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Magic: the Gathering |OT11| Amonkhet - Have you ever had decks with a Pharaoh?

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ultron87

Member
Duels noooooooooooooooooo. I honestly play it every day. It had some problems, but it was a really good way to just play some Magic and it also had an incredibly reasonable Free to Play model where getting a full set of cards wasn't that difficult.

Damn it.
 

Tunoku

Member
I've played Standard for about 18 months now, and during these 18 months three of my Standard decks got banned. It's the right decision, but I think I might stop playing Standard for a while. I'm really good at picking the best deck I guess, but not into it when it gets banned all the time. Maybe I should just stick to playing crappy control decks so I'm on the safe side.
 
Kaladesh was my first foray into standard in almost 25 years of magic play. Boy did I pick the wrong time to jump into this shit.

Black green delirium emrakul was super fun though. Surprised they didn't unban Emrakul, but...whatevs. The landscape is torched in every direction.
 

Tunoku

Member
I played RG Marvel last fall. Banned.
I played 4 Color Saheeli this year. Banned.
I played Temur Marvel this season. Banned.

So, if you wanna know which deck gets banned next season, just ask me.

Joking aside, this is the right move from them, even if I can't help to admit that it hurts a bit getting your deck banned three seasons in a row. I should just stick to playing jankier decks and not the best most broken thing. But I love that kind of deck so much!

EDIT: Well this post is kind of a repeat, sorry. My browser broke for a sec so I thought my post didn't make it!
 
What was the point in hyping the digital next announcement when they announced absolutely nothing other than they are ending development on duels?

In fairness, they seemed to think this announcement was so slight that they also described the B&R list getting a day to itself.

Duels noooooooooooooooooo. I honestly play it every day. It had some problems, but it was a really good way to just play some Magic and it also had an incredibly reasonable Free to Play model where getting a full set of cards wasn't that difficult.

It's difficult to be certain how much of the MTGO model MDN is going to replace, but I feel 99% confident it'll have a Hearthstone-style F2P model attached.

They did ban stupid Marvel. WotC is pulling no punches in trying to salvage the mess that is Standard.

This is what I said about breaking the seal earlier. People talk about ban fatigue, but actually once people already feel like the environment is screwed up by bans you really have to just push through and ban everything awful as it comes up until you can rotate the relevant blocks altogether.
 

DrArchon

Member
Christ, they really fucked standard up. 5 cards banned... it's unthinkable that it got to this point.

Wonder what deck will take the new top spot. I'm betting Mardu goes back to being the best and people go back to calling for Gideon to eat a ban as well.
 

Violet_0

Banned
I only played Duels semi-regularly and stopped a while ago, as it was clear to me that they're going to discontinue it in favor of Magic Digital Next. I'm not going to miss it much

UR control, vehicles and BG stuff are gonna be the decks to be beat - until Hour comes out, anyway
 

Tunoku

Member
I'm probably gonna sleeve up Temur Energy this weekend. Ooooooor, I could not unsleeve my Ulamogs and replace Marvel with this bad boy:

en_FlqyaQnno7.png

It's bad, but so, so good.
 

ultron87

Member
It's difficult to be certain how much of the MTGO model MDN is going to replace, but I feel 99% confident it'll have a Hearthstone-style F2P model attached.

Yeah, I agree. They have to know that that is what digital card games are now. They can't make another product where the only way to progress your collection is to pay money for tournament entries.
 
The amount of shit Development must be getting right now from upper management. "What the fuck do you mean you've had to ban 5 cards in under a year? "
 

DrArchon

Member
The amount of shit Development must be getting right now from upper management. "What the fuck do you mean you've had to ban 5 cards in under a year? "

Didn't development get reamed out by the higher-ups either during or after Urza block? I'm shocked that it's reached a point where the balance of game can be compared to Urza block, but here we are.
 
Didn't development get reamed out by the higher-ups either during or after Urza block? I'm shocked that it's reached a point where the balance of game can be compared to Urza block, but here we are.

