[QUOTE="God's Beard!";186628967]They should have used the Wastes mechanic in BFZ instead of Devoid. Gets the confusion out of the way earlier, and means you don't have to have weird colored creatures that are actually colorless nonsense. That way you can also power up some of the Eldrazi cards since <> is harder to cast than (1).
Nettle Drone 1<>R
T: Nettle Drone deals 1 damage to target creature or player.
Whenever you cast a spell with <> in its mana cost, untap Nettle Drone.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE="God's Beard!";186629903]Then make it cost <> instead of G, or just bring back Tribal to make it all nice and easy for God's sake. If you can't use Tribal for the Ally vs Eldrazi set then I don't know when you can.[/QUOTE]
The flavour makes it sound like Jace is having a tough time, dunno if that's better. Counters used to have great art once.
I wonder during Kamigawa did they ever consider making legendary instants? Could made it so that no 2 copies of a legendary instant can be on the stack at once.
But it isn't meaningless. Mechanically, there are many cards in BfZ that care about colorless things. More importantly, it acts as a flavor indicator for a connection to the Eldrazi. If the rumors are true that Emrakul will be invading Innistrad in SOI, then I expect that the latter will be more relevant.
And should I take the avatar change to mean anything, or is it just some avatar bet?
I think it succeeds in Limited where it does matter quite a bit. It, especially with the card frame, sets up the division between the Eldrazi and Zendikar stuff reasonably well. Sure, it'd be the same thing if it everything just had the Eldrazi sub type instead, but hey they don't like Tribal anymore.
I think if all goes well I should get to play my cube twice this thanksgiving week. Happening tomorrow for sure it looks like, with a chance of it happening Thursday night (4 player, going to try doing a 4 player grid draft of it)
Highlights so far- wants Squirrels back, thinks BFZ is definitely over the line complexity-wise, Devoid is definitely an issue (colored artifacts are a big mental block for people)
But it isn't meaningless. Mechanically, there are many cards in BfZ that care about colorless things. More importantly, it acts as a flavor indicator for a connection to the Eldrazi. If the rumors are true that Emrakul will be invading Innistrad in SOI, then I expect that the latter will be more relevant.
And should I take the avatar change to mean anything, or is it just some avatar bet?
I lost a bet whether Sheamus O'Shaunessy would win the title at WWE Survivor Series.
The only reason its actually relevant is making Ultimate Price vaguely worse even though what actually makes Ultimate Price worse is Mantis Rider and Siege Rhino being the best cards. Being just flavor but simultaneously confusing sucks.
Highlights so far- wants Squirrels back, thinks BFZ is definitely over the line complexity-wise, Devoid is definitely an issue (colored artifacts are a big mental block for people)
I am still surprised people are saying BFZ is too complex. I mean, I have issues with the set but complexity is not one of them. I guess Devoid being a bit confusing and Eldrazi Scions being a smoother thing to get used to if you played ROE are issues? But like, Allies and Awaken are not particularly difficult to understand
I am still surprised people are saying BFZ is too complex. I mean, I have issues with the set but complexity is not one of them. I guess Devoid being a bit confusing and Eldrazi Scions being a smoother thing to get used to if you played ROE are issues? But like, Allies and Awaken are not particularly difficult to understand
The chain of logic makes sense
"We want to use exiled cards as a resource, and we know hard thresholds like...Threshold are swingy"
"We don't want to actually make the RFTFGF zone, so..."
"So they go from exile to the graveyard"
The problem is that they should have questioned if what they wanted to do had a high enough benefit to bother with that. And man...I think processing totally could have, but it didn't really
The chain of logic makes sense
"We want to use exiled cards as a resource, and we know hard thresholds like...Threshold are swingy"
"We don't want to actually make the RFTFGF zone, so..."
"So they go from exile to the graveyard"
The problem is that they should have questioned if what they wanted to do had a high enough benefit to bother with that. And man...I think processing totally could have, but it didn't really
Processing works fine, in my opinion. I have no real issue with how it works mechanically, it just isn't supported as well in the limited environment as I think they think it is.
Processing works fine, in my opinion. I have no real issue with how it works mechanically, it just isn't supported as well in the limited environment as I think they think it is.
I am still surprised people are saying BFZ is too complex. I mean, I have issues with the set but complexity is not one of them. I guess Devoid being a bit confusing and Eldrazi Scions being a smoother thing to get used to if you played ROE are issues? But like, Allies and Awaken are not particularly difficult to understand
There's way, way, way, way too much half-baked stuff going on.
Allies, Exile-matters, Ingest, Devoid, Giant Eldrazi, Sac themes, landfall, basic landfall, converge, Awaken. And then you have cards that cross polinate like a Converge Ally.
The Allies play badly, they made a huge mistake by making most of them Stonework Pumas.
I'm pretty sure MaRo specifically brought up turning exiled things face down as a potential way to implement processing that they looked into in either an article or Blogatog, but they didn't like it. I think the issue is that keeping track of whether exiled things are face up or face down is just something people don't expect to have to keep track of, just like graveyard order, so they prefer not to reference that. Doing it that way would produce an additional pile of cards anyway, which is part of the issue with creating an additional zone.
It feels so disjointed because they went heavy on segmenting the draft archetypes. They didn't make Shadow Glider an ally because they wanted that to be best in Blue/White and not get snapped up by the ally decks. Only some of the Eldrazi have ingest because they want to make sure some are available for the Blue Black deck but leave others that just have devoid for the Blue Red and Red Black decks. But then it gets confusing because one of the straight up best cards for Red Black (Vile Aggregate) has Ingest and you're just like whaaat?
