First, Define "Gaining more and more players". I realize a number of people here are too young to have been able to fully appriciate Mtg's state during Tempest/Urza's block, but inference tells us very clearly that Mtg is very far below the level of popularity it enjoyed during that block. The significant lack of major retailer support is very indicative of Mtg not being anywhere near as popular. During Tempest/Urza's, you could buy the cards everywhere. Today? Well, in my fairly large city, I've got only 2-3 game shops even supporting Mtg in any big way, and none of the retailers carry it. Even Wallmart limits it's supply to a bare minimum. So, to my experience, it's still far, far, below it's prime.
The number of retailers selling in a particular city is a poor indicator. It fails to account for a large number of factors, ranging from general retailer inventory restriction over the last few years (associated with economic crash) to Magic Online players, who simply didn't exist at the time you speak of - and Wizards has stated that Magic Online is 30-50% of its Magic business.
Because hey, people don't like those things, so why should they be in Magic?
You are missing quite a few things here.
First and foremost: you seem to have the idea that there is some kind of ideal state of Magic, and that it is not related to what people want. The only thing that matters is what people want. Every decision that accurately reflects the desires of the total player population is by definition a good one. The goal is to make the game fun to play.
This is not the same thing as catering to exclusively to specific preferences. Some people don't like the flavor of Vampires in Zendikar; most people either don't care or like it, so stripping all Vampires out would be a disservice to the overall entertainment of the game. Some players may not like anything with the word Goblin in it. But most people don't care or like it, so it's a bad idea to strip it out.
But here is the problem: you are also not the majority. It's easy to point at a minority preference you don't share, and laugh at the idea of catering exclusively to it. But it's a lot harder to recognize that your preference for how Blue should be, how common or supported Aggro and Control should be, etc. may itself be such a minority preference.
Wizards needs to cater to a large number of people simultaneously - while they can have multiple game formats, they release the same set for all of them. There are several ways to do this. One of the ways is additive, designing individual cards or mechanics that match a given target. Adding a Timmy card to a set will not usually upset the Spikes - they just don't care. But when the preference they are trying to deal with is a relative one, that doesn't work - people who don't like removal and people who do like removal can't be simultaneously satisfied, because "don't play removal" is insufficient. What they can do is rotate. Some sets are fast; some are slow. Some are creature-heavy; some have most of their power in the spells. Sometimes one color is on top, another time it might be on the bottom in terms of aggregate power. And with time, the "center" of all these rotations shifts as the playerbase as a whole shifts. It's entirely possible that right now, the percentage of "creature-loving" players is higher than it was ten years ago. If that's the case, then the Magic designers should shift design for them; that is not the death of Magic - the only thing that would most surely and swiftly spell Magic's death would be refusing to change as the players change, merely to cater to a subset of veterans who want the game to always be the way they are used to playing it.
Honestly ive played this game for over 10 years. Ive seen the trends of how it has developed, and honestly as time goes on this game is becoming more and more of just I play creature A and attack with it, then you blow up creature A with spell B and play creature C which I destroy with spell D and so on and so forth. This game is devolving into nothing more then aggro decks with removal. I havent seen anything I would call a combo deck since dragonstorm was around and honestly the "control" decks that are around today are nothing more then aggro decks with alot of answers.
Uh... 5 color control? Jacerator/turbofog? Swans combo?
How has "control" ever been anything besides having a lot of answers, by definition?
Seriously, the current standard is less than half a year old. People are making this out to be some kind of many-year slide into oblivion that spells the doom of Blue in particular and Magic in general.
And yet Magic is gaining more and more players. Between option A: the people who make a living on designing cards to have a broad and long-term appeal are all incompetent and stupid and don't care about balance, and option B: some subset of people who happen to be negatively affected by a particular change are wrong about what's fair and balanced, I tend to think B is a hell of a lot more likely.
If WotC wanted to see blue die, they'd stop printing Blue cards completely. They don't want to see blue die, they just have a different idea than you do about what's best for the game. Arguments about how blue sucks tend to be based on what top-8s in Standard tournaments at Competitive and Professional REL. The problem is, the Casual and Limited players outnumber those by a vast ratio.
A Grandeur ability, like any other activated ability, may only be activated if the card it's on is in play. You can't activate it from your hand, no matter how many Korlashes you reveal.