I think the difference is that Urza's block literally almost killed the game it was so unbalanced. This recent stuff is just futzing with standard. Given, the game was a lot smaller back then. The game is so large now it's hard to actually get close to killing it without a seismic change.
 

Adaren

Member
Duels noooooooooooooooooo. I honestly play it every day. It had some problems, but it was a really good way to just play some Magic and it also had an incredibly reasonable Free to Play model where getting a full set of cards wasn't that difficult.

Damn it.

Same. :(

I would have loved some sort of way to transfer my Duels collection to MDN, though I doubt that the Suels user base is large enough to warrant that. They'll probably just opt to have everyone start clean with MDN.

RIP Duels.
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Y'all were hype af for kaladesh as well. That goddamn E mechanic and shit.
That's because Maro said it was his best design. Except it was busted in a million different ways.

They are correct though. Temur Energy is good and Bristling Hydra is like one of the best creatures in Standard now.
 

y2dvd

Member
First Marvel:Infinite looks like crap. Then Marvel gets banned. Marvel losing!

Eh I had already switched over to UR control anyways. My foil Aether Marvel is sad though.
 

G.ZZZ

Member
Except it wasn't even a good design. Energy is a shitty parasitic one-set mechanic and vehicles are just another form of equipments. And nothing was actually too good anywhere, it's just that answers were so neutered this standard that it got to this point. Looter scooter is the only card that would have been probably too good in a lot of other standards, but banned? Dunno, i can't think of another standard that would have been banned in.
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Magic: the Gathering - Hour of Devastation |OT| Thread Subtitle is banned.
 

Violet_0

Banned
Except it wasn't even a good design. Energy is a shitty parasitic one-set mechanic and vehicles are just another form of equipments. And nothing was actually too good anywhere, it's just that answers were so neutered this standard that it got to this point. Looter scooter is the only card that would have been probably too good in a lot of other standards, but banned? Dunno, i can't think of another standard that would have been banned in.
Smug Copter is pretty crazy. It's a cheaper colorless Mantis Rider that dodges sorcery speed removals that also loots
 

bigkrev

Member
While a lot of the issues with Kaladesh/standard as whole rest on the heads of development and not design (not costing Vehicles properly, pushing storyline cards, intentionally lowering quality of answer cards), it is kind of a poor design of a set. Energy is the ultimate parastic mechanic, which is saved by the fact that it's powerful in limited and constructed. The world itself was cool, but a lot of the choices- White Dwarfs, Gremlins instead of Goblins, teasing that the world was Indian themed but then it really wasn't- were bad and easily could have been avoided.
 

Xis

Member
Cancelling Magic Duels is really surprising to me. I thought Duels was part of the reason Magic exploded in popularity a few years ago. It served as a cheap (now free) way to teach new players the game.
 

Maledict

Member
I don't think a mechanic being 'parasitic' is inherently bad. In fact, I'd say a parasitic mechanic can be really strong and fun - not everything should be able to go into every deck and block. I also think they went out of their way to make energy cards non parasitic - a large amount of them both give and use energy. Overall I like energy, I just think a couple of cards were balanced badly.

Now, the entire ingest / process cycle from Battle for Zendikar - that's a terrible parasitic mechanic that just shouldn't exist.
 
I don't think a mechanic being 'parasitic' is inherently bad. In fact, I'd say a parasitic mechanic can be really strong and fun - not everything should be able to go into every deck and block. I also think they went out of their way to make energy cards non parasitic - a large amount of them both give and use energy. Overall I like energy, I just think a couple of cards were balanced badly.

Now, the entire ingest / process cycle from Battle for Zendikar - that's a terrible parasitic mechanic that just shouldn't exist.
too many cards scale way too good. I can take out gearhulks with harnessed lightning playing nothing but glimmers and aether hubs for energy generation.

Also process actually is relevant in modern through 1 or 2 cards.
 

bigkrev

Member
Cancelling Magic Duels is really surprising to me. I thought Duels was part of the reason Magic exploded in popularity a few years ago. It served as a cheap (now free) way to teach new players the game.

