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Magic: the Gathering |OT12| Hour of Devastation - Hour of Jace getting dunked on

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Pundere

Member
Well that sucks. Looking at the release notes, bounty counters from Bounty Hunter don't actually do anything with Mathas.

On the bright side, the rulings say that the counters stack if each one came from a separate Mathas trigger.
 

Justin

Member
(It's Play Design, that team is f'ing huge.)

Having Devs involved at all steps of the process is good.

Maybe but that has already been written about extensively. He said that these changes have not been announced yet.

Edit: At the end of the podcast he talks about Play Design so that isnt the change he is hinting at
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Nah, this is just the second time, because the first time they did this (greater creative integration, pushing face cards) they broke everything.

He wrote a Metamorphosis 2 article fairly recently.
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
The only thing interesting about these Commander things is that Edgar Markov is apparently just Vigo, the Scourge of Carpathia.
 
I agree- some cards I simply cannot justify despite their effect being pretty interesting.
Yeah and so I just stay away from whole archetypes.
Cradle is worth it since it's not on the reserve list though.

Now Nekusar on the other hand... Timetwister, Imperial Seal, Mana Drain, oy.
Of course it's worth it because the card is insane but it's just not a pricepoint I'm agreeable woth.

You can substitute for all the latter cradle has no equal in green decks.
 
Also what the fuck no Riptide Laboratory? Fuck you wotc

This is irritating just because it'd be nice to get a modern-frame version. Even with a bounce from people building Wizard decks it's not gonna go over like eight bucks.

no cavern of souls in each deck is a slap in face to EDH players

lmao what are you smoking cavern of souls in each deck

Jason Alt put out a series of tweets describing the issue with reprints
https://twitter.com/JasonEAlt/status/896022970333888515

I mean, he's not wrong about the general phenomenon he describes here, but I think a lot of people have unrealistic expectations of WotC's reprint equity usage. They've been working very aggressively over the last few years to address pricing at the top end, to the point that there's only about 50 reprintable cards with prices over $30 today, and many of those have still come down in price (like Scalding Tarn, down $40 on its peak, or Tarmogoyf which is currently down a whopping $120 from its highest price.) With the understanding that for their own future sales potential and to only ratchet really expensive cards down slowly, they have a limit to how much reprint equity they can use and they've been pushing closer to that edge.

This category is something new that wasn't even on people's radar a couple years ago: cards that are currently on the high end of "middle" pricing that can explode due to increased demand. It's a real issue, but it's also harder to predict and difficult to nail without doing pretty deep dives on detailed secondary market data (which WotC tries to avoid for understandable reasons.)

I would agree that they should probably work a little harder to find $10-15 cards that fit these decks, but I think the real solution to this kind of problem is just to reprint $30 cards in supplemental booster sets -- which the original Conspiracy does show they're actually willing to do.
 
Maro says this literally every year now.

They got explicit buy-in from Hasbro around 2012 to start implementing major changes to their operation, based on the idea that NWO + M10-style core set + Duels produced a massive boost in sales. From that point on you see fairly significant changes at a much higher rate: new cards in supplemental products starting in Planechase 2012, Masters sets and a complete revamp of the creative team in 2013, Metamorphosis in 2015, Metamorphosis 2 and Play Design in 2017, etc. He's saying this every year because they are making major changes every year.

Nah, this is just the second time, because the first time they did this (greater creative integration, pushing face cards) they broke everything.

And made a shitload of money. I feel like it's pretty important to contextualize this: yes, a shift in their development process to accommodate further creative direction plus a complete change in both set structures and format definitions did completely derail their already tenuous pipeline for producing functional competitive formats, but (for reasons mostly related to entirely different parts of these changes) also massively increased their audience and engagement.

I note this largely because most of the changes from that window aren't actually getting rolled back: the tight creative integration is staying exactly the same, for example, and the solution they're trying instead is what they should've done years ago, to create a separate team whose actual job it is to make competitive formats balanced, functional, and enjoyable to play.
 

kirblar

Member
And made a shitload of money. I feel like it's pretty important to contextualize this: yes, a shift in their development process to accommodate further creative direction plus a complete change in both set structures and format definitions did completely derail their already tenuous pipeline for producing functional competitive formats, but (for reasons mostly related to entirely different parts of these changes) also massively increased their audience and engagement.