This is not strictly accurate - while it's true for Grandeur, it's not true for all activated abilities. Cycling, for example, is an activated ability that is activated from the hand.
What other color do the devs justify printing bad cards for with the reasoning that players should have to be better deck builders?
All of them. Your expectation of what is "bad" in Blue is just much higher than for the other colors, tinged by the over-the-top power it used to have.
2.
He's right, it does make no sense and they should not base card development on sentiments like this.
3. Blue Card drawing. Once again you see them trying to use the argument that blue card draw isn't bad, it just needs people to be creative. Sorry, but blue cannot depend on Mind Spring as it's only card draw. Esper Charm is good, but it requires you to play Esper, which is not good. How often does Jace last when a blue deck drops it most of the time?
I wish they would stop treating blue differently than other colors. They didn't make BSA situational. BBE, blightning, and sprouting thrinax are not situational. So why make blue players play with subpar cards, and then tell them to "try harder" when they complain about it?
First, treating one color differently than the others is the entire premise of the color pie. Anticipating a specific situation and being ready for it is part of Blue's color pie.
Second, your comparison is a red herring. Yes, there are non-situational cards in other colors. There are also non-situational cards in Blue. There are also situational cards in other colors (Deathmark? Entangling Vines? Relic Crush?).
4. Blue in standard.
He really tries to justify that blue is okay right now by posting a deck that runs Spreading Seas??????? People are running spreading seas, which is a card that capitalizes on the fact that blue sucks right now.
Hell, in the same top 8, and a lot of other top 8s, there are RDW decks that run 4 copies of Quechable Fire. Still think blue is ok? If quenchable fire named another color, would it be played?
There are five colors. One color will always be the worst.
People are not saying that Blue is ok to be bad because of some idea that Blue needs to be pounded into the ground. People are saying that Blue is no worse off right now than Green was at its nadir, than White was at its nadir, and so on. They got better; so will blue.
Some people discover alcohol and become addicted. Some people discover gambling and become addicted. Some people discover TV and become addicted. Some people discover Magic and become addicted. Some people discover a sport and become addicted. And some people discover WoW and become addicted.
Addictive personalities find things to get addicted to. It's not necessarily possible to tell that someone is prone to that behavior until they actually find something that clicks with them.
Once again though, if you approach it as a "every colour deserves to suck now and then" view, you're doing it wrong. That should NEVER be the aim of a game designer since it is intentional imbalance. Yes, balance will never be perfect but that shouldn't stop one from trying to achieve the best balance they can.
You're misreading, or reading things in that aren't there. The point is not that making blue the worst color is a goal. The point is that if it happens accidentally as part of the balance process, it's not a big deal.
EDIT:
Why would it have to be that expensive? And why permanent? Permanent makes it akin to land destruction in many ways so at best it would have to be nonland permanent. Spin Into Myth is already 5 and captures another card besides the targeted creature, so there is pretty much zero reason it would need to be 6-7. And besides, why can other colours have much more permanent removal be in the 1-3 mana range but blue can only get temporary removal in that range?
Because blue isn't the color of permanent removal. Are you also upset that Green is bad at producing efficient flyers?
Blue's removal IS it's counterspells. The downside to a counterspell is that once you let the threat resolve, you can't get rid of it with the counter alone anymore. You can't hope to topdeck that Essence Scatter to stop the Baneslayer like you can hope for a Path or Doom Blade. It needs to be preemptive. That is the tradeoff blue pays for its removal being able to shut down CitP abilities and the like.
In terms of removal to topdeck against a Baneslayer, I'd take Mind Control over a Path or Doom Blade anyday.
The only way it would be possible to play a land on another player's turn is if Wizards made a card that said something like, for example, "You may play lands on any player's turn". Since this directly contradicts 305.3, it would override it because of 103.1. Since Djinn of Wishes doesn't directly contradict 305.3, it doesn't allow you to play the land.
It seems like people are having difficulty with the notion that the tournament rules define specific terms - and define them in ways that aren't what the person is used to.
Think of it this way. Wizards could have, if they so chose, defined the mana symbol U as "Red mana". If the Rules say U is defined as "Red mana", that's Red mana regardless of whether the actual symbol is, in "plain English", blue with a water-drop shape.
