I've been talking about their poor company direction for a while. It's so clear to anyone playing the game that the player community is tired of their bad products. They have too many products and they failed miserably to work on their money making standard product. Like other posters I'm tired of their enormous creatures in every color and no easy way to deal with them in a standard meta game. From a game design standpoint they have only focused on creatures and planeswalkers. He are in kaledesh but the best artifacts that you want to play are still creature based. The whole game has become too swingy and it's boring because of it. There are some strategies that take advantage of that. Such as during return to ravnica turbo fog and getting ten gates into play was a fun way to win the game. Alternate ways to win the game still exist but the creature damage is just so massive that the other strategies don't have a chance. Anyone looking at kaledesh can see that the block is pushed to such a massive power level for creatures. You have every kind of value driven creature imaginable. Built in effects that can just replace older sorcery's. The game just hasn't worked for me for a long time. It's left a bad feeling when ever I attend a live event. What am I paying for? Open three booster packs during a draft and get garbage. Even if I won the draft and I get more booster packs as my prize. I could get all garbage again. The lottery aspect is just too high. Yet they continue to just increase that lottery. It's nuts. These standard bannings should have never been done.
Quick run down.
1. They had to reverse their decision to increase standard rotation. (No one was going to throw away even more money.)
2. Master Pieces became a main stay. (Clearly standard is failing.)
3. More new promos to get people playing standard. (Sales must be horrible.)
You can't print a luxury product at ever increasing amounts of luxury. Mythic rares were a mistake and they really need to fix that. They cut off the extremely desirable promos for regular release events years ago now. They cut off prize support to store owners. They are only recently restarting prize support because it's desperately needed. In the short term what they are doing to prop up their product just isn't good enough. Standard used to keep people in the game because they would reprint cards to a certain extent. They no longer do that in any meaningful way. We are always in awe when they finally decide to reprint something. They took away one mana green mana ramp because their massive creature design way messing with a old game mechanic that worked even though their game design didn't.
Here's how you generate equity with the community and fix the game.
1. Start doing reprints again. I'm pretty sure as this point one high end reprint per set would be good. damnation
2. Eliminate mythic rares. That fact that you are telling us what is very rare destroys the games trading card aspect.
3. Fix the release promos. I got four Emrakul, the Aeons Torn on release day way back when. One from playing and 3 from trading for them.
4. Stop lying to us and saying you don't consider the secondary market price of cards. No one believes you. Putting old cards in standard sells booster packs. It's equity that you need to use because your product is bombing.
5. Get some different game designers. Your massive creatures and lack of answers makes no sense.
6. You need to revisit old game design. Red needs land destruction. Discard needs to be viable. The people you are pandering to with your massive creatures clearly aren't buying your booster packs. Megrim , black vise,with howling mineunderworld dreams, stone rain. I can even make a two mana RR land destruction spell that's fair. Could be Red/black, or red/green too. R/black sorcery destroy target land exile the top five cards of your library. It you want to take it a step further because you think it's too powerful. Exile the card itself too when it goes to the graveyard. There is plenty of alternate game design space available but wizards you just aren't using it.
7. Booster pack redesign. People aren't getting enough for the money they are spending. Experiment with this.
8. Eliminate special products. Put those special cards into standard sets. No more EDH support unless you buy a standard booster pack. This idea that sets can't be big is dumb. Add every new card only in standard products.
I don't like these new land promos and it's just not going to help enough.
2018 idea
Half grand prixs for 2018 are booster draft or sealed. Other half are standard. Everyone gets a promo tarmogoyf. At least then you get your admission price. Even if the price drops, I'm very sure people will still be happy with themselves. You're paying at least $60 for the promo.
I love everything in this post, it pretty much sums up my opinion as well, except for #8. In my opinion, the EDH products are the coolest thing that Wizards has been doing for a while.
I would also add that they need to get rid of NWO and the dumbing down of the game. It's really frustrating that 95% of the uncommons and 99% of the commons are limited garbage, unplayable in any format, even EDH.
As a collector of Lich cards (see my username), I'd place this in the middle of Lichy goodness. There are definitely worse Lich cards, such as Scornful AEther-Lich.
I hope there's a "You are no longer the monarch" or "Target opponent becomes the monarch" ("abdicating your throne"?), so you can repeat this somehow.
EDIT: Yeah, it's a replacement ability, so it likely does work, and you are correct. (Assuming the meaning of <> is actually what we're thinking.)
903.9. If mana would be added to a player’s mana pool of a color that isn’t in the color identity of that player’s commander, that amount of colorless mana is added to that player’s mana pool instead.
Is a Swamp you're tapping in your mono-White deck a colorless source? That is NOT obvious in my opinion. It depends on how <> is actually worded. It probably does work (and you are correct), but it might not.
And can lead to weird situations. In EDH, if I'm playing mono-White and someone plays Urborg, can I tap a Plains for B which in turn becomes <> ? Hard to speculate; we'll have to wait to see what the rules are.
Prediction (baseless of course): Annihilator is gone, to be replaced with a similar mechanic that bounces that many permanents instead of sacrificing them. So like:
Claw of Emrakul
10
Creature - Eldrazi
Enervate 5 (Whenever this creature attacks, defending player returns five permanents to their owners' hands.)
9/7
This feels suitably alien to me, and at the same time is similar to Annihilator, and serves the purpose of being a weaker mechanic. The Enervate number could be slightly higher than comparable Annihilation cards.
Dash (from the Command zone) doesn't avoid the additional Commander tax costs, since you are still "casting" it. From your hand (after the Dash bounces it) is fine however.
(Edited for clarification; I'm not saying Singe is wrong.)
I love everything in this post, it pretty much sums up my opinion as well, except for #8. In my opinion, the EDH products are the coolest thing that Wizards has been doing for a while.
I would also add that they need to get rid of NWO and the dumbing down of the game. It's really frustrating that 95% of the uncommons and 99% of the commons are limited garbage, unplayable in any format, even EDH.
I hope there's a "You are no longer the monarch" or "Target opponent becomes the monarch" ("abdicating your throne"?), so you can repeat this somehow.
903.9. If mana would be added to a player’s mana pool of a color that isn’t in the color identity of that player’s commander, that amount of colorless mana is added to that player’s mana pool instead.
Is a Swamp you're tapping in your mono-White deck a colorless source? That is NOT obvious in my opinion. It depends on how <> is actually worded. It probably does work (and you are correct), but it might not.(using tinyurl because I can't figure out how to nest brackets in a url tag here)
T: Add 1 to your mana pool.
3: Put ~this~ back into your hand.
Swampcycling 1
Forestcycling 1
Dual #2
Land - Swamp Forest
Whenever ~this~ becomes tapped, exile the top four (five?) cards of your library.
(I'm not a fan of ETB tapped lands; I like to think of other possibilities.)
Claw of Emrakul
10
Creature - Eldrazi
Enervate 5 (Whenever this creature attacks, defending player returns five permanents to their owners' hands.)
9/7
This feels suitably alien to me, and at the same time is similar to Annihilator, and serves the purpose of being a weaker mechanic. The Enervate number could be slightly higher than comparable Annihilation cards.
(Edited for clarification; I'm not saying Singe is wrong.)
gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?set=[%22Commander%202014%22]