The fact that it didn't ever come to the most popular console this gen was always completely insane to me, as the first Duel of the Planeswalkers was the reason I started playing Magic again. Maybe they had some metric that told them that there weren't as many people coming to the game because of it? Maybe Duels was too feature rich and those newcomers weren't ever converting to paper players?

Duels 1 did a great job of teaching/refreshing rules, had enough content to justify it's price, but really left me wanting for more. While I haven't played the most recent version, it sounds like that can be your only Magic outlet, and you could be satisfied.
 
Guys, Energy is not Parasitic. Per WotC own words, Parasitic Means that the card does nothing without other similar cards(IE Kamigawa's Splice mechanic). Every energy card makes you energy that can be used for any energy usage, and most make enough energy on ETb for activation.

You can play cards like Voltaic Brawler without going whole hog on Energy. Hell, you can even do that with Dynavolt Tower(It's an infinite combo in an EDH deck I have),or Marvel, or any other energy cards. You can't do it with actual parasitic mechanics(IE Ingest/Process, which are both fucking useless without each other)
 
Y'all were hype af for kaladesh as well. That goddamn E mechanic and shit.

Putting aside Marvel (which is just an idiotic design top to bottom in retrospect) Energy is the best part of Kaladesh block!

Wonder what deck will take the new top spot. I'm betting Mardu goes back to being the best and people go back to calling for Gideon to eat a ban as well.

There's only one other chance for him to get banned before he naturally rotates and that's about four weeks beforehand, so I don't think anyone is seriously gonna call for this at this point. Marvel was more important because it was just gonna get even worse once BFZ/SOI rotated out.

Yeah, I agree. They have to know that that is what digital card games are now. They can't make another product where the only way to progress your collection is to pay money for tournament entries.

Their entire MDN initiative has been about finally taking this seriously. They hired a videogame industry person who worked for years on a F2P title to run their new digital department and staffed it with actual industry developers (instead of fans who will work on the cheap.) The semi-leaked preview shots showed off stuff like card backs (or "sleeves"), spell effects, etc.

The thing about MTGO is that it's fundamentally based on an economic structure that made sense for a game launching way ahead of the curve on digital products. At the time there was a serious question of whether anyone would pay money for digital-only online stuff (which seems absolutely laughable now) and so redemption was built in at a core level as an answer to that -- which in turn meant the model had to be as much like the paper one as possible. Starting over now you can build a game around the economies that actually make sense online, not really degrade your paper business, and expand the market.

The amount of shit Development must be getting right now from upper management. "What the fuck do you mean you've had to ban 5 cards in under a year? "

"Upper management" is Aaron Forsythe (who has been to this rodeo twice before), then above him Chris Cocks (who's worked in games and is a long-time player), and then above him the mysterious masters at Hasbro (who don't give a shit about tournament issues unless they materially affect the business, which WotC has spent the last decade or so increasingly reducing the possibility of.)

Like people said, R&D got chewed out for Urza's block because they were still a tiny company who could face an existential threat if Magic tanked, they'd never banned cards in Standard so nobody knew how bad the actual impact would be, and the game was small and new enough that even more casual players were likely to play "Standard" rules. These days they have a diversified portfolio and even an extraordinarily bad Standard (which this has unquestionably been!) just doesn't move the needle much in the big picture.
 

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I'm not prepared to say Standard will be bad now that all of the cancerous shit is banned.
 

Justin

Member
Cancelling Magic Duels is really surprising to me. I thought Duels was part of the reason Magic exploded in popularity a few years ago. It served as a cheap (now free) way to teach new players the game.

It was the whole reason I got into magic two months ago. I found it on the ios shop, decided to run through the tutorial. Enjoyed the game. Went to try MTGO (lol) then went to the Amonkhet pre-release as my first ever time playing in person. Now I have gone to my LGS every Friday since to do drafts.
 
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