I note this largely because most of the changes from that window aren't actually getting rolled back: the tight creative integration is staying exactly the same, for example, and the solution they're trying instead is what they should've done years ago, to create a separate team whose actual job it is to make competitive formats balanced, functional, and enjoyable to play.
Ya, but the idea that cosplayers and creatively engaged players are going to be really excited to see "face cards X Y and Z" played at the PT T8 was just a monstrously misguided mistake in completely not understanding what these players actually value.
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
They got explicit buy-in from Hasbro around 2012 to start implementing major changes to their operation, based on the idea that NWO + M10-style core set + Duels produced a massive boost in sales. From that point on you see fairly significant changes at a much higher rate: new cards in supplemental products starting in Planechase 2012, Masters sets and a complete revamp of the creative team in 2013, Metamorphosis in 2015, Metamorphosis 2 and Play Design in 2017, etc. He's saying this every year because they are making major changes every year.



And made a shitload of money. I feel like it's pretty important to contextualize this: yes, a shift in their development process to accommodate further creative direction plus a complete change in both set structures and format definitions did completely derail their already tenuous pipeline for producing functional competitive formats, but (for reasons mostly related to entirely different parts of these changes) also massively increased their audience and engagement.

I note this largely because most of the changes from that window aren't actually getting rolled back: the tight creative integration is staying exactly the same, for example, and the solution they're trying instead is what they should've done years ago, to create a separate team whose actual job it is to make competitive formats balanced, functional, and enjoyable to play.

The point is that I no longer care about Maro's "big announcement" because he always has "big announcments" none of which I have any recollection of benefiting the game.
 
Ya, but the idea that cosplayers and creatively engaged players are going to be really excited to see "face cards X Y and Z" played at the PT T8 was just a monstrously misguided mistake in completely not understanding what these players actually value.

Oh yeah, I agree on that entirely. I think this was a compound error of having new leadership in Creative (this got rolling right after Brady was fired) plus being one change getting made in a mix of others plus (this is the big one for me) having zero oversight for competitive formats outside of what was essentially a side-effect of their normal design process, meaning there wasn't even a person whose job it was to look at Emrakul 2 and go "WTF." The first two are naturally resolving themselves over time but I think Play Design is really going to be the biggest factor avoiding this kind of cockup in the future.

The point is that I no longer care about Maro's "big announcement" because he always has "big announcments" none of which I have any recollection of benefiting the game.

I mean, okay?
 

red13th

Member
oooh nice Scryfall already has the HD Hour of Devastation scans that look like real cards. I love that site.

EDIT: looks like some cards are still low res? weird.
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I mean I assumed you yourself meant something besides "I don't care about this information" with your original post that I replied to and that was clearly a mistake, so.
So now you're saying either way I meant it, it's stupid and you don't care.

I'll guess take my leave and post elsewhere.
 
hilariously all you need to break mairsil is
47.jpg
target himself
 

Glix

Member
mairsil's restriction on his activated abilities is part of his static ability granting him the abilities not the abilities itself. Because of that with quicksilver elementals ability mairsil can grant himself all his abilities without restriction

Ahhh, so by "break him" you are talking about breaking the "once per turn"?
 
Ixalan has a card named Walk the Plank. Probably a common black kill spell.
Awesome.

lmao what are you smoking cavern of souls in each deck
To be fair though, I think that CoS should have been reprinted already in a Standard set. From what I understood it was designed as such to be pretty neutral as to the set it showed up in. Maybe future Core sets could address this.

Maro says this literally every year now.
It does seem like that. I think it's just because he's the super happy go lucky spokesman.
 

Justin

Member
It does seem like that. I think it's just because he's the super happy go lucky spokesman.

I wonder if that is part of his official duties or if management just figures it easier to let him continue than making him dial it back.
 
Oh yeah, I agree on that entirely. I think this was a compound error of having new leadership in Creative (this got rolling right after Brady was fired) plus being one change getting made in a mix of others plus (this is the big one for me) having zero oversight for competitive formats outside of what was essentially a side-effect of their normal design process, meaning there wasn't even a person whose job it was to look at Emrakul 2 and go "WTF." The first two are naturally resolving themselves over time but I think Play Design is really going to be the biggest factor avoiding this kind of cockup in the future.



I mean, okay?
Wait, I thought development was looking at standard too. Are you saying development only really balanced around limited?
 
Wait, I thought development was looking at standard too. Are you saying development only really balanced around limited?
They do test Standard heavily, but rotation changes messed them up a lot. And even disregarding that, they somehow missed Copycat, so clearly they haven't been testing well enough.
 

Santiako

Member
Protip: Troubled Healer (white common from Prophecy) is completely broken and should be splashed if you open one. It's worse under the current rules (it was ABSURD with damage stacking), but still a complete nightmare to play against

Hey thank you for this! I went 3-0-1 and the Healer was the MVP, insane card that I would've probably dismissed.
 

Justin

Member
They do test Standard heavily, but rotation changes messed them up a lot. And even disregarding that, they somehow missed Copycat, so clearly they haven't been testing well enough.

