Remember the sooper-dooper awesome 'Choose Your Side' promotion we ran with Mirrodin Besieged? How, in reality, it was an immense failure when people immediately realized that absolutely nothing they did that day would have any impact on the game they were playing? How it was mocked hilariously by all in attendance? How the only reason you remember it is because of how ****ing stupid it was?
No, I don't remember that, because the Mirrodin Besieged promotion was received incredibly positively and the increased number of gimmicks for prereleases is a direct result of the positive feedback about the MBS faction pre-re.
(I detect some bitterness in your post over the lack of player influence on the SoM storyline, but if so, you have no one to blame but yourself.)
The basic problem with this is that if there's anything really amazing in these "Helvaults" many stores will preopen them and take the good stuff for themselves.
Wouldn't tournament-organizer agreements do a fairly good job of protecting against this? I'm not sure how many stores would really want to open these up early if it meant losing the ability to run events.
I'm a bit puzzled about all the "it will be the same as ROE" comments. There have been several official comments made that they should have made more of a connection between the sets.
Right, but saying and doing aren't the same. This block seemed to be a perfect opportunity to really demonstrate that they learned a lesson from RoE and do a third-act-twist set that had a strong mechanical tie to its predecessors -- but they've already pre-emptively ruled out, quite literally, every interesting mechanical theme from INN: no DFCs, no flashback, no graveyard theme. We might be looking at a set that carries over, I dunno, some (but not all!) of the monster tribal themes and the Curse mechanic, but that's pretty unexciting and suggests to me that R&D understood the words people were saying ("we want a mechanical connection between the halves of the block") but not the meaning behind them ("we get invested in our mechanics and themes and want to see them fully developed rather than cut off just when they're getting interesting.")
In some ways this is one of those "good problems to have" (like Zendikar, Innistrad was an enormous success and people want more of it than WotC actually has to give) but I'd like R&D to actually learn this lesson more aggressively here -- people like the three-set block structure and like to see you pull out all the stops on the mechanics and themes in the third set.
Yeah I remember the pre-releases of old especially Prophecy. Things were way different before the internet.
Going back to MTGNews (and before that Lands of Destoguardiana, and even before that rec.games.trading-cards.magic.misc) those of us on the Internet were getting full leaked spoilers for every set before it was officially revealed back almost to the first days of Magic.
1. Releasing the full spoiler early is a good thing up until a point. If you release it too early people start to get bored.
2. Releasing the full spoiler early is good for good sets and bad for bad sets.
Based on years of watching this, I believe both are true. Judgment was leaked almost two months early by a bug in MTGO; there was a ton of excitement about it early on (because it was a good set) but it couldn't sustain the length of time between the reveal and when people actually got to buy the cards.
I don't think that it's a coincidence that they changed their policy with the next expansion and started releasing the full spoiler earlier.
It's definitely not, and while I'm sad about what happened with the uncontrolled leak of NPH, I'm glad it's led them to improve their spoiling strategy again.
Also, didn't R&D say that they were veering away from Legendary on lands unless the effects put on it really really warranted it being an exclusive-to-battlefield item?
Yes, that's correct. Legendary Lands are only printed for balance reasons now, not for flavor.
If Sorin created Avacyn, does that increase the chances of Avacyn being B/W herself?
Not necessarily, since the story says Sorin created her to be a pure force of protection. (Though what she's like when she comes back is anybody's guess.)
I agree with you about how being partly white, this contradicts him being a vampire.
That's kind of the point, though. Everywhere else, he's purely a vampire, and he doesn't care about others' petty morality. Innistrad, though, is the place he was born and the only place he was ever a human, and so he backslides into whatever little part of himself is still human underneath when he's there (just like people who move away from their hometown start to subconsciously go back to old habits when they visit home.)
I think people are underrating putting out a constant flow of lifelink vamps.
Yeah; there's a lot of reasons Sorin might not work out in general, but the addition of the lifelink (compared to Elspeth) on that ability is very significant, especially in a situation where you can get any sort of pump going on the tokens.
The explanations in the revised OP seem like a huge improvement. The goal here was to make people responsible for their own triggers and handle forgotten triggers in a saner way -- the way they describe their new attempt seems like a much better way to accomplish that.