Similarly, you may think that in real life, incomplete is the same as incorrect. You might even be legally correct in some legal systems. However, specifically with regard to Magic rules, "incorrect" means "explicit statement that is wrong", not "statement that portrays only a subset of the truth". Regardless of whether in "plain English" you might call something "lying by omission", and might call it similar or identical to "lying by commission", by Magic rules standards it's simply not the same.
so when affinity got dealt with, they nerfed all artifacts and all five color?(coughKAmigawaBlockcough)
counterspells need to be a part of the game. if not, we'll all be playing another game of yu-gi-oh. we already have creatures with yu gi oh pricetags, anyway. i find this article to be complete and utter Bull. who finds it annoying? the competitive players who actually BUYS cards or timmy who buys maybe 1 pack a week?
The competitive players buy singles on the secondary market. Even supposing each of those competitive players causes a retailer somewhere to crack open ten packs a week to sell singles from, the timmies outnumber the competitive players a hundred to one or more. Casual and semi-casual players are the majority of the revenue stream. True competitive players are obviously also important, because their existence influences the casual players. But your dismissal of the typical "pack-a-week timmy" misses the business economics here.
But of course, part of the point of the article is that the feeling of accomplishment vs. wasted time is not just among the casual players, but also present among people who have been playing the game at the top level for years. You may not personally feel that way when your spells get countered, but assuming that your experience is true for others is unreasonable.
Wizards obviously has a communication problem here, though it's not something unique to Wizards - any situation where one entity is trying to communicate with a relatively large mass of people, where one-on-one communication is not possible, causes this sort of thing to happen. What I see, here and elsewhere, is people taking what was actually said and reading into it what they were expecting or looking for. Nowhere in the Blue article, for example, does it say that Wizards thought Compulsive Research, Mystical Teachings or Mulldrifter were too good, rather that they ended up being better than they expected. In fact, the article explicitly says that they want to make cards that are on the same power level, but are powerful for a different reason - versatility, for example, rather than task-specific focus. This is hardly the "make blue suck!" that people seem to be reading from it; it's their explanation of why they're trying less-straightforward avenues for Blue.
It would negate the effect of creatures on combat, or grossly deflate their power and large portions of an opponents deck as opposed to being an enabler for swarms.
Countermagic goes 1 for 1, this thing could go 2 for entire decks. Just as critically, you would have much less to use your countermagic on - you would only need to protect your -X/-0 stones from destruction and your opponent will flail about helplessly and fling burn spells at your head in impotent rage. Imagine eight of them in your deck, sticking two against Boros or Jund wouldn't be hard. You'd have all the time in the world to set up whatever win you wanted and DoJ away the creatures they massively overextended into to maintain pressure on you.
So why aren't people even considering running Cumberstone now?
We've already got Turbofog decks which run 8-12 effects to completely prevent combat damage, not just reduce it - and they still don't represent a particularly big chunk of the meta. In general, preventing damage, lowering power, etc. has always been weaker than the commensurate damage-causing and power-increasing effects.
Sounds like there's already a problem here. Here's where it gets tricky. Here's the stack as soon as R casts the Guided Passage:
(top) Hive Mind trigger from R's Passage Eye of the Storm trigger from R's Passage
R's Guided Passage
Once W and C resolve their Passages, Eye of the Storm will resolve. R's Guided Passage is exiled, and then he gets to copy it and cast it. Now, since he cast it from Eye of the Storm, Hive Mind triggers again:
It sounds like W and C only resolved Guided Passage once, but they should have resolved two copies apiece (R, unfortunately for him, only gets one Guided Passage to resolve.)
Edit: I misread as Eye of the Storm being controlled by R, and Hive Mind being controlled by W. GrifterMage is correct in the trigger order, though the net result up till that point is the same (two Passages for W and C, one for R).
FNMs are Tournaments for the purposes of the Tournament Rules. Pretty much anything that's got an official judge follows the Tournament Rules. You can use them as guidelines or even strict rules for casual aka "kitchen-table" Magic as well - after all, no one can really tell you how you can or can't play Magic in a casual setting; if you want, you can play with everyone starting at 50 life, or 5, or use 20-card libraries. Because of that, the answers you'll get to "what if X happens, which is technically in violation of the Comprehensive Rules?" will be drawn from the Tournament Rules - it's not really useful to tell you to just decide for yourself, but it might be useful for you to see what happens in an official context.
