MTG Salvation

The creative team seems to be content with creating basically the same character over and over again.

I'm an oppressed European.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jnbdddl660wsw5a/magic-m15.mse-style.rar?dl=1

If I'm not missing anything, you should be able to just copy the folder into your data folder and it should work. Stop using these installers if they don't work. It might be that there are edits to the script and card field files necessary to make the M15 template work, but I think you can try it like this first.

The template installers don't do anything other than extracting the files to the correct location. If they don't work, try doing it manually. If you can't find the correct files, maybe I can upload them from my installation.

It seems that you had bad luck in Innistrad and I had bad luck in Ixalan. But I can't imagine that over a larger sample size you wouldn't find that non-interactive games involving One with the Wind are far more common than non-interactive games involving Invisible Stalker. The latter is an uncommon and requires another uncommon to be really broken. One with the Wind just requires any early creature - it doesn't have to be a Jade Guardian. The removal is so bad that every creature might as well have hexproof (exaggerating of course).

Regarding your second and third paragraphs, you're making it out to be as though "sweet-deck" mirrors in Innistrad are like combo mirrors in Eternal. What I was trying to say was that games with decks that occupy vastly different points on the aggro-control axis tend to be uninteractive. So, if you're drafting a tribal aggro or midrange deck more often than not, you might find that your games against control players are not very interactive. You can't deal with the opponent creating 10 spider tokens, so you just have to kill him before he does that and the game becomes very one-dimensional. But if you're playing any deck that can do powerful things in the late game, you can interact and deal with your opponent's army of spider tokens. Those games tend to be among the most interactive games in Magic.

"Too often games of Innistrad are determined [...] by which broken strategy trumps the other guy's broken strategy."
This sentence doesn't mean anything. Shouldn't Magic games be determined by which strategy trumps the other guy's strategy? If you include in-game strategy, not just deckbuilding strategy? I find the word broken also misplaced because what you're describing are just strategies that scale very well into the late-game, not one-turn kill combos or similar.

Again, I don't get where your notion comes from that control mirrors in Innistrad were uninteractive. Is this only specific to Innistrad or would you say that about any format where you can draft similar decks? Was, say, Rise of the Eldrazi interactive?

I think you're using a bit of a one-sided representation of both Innistrad and Ixalan to make your comparison. You're only focusing on the good aspects of Ixalan, and only on the bad aspects of Innistrad. I'm not going to comment about the drafting part of your post, because I agree with a lot that you said there, and I don't have the necessary in-depth knowledge of Ixalan drafting to make a qualified response to it. I'm fine with accepting that there's a different skill set that Ixalan and Innistrad drafting cater to, and both are equally skill-intensive.

But I find it ludicrous to make the same claim regarding the gameplay.

First of all, the games that you described - the ones where you make hard, skill-based decisions about playing around tricks, the ones where you wonder why your opponent played their cards in the order that he did and not in a different order, the ones where you bluff a trick to keep your opponent from attacking - these are the extreme minority of games.

Most Ixalan games are completely non-interactive - not anymore interactive than the bad Innistrad games you described. If you count up the number of games that are decided by one player utterly outcurving and stomping the other player, and the games that devolve into simple mindless racing because you can't deal with your opponent's One with the Wind or other unblockable creature, you aren't left with room for much else. And even these games are often decided merely by topdecks, because after the dust has settled in an even match, there's no mana sinks or anything else to do but hope for good draws.

The last two drafts I did, I can think of maybe one or two games where I had interesting decisions to make. The other ones I lost to One with the Wind, by being mana screwed, or by flooding out after the initial exchange, or I won in a similar manner.

Compare that to Innistrad draft. You're again painting a very one-sided picture of the format. The lack of interactivity that you described is not a problem of Innistrad, but a problem in any match where the two decks operate on completely different axes. The same is true in most formats - aggro vs. aggro is interactive and skill-intensive, control vs. control is even more interactive and skill-intensive, and aggro vs. control isn't skill-intensive at all. So, you're right in so far that there are some games in Innistrad that aren't very interactive - Green-white humans vs. Burning Vengeance certainly isn't. But aggro vs. aggro surely isn't any less interactive than in Ixalan, and control mirrors can be the most interactive and skill-demanding games of all. Your description of these games as two players just doing their own thing is just completely wrong. You can interact with what your opponent is doing on many more levels - with counterspells, with creature removal, with graveyard hate etc. You have to protect your win condition and make a judgment call whether you use your removal on that filler creature or hold it for your opponent's win condition. You have to sometimes change gears completely and adapt to the situation. Your opponent gained 50 life from Gnaw to the Bone? Then you'll have to try and mill him out.

This way, Innistrad gameplay demands the same skills that Ixalan does, but then even more.

I recommend printing on adhesive paper and sticking it onto junk Magic cards. No need to print a back side.

Owl's Crime: If I can pick up a few of these in a draft, I'll just play these and only lands. I can mill out the opponent on turn 5 on the play, and on turn 4 on the draw. You should reduce it to three cards.

Which is the other image board you mentioned?

MTGsalvation changed how the links to forum threads are formatted at some point, so none of the older links work anymore.

Set creators are constantly getting screwed by these jerks

I asked a moderator just last week whether I can post about my non-Magic related card game on the Custom Set Creation forum and I got green light. I understand that your game still has some relevance to Magic design, so I see no problem at all.

Quote from Creedmoor »

Sutkun, Master Embalmer 1WU
Legendary Creature - Human Cleric
Creature cards in your graveyard have Embalm. Their Embalm cost is equal to their mana cost.
Embalm 3WU
1/4

This! So much this! I demand that this card exists!

Wizards has been oppressing the people of Amonkek for far too long.

If you compare this to Ætherling, you'll notice many similarities, but it has less stats and can still be handled by a large flyer. Still, I wouldn't say those disadvantages justify dropping the cost from six to three. You said yourself it's a control finisher. Which control finisher costs three mana (outside of Eternal )?

Quote from ReapThaWhirlwind »

As for the design, do you see how my version strives to be more intuitive with the dynamics of the mana cost/turn exchange/playability factor?

I'll go with No.