I am really honestly at a loss as to why they keep going back to the two-set block well when history has not looked kindly on it. As sad as I would be to have ROE retroactively erased from existence (because it's a top-3-ever limited format) the split had negative repercussions for constructed and despite Rosewater's comments here the evidence doesn't really suggest to me that they've fixed the problem this time.
Do you remember the days when most magic expansions were one word?
After WotC repeatedly had to rename sets at the last minute due to trademark issues, they changed their set naming policy to one that focused on Magic-specific characters and places, invented words, and unusual combinations of normal English words in order to make colliding trademarks less likely.
Who else is betting on more "this set only" mechanics?
Actually, given R&D's dislike of reusing the same gimmick in the same way twice, I'm guessing the opposite: unlike Rise, AVR will be a large third set that continues the mechanical themes of its predecessors. There's certainly plenty of design space in DFCs, flashback, etc. to make it work.
The set size (244) leads me to believe that the set will likely not contain DFCs.
That would be the right size if you took the previous standard for large set sizes (229) and tacked on 15 DFCs, but yes, it could also just be the size of Innistrad minus DFCs too.
I'd like to think Rosewater's commentary on Rise will be predictive here and they won't cut off the Innistrad mechanics; DFCs really aren't going to have a chance to reach their full potential with just two sets.
I know it's not a popular opinion - but making this a larger set goes against their suggestion of reducing the nuber of new cards (in tandem with a new core set every year)
Rosewater and Forsythe have both commented since the switch with Alara that one element of reducing the "default" set size is that when they do weird designs that bump up the card count, it pushes the size of Standard from "a bit low" to "normal" instead of from "normal" to "much too big" like it did during TSP/LOR standard.
Without an official answer right now, I would say that when a Phenomena is revealed, have its effect happen, put it on the bottom, then deal out the plane in the spot where it would have gone. So you could get a cascade (cwutidid?) of Phenomena, then a Plane of your choice!
Yeah, that's probably how I'd do it too. I'll probably give this rule a try once these new decks are out.
This smacks of condescension and the complete misunderstanding of why (at least in my opinion) why people didn't like Werewolves.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to agree: his presentation in that article was quite condescending.
On the other hand, the point he was making there was completely right: there were a huge number of really uninformed reactions that weren't a good representation of how players in general felt about the set after the dust settled. Shrug.
Magic as a game is at its best when it is balanced - not the creature power creep we have seen for the last half decade or more.
It seems straightforwardly obvious to me that creature power creep was necessary because the card types were hideously unbalanced before, but that the ideal stopping point was probably a bit less than the high point they reached. I feel like the fact that the Best Standard Format Of All Time (RAV/TSP) was partway into the power creep process supports that.
And I think they knew this would happen. The announcement looks to be geared towards an audience that loves EDH but doesn't really care about Planechase.
Well, I mean, the reality is that Commander has a huge, dedicated, pre-existing fanbase whereas Planechase is entirely a product of the single deck release they'd previously done. I think the idea is more to get people to buy these because they fit into their casual format of choice and have the Planechase cards tempt them into giving the PC format another shot (or mixing it with Commander, or whatever.)
I wonder how phenomena will work with the Eternities Map variant.
I'd like it if they'd give an "official" answer. Eternities Map rules. Honestly, I think they should print the EM variant directly in the Planechase rulebooks this time around.
I also really don't get what's up with all the conspiracy theories about how he was actually fired for Modern bannings or something?
Like every previous member of R&D to write a weekly column on the mothership, people have created a phantasmagorical bogeyman out of Mr. LaPille to vent their frustration at, and now that he's leaving they'll grasp at any straw to retroactively justify that venting.
In reality, if Tom was actually getting blamed for something significant about the state of development over the last few years, he'd be leaving the company, not transferring to go work on their second-most-important product.
There can be a balance between that and playing a mostly non-creature spell-based deck.
Never gonna happen again. Anyone who feels that this is somehow important to their ongoing enjoyment of Magic should just quit now; there is literally not a single person in Magic R&D who feels that creatureless decks have a significant place in the game and unless R&D gets hit by a bus they're not going to hire anyone new who feels that way either.
So the developer article has gone from Randy Buehler and Aaron Forsythe to Tom LaPille and now Zac Hill. The apple has fallen quite far from the tree. I will reserve judgment, as I recall Forsythe too being inexperienced when he started, but my limited exposure to Hill’s writing on MTG.com doesn’t leave me overconfident.