MaRo said on his podcast today that while they had the Future Future League working on competitive balance no one was actually assigned that position. It was an extra duty that people help out with as their time permitted.
 
To be fair though, I think that CoS should have been reprinted already in a Standard set.

Oh, sure, definitely. It's silly that it got to the point it did and WotC still need to figure out a way to bring it further down as mythic in MM3 obviously was kind of absurd. Given its actual status though the idea of reprinting it in a $35 precon is hilarious.

Wait, I thought development was looking at standard too. Are you saying development only really balanced around limited?

Development always looked at Standard, but their process was fundamentally incapable of balancing it at the necessary level. There was always an ongoing playtest process through the "Future Future League," which played with cards intended to represent a Standard environment containing the sets currently in development, and this did get them some amount of useful balance information, but this process was somewhat informal and always working with a moving target: the set files were all changing in a variety of ways all the time, and FFL would just test whatever snapshot happened to be present at any given time. It was also just whatever decks individual designers/developers thought might be viable as of their last look at the files, and it was typically just one day a week. As a result, the implications of late changes, or of two cards changing independently that ultimately interacted with each other, would be missed all the time.

Play Design exists purely to balance competitive formats. They have access to the whole set, discuss it as a group, build a full slate of playtest decks together, watch changes to the file to identify stuff specifically to retest, and just have time to test in far more depth just by being an entire 10-ish-person team dedicated to just this purpose. As a result they look a lot more like a real PT team trying to break an upcoming Standard do and should be able to catch a lot more issues (and especially, warn Design/Dev off from a bunch of things that have a high probability of causing problems) in advance.
 

bigkrev

Member
Hey thank you for this! I went 3-0-1 and the Healer was the MVP, insane card that I would've probably dismissed.

I miss complete game warping on-board tricks at COMMON

I'm kind of sad Masques block is the only post Mirage block that you can't properly draft on MTGO (they made it one giant mixed set)
 

Violet_0

Banned
Thanks everyone. I'll download Magic Duels to familiarize myself tonight. I've never heard of booster drafting and that sounds really exciting for when I know the game better. I'll definitely make sure I attend a pre-release event.

How important are older sets of cards? I don't entirely understand the block system. Are Ixalan cards all I'll need to play for the next few years?

Magic: The Gathering formats

the most important ones:
Standard - the most recent three or four blocks, the older blocks rotate out when a new block is released
Modern - every set released after 8th Edition
Legacy & Vintage - don't even think about it
Limited - Booster Drafts and Sealed
Commander - pick any legendary creature as your commander and build a 100-card deck around their color identity, playing no more than one of each card. A casual format that is just as popular as the competitive formats, all the discussion you see in this thread right now is about the new 2017 pre-built Commander decks
 
wotc said:
Three eminence abilities are triggered abilities. That creature must be on the battlefield or in the command zone as the trigger event occurs and also as the triggered ability resolves. If the creature is in an appropriate zone as the trigger event occurs but leaves that zone, the ability won't do anything as it resolves.
Notably, if your commander is on the battlefield and its eminence ability triggers, but it's put into the command zone before that ability resolves, that ability won't do anything as it resolves. This is because an object that changes zones is considered a new object.
that's not gonna confuse people at all...
 

Card Boy

Banned
Magic: The Gathering formats

the most important ones:
Standard - the most recent three or for blocks, the older blocks rotate out when a new block is released
Modern - every set released after 8th Edition
Legacy & Vintage - don't even think about it
Limited - Booster Drafts and Sealed
Commander - pick any legendary creature as your commander and build a 100-card deck around their color identity, playing no more than one of each card. A casual format that is just as popluar as the competitive formats, all the discussion you see in this thread right now are about the new 2017 pre-built Commander decks

Pauper is worth looking at if you want to get into Magic on the cheap. You can literally build $5 competitive decks. It's at least more popular than Legacy and Vintage (for obvious financial reasons).

Commander is has jumped in popularity in the past couple of years.
 

Violet_0

Banned
Pauper is worth looking at if you want to get into Magic on the cheap. You can literally build $5 competitive decks. It's at least more popular than Legacy and Vintage (for obvious financial reasons).

Commander is has jumped in popularity in the past couple of years.
right, though honestly I've never seen anyone play pauper in paper. I rarely go to game stores, though
Why are mommy and daddy fighting its scary

21jnyqh.png
 
I mean, it's not ideal but it's also a natural outgrowth of the rules for triggered abilities. Not much way around it without completely changing the designs.

sure but it's these sort of rulings that lead to gotcha moments where people have to discuss first for some time then someone looks it up and you just wasted 3 minutes
 
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