MTG Salvation

Quote from Card Slinger J »

Sad part is that Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro is so creatively bankrupt over their lore when it comes to Magic: The Gathering that they could have AI do all the work for them and make it more competent in terms of narrative and storytelling despite lacking the human element. I think that's why there's a current Writers Strike going on (unlike the one in 2007) because more businesses are using AI to write their scripts instead of more "woke" material by actual writers that's causing them to lose more money and hurt their bottom line.

It's a Catch-22 where If writers decide to go "woke" then that leads to AI cleaning up the mess causing people to lose their jobs where even If they don't the threat of AI will continue to pressure them out of their current jobs.

The reason there's a writers strike right now is because the WGA contract ended may 1st and negotiations over a new contract broke down. The reason the negotiations broke down is because WGA is angling to get writers to be paid residuals from streaming services the same way they used to be paid residuals on broadcast. Streaming services don't wanna pay that money because they've been getting real used to running shows on the cheap and lowballing everyone except the big name actors who have to angle themselves into being executive producers of every show just to get paid.

The current whole marketing push for these GPT powered textual AI programs started just a few months ago well into the contract negotiations time for WGA, and GPTs are very much not yet capable of putting together coherent movie or TV scripts without someone else at the wheel to edit the output into usable stuff.

The magic the gathering plot is pretty messy, but this has more to do with corporate timelines and interference with creative than it does the creative team itself. When the mandate on high is to produce something like seven sets a year and come up with big event sets every other year and a constantly changing status quo in terms of the characters and their abilities, you end up with a lot of rushed first drafts getting pushed in production because there's zero time for rewrites. If you remember the heyday of sets that came out with entire novels that was also a time when blocks were three sets long and all took place in a single plane with a 3 sets and one core set release schedule, meaning you were gonna spend an entire year in one place instead of what feels like about 2 months. Using AI to slap together plots isn't going to solve this sort of fundamental problem with the creative side of magic.

Quote from Tiro of Meletis »

How often is it that such mistakes occur? Not often. The opportunity doesn't exist frequently enough to warrant my proposed solution serving as an incentive. This situation is an exception, not the standard for leaks.

I think the only exception to a normal leak here is that it was put up on a fairly popular youtuber's main feed with himself listed as the source of the leaks, rather than a burner posting it on mtg reddit or imgur. If he had put up even the mildest of facade and pretended that he got these images from some rando behind seven proxies on imgur and he's merely reporting on a possible leak then literally none of this would have happened.

Quote from Tiro of Meletis »

Only to have someone who legally acquired a product in advance,

Thus preserving the integrity of their consumer base while diffusing a regrettable, but not illegal, situation.

I feel like this is the point where a lot of folks are losing the plot. It was actually not legal for him to acquire those cards. His supplier was not legally authorized to sell them at the time that they did. Oldschoolmtg was in possession of legally stolen goods. It's much more likely that the litigation will involve the supplier who violated contract and copyright and has more to lose than the third party (unless collusion can be established) but none of this stuff is legal. It sure feels like it should be legal, right? It's just a mistake and so on? There's leaks all the time and it's mostly just building hype, right? No, that is just not how law works.

Don't get me wrong, violating the law is fun and can be pretty profitable and I won't judge anyone for doing it alone, but it's a mistake to assume that just because something seems morally ok that it's legally ok. It's illegal to feed homeless people in a lot of places here, doesn't mean you shouldn't.
Reproducing wotc's intellectual property (here the card art and the written text) without their permission or license to do so is in fact illegal, which is why DMCA takedowns work.

Quote from Card Slinger J »

It's obviously not us the players but rather the shareholders and people who play the MTG Finance game.

Yes, they are a publically traded business in a capitalist economic system. They have a specifically declared fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profit. Their shareholders could sue them if they did not explicitly pursue the maximum shareholder value.

It sucks, right? It sure would be better if we existed in an economic system where companies had a fiduciary duty directly to the communities in which they exist, or to the people as a whole.

Quote from ThyLordQ »

A guy ruins the marketing of a single set of 50 cards half a month in advance and he deserves to have notorious extra judicial thugs visit him personally?

This is how far they're willing to go for the sake of 50 cards in a hyper-niche supplemental set?

I mean you have to put this in the historical context of MTG cards being stolen and leaked every single set sometimes to an absurd, entire-uncut-sheets-stolen-from-factories degree. This is from a corporate standpoint a total disaster and a consistent IP violation that usurps their entire control over their own products.

The whole point of retaining security companies like the pinkertons is to investigate internal affairs like this (including unionization) and the goal of this investigation is definitely not just taking down this one youtuber but determining who his supplier is, who is at best in violation of of their sales license. It's not like they just hired the pinkertons to do this.

Quote from Jh216 »

Quote from The Lord of Tresserhorn »

So what's the thing about "Collector's Edition"?

Those decks are completely in ‘Surge foil’.

Nobody (yet) knows what ‘Surge Foil’ is though.

It's only foil if you cast a spell earlier in the turn.

Quote from Spaz350 »

I mean, it's still only a crew 1, so you're really only flickering one creature unless you REALLY wanted to blink a few Ornithopters.

you can tap as many creatures as you want to pay for crew, you just have to hit the minimum to actually crew the thing.

Dang you mean wizards didn't print a 5 for 1 for five?? time to sell all my stock in black

Quote from HighHolder »

Quote from Ryperior74 »

Quote from HighHolder »

Discard two may as well be hexproof. She is brutal. Better hope they print decent sacrifice spells

not exactly they just need atleast 2 noncreature cards in hand.

Thanks captain obvious. If you are using three cards to kill one creature then you fail hard at magic.