So, with that in mind, what he's saying is "if, in an official tournament such as an FNM, you say such-and-such, it's an accepted shortcut per the Tournament Rules."
Cumber Stone effects are a bad idea if they are stackable, considering that two 2-3 CMC cumber stones would basically equal the effect of Humility and force over-extension in order to maintain pressure, as well as neutralizing 2-3 drops and token generators. Static power decreases on a type of permanent people don't MD hate for should be viewed with not a little suspicion.
If artifacts become prevalent, people will start MDing hate for them. I'm not sure I see how Cumber Stone at 3 cmc is worse or more disruptive than, say, Glorious Anthem at 3cmc. Counterspells have fewer answers to them than Cumber Stone and the like would.
There seem to be a few fallacies in the way the question is stated. Specifically, while MTG has been around for 15 years, the vast majority of its current playerbase has not been playing it for 15 years. And it seems that the playerbase continues to grow. Also, it's not always necessary to add elements to a game to keep it interesting. Consider how long it's been since Chess has changed - or in a space much closer to MTG, how long it's been since Texas Hold'Em has changed. Obviously it's not strictly the same, and not all games are able to catch that sort of evergreen attention, but the point is that R&D doesn't operate under the constraints of satisfying all their 15-year veterans, and often those veterans won't need anything new to keep them satisfied.
They do have a lot of untapped design space available, and there's also space "within the gaps" of design. There are a lot of things that they could do that they simply haven't yet, and a lot of cases where small fine-tunings change a card's actual effect radically (consider what happens when you change any of the numbers printed on Divination by one.)
You are missing quite a few things here.
First and foremost: you seem to have the idea that there is some kind of ideal state of Magic, and that it is not related to what people want. The only thing that matters is what people want. Every decision that accurately reflects the desires of the total player population is by definition a good one. The goal is to make the game fun to play.
This is not the same thing as catering to exclusively to specific preferences. Some people don't like the flavor of Vampires in Zendikar; most people either don't care or like it, so stripping all Vampires out would be a disservice to the overall entertainment of the game. Some players may not like anything with the word Goblin in it. But most people don't care or like it, so it's a bad idea to strip it out.
But here is the problem: you are also not the majority. It's easy to point at a minority preference you don't share, and laugh at the idea of catering exclusively to it. But it's a lot harder to recognize that your preference for how Blue should be, how common or supported Aggro and Control should be, etc. may itself be such a minority preference.
Wizards needs to cater to a large number of people simultaneously - while they can have multiple game formats, they release the same set for all of them. There are several ways to do this. One of the ways is additive, designing individual cards or mechanics that match a given target. Adding a Timmy card to a set will not usually upset the Spikes - they just don't care. But when the preference they are trying to deal with is a relative one, that doesn't work - people who don't like removal and people who do like removal can't be simultaneously satisfied, because "don't play removal" is insufficient. What they can do is rotate. Some sets are fast; some are slow. Some are creature-heavy; some have most of their power in the spells. Sometimes one color is on top, another time it might be on the bottom in terms of aggregate power. And with time, the "center" of all these rotations shifts as the playerbase as a whole shifts. It's entirely possible that right now, the percentage of "creature-loving" players is higher than it was ten years ago. If that's the case, then the Magic designers should shift design for them; that is not the death of Magic - the only thing that would most surely and swiftly spell Magic's death would be refusing to change as the players change, merely to cater to a subset of veterans who want the game to always be the way they are used to playing it.
How has "control" ever been anything besides having a lot of answers, by definition?
Seriously, the current standard is less than half a year old. People are making this out to be some kind of many-year slide into oblivion that spells the doom of Blue in particular and Magic in general.
If WotC wanted to see blue die, they'd stop printing Blue cards completely. They don't want to see blue die, they just have a different idea than you do about what's best for the game. Arguments about how blue sucks tend to be based on what top-8s in Standard tournaments at Competitive and Professional REL. The problem is, the Casual and Limited players outnumber those by a vast ratio.
This is not strictly accurate - while it's true for Grandeur, it's not true for all activated abilities. Cycling, for example, is an activated ability that is activated from the hand.
First, treating one color differently than the others is the entire premise of the color pie. Anticipating a specific situation and being ready for it is part of Blue's color pie.
Second, your comparison is a red herring. Yes, there are non-situational cards in other colors. There are also non-situational cards in Blue. There are also situational cards in other colors (Deathmark? Entangling Vines? Relic Crush?).