Buehler was actually a terrible columnist who usually wrote short, perfunctory articles and rarely delved into anything interesting or made any serious effort to explain the role of development in a more in-depth way, IMO. Forsythe was probably a better columnist than anyone else who's written a mothership column in an official WotC capacity, just for his candor and willingness to delve into less positive elements of the game, so it's certainly hard to find someone to replace that.
Personally, I thought LaPille was a much better writer for the column overall than Devin Low (even if he did a number of things that personally irritated me) and I'm hopeful Zac will do a decent job as well.
Why don't you go around to inner city kids shooting hoops and remind them how statistically improbable it is that they will ever reach the NBA.
Do you often hear people looking to earn a college basketball scholarship reconsidering that choice because they didn't like the terms of the latest NBA collective bargaining agreement? That's basically the level of relevance we're talking about in terms of PPC changes. I honestly think it's pretty ridiculous to focus on that compared to any of the other changes afoot here.
The only people who will quit over this change, in my opinion
I think a lot of the issue here is that there isn't really a single "this change," but rather a whole bunch of changes all happening at the same time. I think more GPs is a good thing, I think fewer invitation-only Pro events is a very bad thing, I think reorganizing Worlds is a good idea but not into what they've chosen, I think PWPs are a great idea but the math they're using needs to be significantly tweaked to make the system work and some reason to earn them besides the near-mythical shot at PT invites needs to be rolled in.
How do all these things fit together to form the future of OP? That I don't know. I'm inclined to think it'll work out overall but considering all the changes together I can definitely see why current pros are concerned. There's also an unmistakable trend towards scaling back OP that's more concerning than any individual change simply because no one knows if/when it'll stop.
No, I don't remember that, because the Mirrodin Besieged promotion was received incredibly positively and the increased number of gimmicks for prereleases is a direct result of the positive feedback about the MBS faction pre-re.
(I detect some bitterness in your post over the lack of player influence on the SoM storyline, but if so, you have no one to blame but yourself.)
Wouldn't tournament-organizer agreements do a fairly good job of protecting against this? I'm not sure how many stores would really want to open these up early if it meant losing the ability to run events.
These two points disagree with one another.
Right, but saying and doing aren't the same. This block seemed to be a perfect opportunity to really demonstrate that they learned a lesson from RoE and do a third-act-twist set that had a strong mechanical tie to its predecessors -- but they've already pre-emptively ruled out, quite literally, every interesting mechanical theme from INN: no DFCs, no flashback, no graveyard theme. We might be looking at a set that carries over, I dunno, some (but not all!) of the monster tribal themes and the Curse mechanic, but that's pretty unexciting and suggests to me that R&D understood the words people were saying ("we want a mechanical connection between the halves of the block") but not the meaning behind them ("we get invested in our mechanics and themes and want to see them fully developed rather than cut off just when they're getting interesting.")
In some ways this is one of those "good problems to have" (like Zendikar, Innistrad was an enormous success and people want more of it than WotC actually has to give) but I'd like R&D to actually learn this lesson more aggressively here -- people like the three-set block structure and like to see you pull out all the stops on the mechanics and themes in the third set.
Going back to MTGNews (and before that Lands of Destoguardiana, and even before that rec.games.trading-cards.magic.misc) those of us on the Internet were getting full leaked spoilers for every set before it was officially revealed back almost to the first days of Magic.
Based on years of watching this, I believe both are true. Judgment was leaked almost two months early by a bug in MTGO; there was a ton of excitement about it early on (because it was a good set) but it couldn't sustain the length of time between the reveal and when people actually got to buy the cards.
It's definitely not, and while I'm sad about what happened with the uncontrolled leak of NPH, I'm glad it's led them to improve their spoiling strategy again.
Yes, that's correct. Legendary Lands are only printed for balance reasons now, not for flavor.
Not necessarily, since the story says Sorin created her to be a pure force of protection. (Though what she's like when she comes back is anybody's guess.)
That's kind of the point, though. Everywhere else, he's purely a vampire, and he doesn't care about others' petty morality. Innistrad, though, is the place he was born and the only place he was ever a human, and so he backslides into whatever little part of himself is still human underneath when he's there (just like people who move away from their hometown start to subconsciously go back to old habits when they visit home.)
Yeah; there's a lot of reasons Sorin might not work out in general, but the addition of the lifelink (compared to Elspeth) on that ability is very significant, especially in a situation where you can get any sort of pump going on the tokens.