>not playing blue and using a counterspell

Quote from Mystic_X »

snip'd a lot of stuff

I mean look, the basics here are about a game making money and you don't make money by pissing people off. Like /you/ might be fine with anything, /you/ might not be offended, but I am here to make money and I am leaving it on the table if I go to people with money and say "haha you're stupid and your religion is weird, four bucks for a pack thanks."

Until very recently it didn't really matter because the only people with money were white men, heads of the household and the "breadwinners" so you could totally make mad dosh just by flattering them and them alone. Nonwhites were savages, women were there to be big boobie prizes for men etc etc. The past 20-30 years or so what people call "woke" capital is just companies realizing that wait a second, women can get their own credit cards now. Minorities have money that they /could/ be spending with us. So you know, you at least make an effort at cleaning up your act.

You can say it's cynical and hypocritical and all that and yeah it sure is, lotta the companies trying to clean up their image still have lily-white boardrooms with maybe a token woman up there, but it's not some big ideological crusade. At the end of the day the folks who run wizards are there because they're trying to make money so they can buy a second boat or something, not provide a socialist society with a fun diversion. It just so happens that you can make more money by appealing to more audiences. There are comedians who get this! Some comedians stick really hard to the "offend" thing because that's the brand they have and the audience they want to cultivate, but you know what, gilbert gottfried did not make that much money in life compared to, say, steve carrell.

Quote from MoonliteKnight »

So they're likely to keep remaking common dual-land cycles into gates until gates are pushed enough to be a competitive archetype... neat

I mean I wouldn't go that far, I think they're just making it so you can do a three color gates deck instead of being stuck in five color.

haha, dragon balls

Quote from Djau the Jackal »

I mean, the same thing happens in return with Western religious beliefs and mythology. I don't think its strictly just a Western thing. I'd argue that the presence of Angels in Ixalan recently was equally offensive if we take a similar approach. Aztecs don't have claim to Judeo-Christian mythology.

After their forcible conversion to Christianity, I think they have plenty of claim.

Quote from Djau the Jackal »

I mean, the same thing happens in return with Western religious beliefs and mythology. I don't think its strictly just a Western thing. I'd argue that the presence of Angels in Ixalan recently was equally offensive if we take a similar approach. Aztecs don't have claim to Judeo-Christian mythology.

I will agree that it's not specifically a Western thing. But any group that has historically oppressed others, or taken efforts to eradicate someone else's culture and replace it with their own, should probably try their hardest to treat representation of that culture in their work with care.

Japanese media doesn't need to be super careful about their use of Christian iconography, for example (though there are still lines to not be crossed); but they should probably be careful about their depictions of Chinese and Korean people or aspects of their culture.

Your example doesn't quite work by that metric. However, it also doesn't work by a different metric. This set wasn't made by Aztecs. They're all dead, for one. But it also wasn't made by the modern Indigenous cultures. It was made by mostly white people, of a mostly Jewish or Christian background. It's Westerners adding their culture to media that is largely pulled from a different culture. One they're treating with, from my admittedly ignorant eyes, with some amount of respect.

Quote from Flisch »

Quote from ThyLordQ »

It'd sort of be like putting creature type Goat Demon on a depiction of Satan.

I don't see anything inherently wrong with that. Just like how "Cerberus" was an entire group of multi-headed dogs on Theros, I could theoretically see a "race" of demons called Satans that have the creature type Goat Demon in some magic plane. Sure, it'd sound a bit silly to us but it's not problematic.

The Rakshasa of Tarkir are just based on the mythological ones, just like literally every single other creature in Magic. I absolutely don't understand how this change is necessary. And whether DnD does it or not doesn't matter. If it was done for real world cultural reasons then DnD faces the same issue. And if it doesn't, then why does Magic.

Also, the tribal thing continues to baffle me. When has "tribal" ever had a negative connotation? Savage I can understand but tribal???

There's kind of a big history of white western fantasy taking whatever the hell concepts it likes from nonwestern, nonwhite cultures and religions and just doing whatever the hell they want with it, basically just using the fact that it is a real religious/mythological thing to give it some kind of 'exotic' flair. But this can all get rather uncomfortable if you are from that background and don't get to see much representation of it, and then when you do it's just madeup fantasy creatures in a half remembered costume of it. Not to mention the problematic associations of nonwhite, nonwestern cultures happening to be portrayed as more mystical (and therefore it must be great to throw in their words), literally demonising spirits and deities (Baal is Canaanite deity, Astaroth is a Phoenician deity etc), lumping in all sorts of thing under the umbrella of western concepts, and the broader long history of using other culture's concepts as toys and props, misrepresenting and sometimes going out of their way to disrespect them.
Rakshasa as the DnD tiger demons stinks very much to me of a disrespectful attitude. Leaning on some version pulled out of thin air, with this very obvious Rakshasa=Indian India=Tigers element, plopped into western dominated fantasy lacking much of any real Hindu context that shapes their real meaning, showing a weird loyalty to continue to reinforce an existing popular inaccurate depiction. Just feels unmistakably orientalist tbh.
There's always subjectivity to this of course, but it's pretty easy I think to make a case for why it's not great and just not much of a reason to keep it this way.

Because words in different contexts mean different things. There's some baggage the word Tribe carries when referring to groups of people, which is largely what it's used for in Magic.

No, shadows is overcosted like they said. A four mana do nothing enchantment is unplayable is modern limted

This feel frighteningly like a certain engine card that made Explore good in its last Standard. I expect this to do similar work.

5 mana sorcery-speed and creature only? Not sure that one treasure on ETB is really worth it. I see as well as other it can have further value down the line, but I'm not impressed enough to to appreciate it at rare. Would be a great uncommon, now is a mediocre rare that will see play in janky kitchen-table decks.