There are five colors. One color will always be the worst.
People are not saying that Blue is ok to be bad because of some idea that Blue needs to be pounded into the ground. People are saying that Blue is no worse off right now than Green was at its nadir, than White was at its nadir, and so on. They got better; so will blue.
Addictive personalities find things to get addicted to. It's not necessarily possible to tell that someone is prone to that behavior until they actually find something that clicks with them.
Because blue isn't the color of permanent removal. Are you also upset that Green is bad at producing efficient flyers?
In terms of removal to topdeck against a Baneslayer, I'd take Mind Control over a Path or Doom Blade anyday.
Think of it this way. Wizards could have, if they so chose, defined the mana symbol U as "Red mana". If the Rules say U is defined as "Red mana", that's Red mana regardless of whether the actual symbol is, in "plain English", blue with a water-drop shape.
Similarly, you may think that in real life, incomplete is the same as incorrect. You might even be legally correct in some legal systems. However, specifically with regard to Magic rules, "incorrect" means "explicit statement that is wrong", not "statement that portrays only a subset of the truth". Regardless of whether in "plain English" you might call something "lying by omission", and might call it similar or identical to "lying by commission", by Magic rules standards it's simply not the same.
But of course, part of the point of the article is that the feeling of accomplishment vs. wasted time is not just among the casual players, but also present among people who have been playing the game at the top level for years. You may not personally feel that way when your spells get countered, but assuming that your experience is true for others is unreasonable.
Wizards obviously has a communication problem here, though it's not something unique to Wizards - any situation where one entity is trying to communicate with a relatively large mass of people, where one-on-one communication is not possible, causes this sort of thing to happen. What I see, here and elsewhere, is people taking what was actually said and reading into it what they were expecting or looking for. Nowhere in the Blue article, for example, does it say that Wizards thought Compulsive Research, Mystical Teachings or Mulldrifter were too good, rather that they ended up being better than they expected. In fact, the article explicitly says that they want to make cards that are on the same power level, but are powerful for a different reason - versatility, for example, rather than task-specific focus. This is hardly the "make blue suck!" that people seem to be reading from it; it's their explanation of why they're trying less-straightforward avenues for Blue.
So why aren't people even considering running Cumberstone now?
We've already got Turbofog decks which run 8-12 effects to completely prevent combat damage, not just reduce it - and they still don't represent a particularly big chunk of the meta. In general, preventing damage, lowering power, etc. has always been weaker than the commensurate damage-causing and power-increasing effects.
Sounds like there's already a problem here. Here's where it gets tricky. Here's the stack as soon as R casts the Guided Passage:
(top)
Hive Mind trigger from R's Passage
Eye of the Storm trigger from R's Passage
R's Guided Passage
Next, Hive Mind resolves. Stack:
(top)
W's Guided Passage
C's Guided Passage
Eye of the Storm trigger from R's Passage
R's Guided Passage
Once W and C resolve their Passages, Eye of the Storm will resolve. R's Guided Passage is exiled, and then he gets to copy it and cast it. Now, since he cast it from Eye of the Storm, Hive Mind triggers again:
(top)
W's Guided Passage
C's Guided Passage
R's Guided Passage
It sounds like W and C only resolved Guided Passage once, but they should have resolved two copies apiece (R, unfortunately for him, only gets one Guided Passage to resolve.)
Edit: I misread as Eye of the Storm being controlled by R, and Hive Mind being controlled by W. GrifterMage is correct in the trigger order, though the net result up till that point is the same (two Passages for W and C, one for R).
So, with that in mind, what he's saying is "if, in an official tournament such as an FNM, you say such-and-such, it's an accepted shortcut per the Tournament Rules."
If artifacts become prevalent, people will start MDing hate for them. I'm not sure I see how Cumber Stone at 3 cmc is worse or more disruptive than, say, Glorious Anthem at 3cmc. Counterspells have fewer answers to them than Cumber Stone and the like would.
phantomgreen: Fatespinner comes to mind.
They do have a lot of untapped design space available, and there's also space "within the gaps" of design. There are a lot of things that they could do that they simply haven't yet, and a lot of cases where small fine-tunings change a card's actual effect radically (consider what happens when you change any of the numbers printed on Divination by one.)