MTG Salvation

Very nicely done.

Exactly right. Number Crunch is actually the ONLY card in the entire game our casual group ever talked about banning. Luckily, the offending player(s) got the message and voluntarily stopped running it. Let me be very clear: Gotcha cards are TERRIBLE FOR MULTIPLAYER. Don't do it, you will regret it.

Nicely done.

Just wanted to check in with you guys. These articles are light-years better than...they used to be. Please keep it up.

I have no personal beef against Rai, but I would like to voice (as strongly as possible) the opposing viewpoint. These are now actually useful once again, unlike how they used to be. We get targeted comments instead of an recurring obsession on providing bland, neutral, and ultimately-meaningless commentary on *every single card*, no matter its significance or relative insignificance. (And most weeks, at least 50% of them were just lazy cut/pastes of the same repeating statuses over and over.)

And a lot of the opinions ("Format BOMB, it's got room to grow." or "This card is garbage, it's going down.") were apparently personal opinions anyway, as we would never get any actual analysis or support to back up claims. That seems a bit pointless too.

I found Rai's updates to be a nearly complete waste of time to read. The current, more focused format is much better in my mind. We get the quick hits and not a lot of fluff about cards that don't even matter.

Sorry but that's how I feel. I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings so I kept it under wraps and then the authorship changed, so I dropped it. (Sorry if any of this hurts your feelings, Rai. Really not my intent. I imagine these are hard to do, and no, I probably couldn't do any better myself.)

As for storyline, I think this might be a cool thing: Do a full-on fantasy movie set in a Magic plane. Characters are introduced, crisis erupts, huge battle ensues, ups and downs, all that..

Fade to black..

Fade back in to one final, real-world scene in someone's basement. All the heroes (and the villain) are there, talking epic smack, picking up their stuff and shuffling up for the next game. Or packing up for the night and saying something like "See you next time, guys." "Hell yeah, awesome game!!"

Fade to black.. Credits roll.

Any movie about Magic should spend as little time as possible talking about handsize, milling, any of that stuff. Did the D&D movies spend time talking about dice rolls, THAC0, or encumbrance? (Communicate the flavor of a some rule via a quirky funny one-liner aside to the audience? "You wanna do WHAT now?" Sure--that's reasonable, but absolutely nothing beyond something like that.)

The movie doesn't need to be a game tutorial. It's supposed to entertain and get people interested in learning more about the game AFTER the movie.

It shouldn't be an opportunity to stroke Magic players egos with endless in-jokes about Magic and R&D and....a bunch of fanservice, more or less. I mean--Magic players are gonna show up in droves no matter what they put in it. This being the case, they should worry about the NON players and make the movie for them (and less for us). I mean--what's a better payoff? A movie that makes us all feel awesome about ourselves for a few days on the forums or a movie that helps inject a BUNCH of new players to help the game go on for (at least) another decade.

Whatever, my 2¢.

Cool theory..you might get some more looks if you repost this in speculation.