After WotC repeatedly had to rename sets at the last minute due to trademark issues, they changed their set naming policy to one that focused on Magic-specific characters and places, invented words, and unusual combinations of normal English words in order to make colliding trademarks less likely.
Actually, given R&D's dislike of reusing the same gimmick in the same way twice, I'm guessing the opposite: unlike Rise, AVR will be a large third set that continues the mechanical themes of its predecessors. There's certainly plenty of design space in DFCs, flashback, etc. to make it work.
On the other hand:
That would be the right size if you took the previous standard for large set sizes (229) and tacked on 15 DFCs, but yes, it could also just be the size of Innistrad minus DFCs too.
I'd like to think Rosewater's commentary on Rise will be predictive here and they won't cut off the Innistrad mechanics; DFCs really aren't going to have a chance to reach their full potential with just two sets.
Rosewater and Forsythe have both commented since the switch with Alara that one element of reducing the "default" set size is that when they do weird designs that bump up the card count, it pushes the size of Standard from "a bit low" to "normal" instead of from "normal" to "much too big" like it did during TSP/LOR standard.
Yeah, that's probably how I'd do it too. I'll probably give this rule a try once these new decks are out.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to agree: his presentation in that article was quite condescending.
On the other hand, the point he was making there was completely right: there were a huge number of really uninformed reactions that weren't a good representation of how players in general felt about the set after the dust settled. Shrug.
It seems straightforwardly obvious to me that creature power creep was necessary because the card types were hideously unbalanced before, but that the ideal stopping point was probably a bit less than the high point they reached. I feel like the fact that the Best Standard Format Of All Time (RAV/TSP) was partway into the power creep process supports that.
Well, I mean, the reality is that Commander has a huge, dedicated, pre-existing fanbase whereas Planechase is entirely a product of the single deck release they'd previously done. I think the idea is more to get people to buy these because they fit into their casual format of choice and have the Planechase cards tempt them into giving the PC format another shot (or mixing it with Commander, or whatever.)
I'd like it if they'd give an "official" answer. Eternities Map rules. Honestly, I think they should print the EM variant directly in the Planechase rulebooks this time around.
Like every previous member of R&D to write a weekly column on the mothership, people have created a phantasmagorical bogeyman out of Mr. LaPille to vent their frustration at, and now that he's leaving they'll grasp at any straw to retroactively justify that venting.
In reality, if Tom was actually getting blamed for something significant about the state of development over the last few years, he'd be leaving the company, not transferring to go work on their second-most-important product.
Never gonna happen again. Anyone who feels that this is somehow important to their ongoing enjoyment of Magic should just quit now; there is literally not a single person in Magic R&D who feels that creatureless decks have a significant place in the game and unless R&D gets hit by a bus they're not going to hire anyone new who feels that way either.
Buehler was actually a terrible columnist who usually wrote short, perfunctory articles and rarely delved into anything interesting or made any serious effort to explain the role of development in a more in-depth way, IMO. Forsythe was probably a better columnist than anyone else who's written a mothership column in an official WotC capacity, just for his candor and willingness to delve into less positive elements of the game, so it's certainly hard to find someone to replace that.
Personally, I thought LaPille was a much better writer for the column overall than Devin Low (even if he did a number of things that personally irritated me) and I'm hopeful Zac will do a decent job as well.
Do you often hear people looking to earn a college basketball scholarship reconsidering that choice because they didn't like the terms of the latest NBA collective bargaining agreement? That's basically the level of relevance we're talking about in terms of PPC changes. I honestly think it's pretty ridiculous to focus on that compared to any of the other changes afoot here.
I think a lot of the issue here is that there isn't really a single "this change," but rather a whole bunch of changes all happening at the same time. I think more GPs is a good thing, I think fewer invitation-only Pro events is a very bad thing, I think reorganizing Worlds is a good idea but not into what they've chosen, I think PWPs are a great idea but the math they're using needs to be significantly tweaked to make the system work and some reason to earn them besides the near-mythical shot at PT invites needs to be rolled in.
How do all these things fit together to form the future of OP? That I don't know. I'm inclined to think it'll work out overall but considering all the changes together I can definitely see why current pros are concerned. There's also an unmistakable trend towards scaling back OP that's more concerning than any individual change simply because no one knows if/when it'll stop.