has always been a goal for core sets. They even used to have difficulty levels in which Portal was beginner, # edition sets were intermediate, and all block sets were expert. More recently, Maro said in metamorphosis 2.0 that they're putting a lot of importance on helping newer players for the new core sets, and are trying to avoid the gimmicks that got out of control with the previous M series.
True, but also because it's more of the same. Like if you're going to serve me roasted Kobold at least give me Jaya doing the cooking, with her signature sass and one liners of course. We've been reading about Chandra throwing fireballs for years and this space could have been used for something far more interesting.
I'm hoping we get a big reunion soon, with the older characters reconnecting and Jace 2.0 showing up at some point. It also sort of feels like the ending is going to be somewhat rushed. It'd be really cool if they find room to shed some light on Belzenlok's backstory, the war of the abyss, and how he/Bolas brokered Liliana's contract.
On the other side of the coin, Masters 25 was trying to execute a nostalgia theme and really wanted to have a lot more value. People remember powerful cards, and the theme would come through much more strongly if cards like red Akroma, Tree of Redemption, and Triskaidekaphobia had been cut for cards that were actually impactful in their time. The problem is if they loaded up Masters 25 like this, it would make all the other 9.99 masters sets look bad. Hopefully they'll actually listen to feedback and make some changes but it isn't likely. After all in the recent article looking back at masters sets, they both listed MM15 as an unqualified success, which it wasn't, and promised Masters25 would be the nostalgia set people wanted Iconic masters to be, and it wasn't.
IMO vehicles are probably a good thing to have in Magic, since they give aggro decks game against control so they aren't just dead to a sweeper. The problem is the first vehicles were pushed a tick too far during a time when removal and wraths were at a more restrained power level than ever before.
I completely agree that core-sets were boring draft environments, but that might actually be a feature as well as a flaw. Because not much was expected of the set draft wise, WOTC might have more liberty to print cards like doom blade and lightning strike that are good to have in standard but they would be too skittish to print in a fall/spring large set.