I always appreciate how Forsythe is, like... a real person, lol. Rosewater's answers on things like "let's do Kamigawa again!" are so on-message and absolutist that it's nice to someone be frank and say "yeah that's actually a very good idea, we just can't sell it business-wise." Some real serious self-awareness there about why sequels are so problematic too -- curious to see if we see anything reflected in SOI to deal with some of the issues we have in BFZ.
I feel like the Allies are still on the more successful side of the mechanics in the set. The biggest problem with them is the visibility (skipping the watermark was an enormous mistake), I don't think the Rally structure is a huge issue in comparison.
You absolutely can't look at return to other planes and sets as "This would be great to revisit old stuff and make it better" because you have to figure out the cost to try to hype up the stuff. Nostalgia sells itself, while hatred for things old and ancient and terrible (Homelands) would be hard to overcome. You'd basically have to make an entirely new set that just basically shits all over the original cards, power-wise. I think they'll eventually go back to Ulgrotha; it will just take many many years so players can forget about Homelands (which I'm not sure they can, if ever). The problem being there's always a list of "BEST/WORST X" and Homelands always takes the Worst spot.
And oh I love the new Allies mixed with old Allies in my Modern Allies deck. I still need to tweak it as it did kinda poorly at my FNM Modern tourney.
I love the archetype so much I'm eager to see what comes out of OGW.
It's one of those fake problems that MaRo rings his hands about because none of the Ingest cards are particularly good so you're only really worrying about it in BFZ/OGW limited.
Scars of Mirrodin is easily the best revisit they've done so far, and a good block overall. RTR was just meh, and I'm down on BFZ so...that's not a great trend
I hesitate to blame too much on the contracted design schedule since I think there are some fundamental conceptual issues with the set regardless of the amount of time they have but the worry about Allies being too parasitic is almost certainly a result of them realizing they didn't have time to develop a format that included them in such a form.
Minor random opinion: I kind of hate cards that say ______ you control have +x/+y and effect themselves. I'd rather they had the word "other" and just had the x/y incorporated into their base stats. On the other hand, ______ you control have haste (or other keyword) don't bother me when they effect themselves.
Minor random opinion: I kind of hate cards that say ______ you control have +x/+y and effect themselves. I'd rather they had the word "other" and just had the x/y incorporated into their base stats. On the other hand, ______ you control have haste (or other keyword) don't bother me when they effect themselves.
Part of that was because Avacyn's first card came out before indestructible was keyworded. But after they made it into a keyword, it went into her ability box.
It's either SOM or RTR depending on your criteria. SOM's the best set/block of all the options, though many of its best parts are new elements unique to the return and it falls down on some fundamental aspects of being a return set by virtue of attempting to steer clear of MIR's broken qualities. RTR has an awful set in DGM, but if you take just the first two sets it's a competent revisit that introduces a number of good new mechanics and cards and had at least one (RTRx3) really good limited environment.
Coldsnap is a really bad set, but it's a really bad set by virtue of trying to do a dumb thing (make a standalone-draftable small set) in service of revisiting a terrible in retrospect block (Ice Age.) Inasmuch as it was janky and weird and full of gartbagey cards that was a pretty accurate recreation of the Ice Age experience. Similarly, the core problem with BFZ was trying to return to two different things at once -- ZEN (which they actually did a pretty solid job of) and ROE (which they fucked up on a very conceptual level.)
I hesitate to blame too much on the contracted design schedule since I think there are some fundamental conceptual issues with the set regardless of the amount of time they have
Conceptual problems with Magic sets are almost always the result of time issues, though. A lot of the best blocks have a backstory like "we had this tough problem, but then someone had a great idea of how to crack it early on and we never looked back!" while a lot of the problematic blocks have a backstory like "we had this tough problem, and didn't hit on a solution until the last minute." Because they have a completely inflexible schedule, a set that wastes 3+ months of design before anyone figures out the right approach to take just can't ever make that back up, and the development team winds up patching holes when they should be assembling a fun limited/Standard environment; BFZ had that exact problem plus made it worse with the 3 sets -> 2 sets switch.
I call Onslaught the creative nadir of Magic for a reason. It's the period where they had a top-down corporate requirement to pursue "magepunk" (i.e. ludicrous edgy nonsense designed to appeal to twelve-year-olds), the period of the "people from under the white sun" approach to setting design where every plane had exactly five human and five humanoid races that were all tediously on-color, and the period where they were obsessively pursuing foolish-in-retrospect "ideas" like eliminating merfolk and sea creatures because "lol how would they fight on the land??!!" The terrible Mirari-mutation design in Onslaught block, where each of the eight tribes transformed into some kind of bizarre and hideous thing over the course of the three sets, is really just a manifestation of all those bad ideas shoved into one place.
You absolutely can't look at return to other planes and sets as "This would be great to revisit old stuff and make it better" because you have to figure out the cost to try to hype up the stuff. Nostalgia sells itself, while hatred for things old and ancient and terrible (Homelands) would be hard to overcome. You'd basically have to make an entirely new set that just basically shits all over the original cards, power-wise. I think they'll eventually go back to Ulgrotha; it will just take many many years so players can forget about Homelands (which I'm not sure they can, if ever). The problem being there's always a list of "BEST/WORST X" and Homelands always takes the Worst spot.
And oh I love the new Allies mixed with old Allies in my Modern Allies deck. I still need to tweak it as it did kinda poorly at my FNM Modern tourney.
I love the archetype so much I'm eager to see what comes out of OGW.
They have to make an entirely new set, regardless of the quality of the original set. It's why I'm not any more excited about the return to Innistrad, despite it being my favorite set (and probably plane as well) of all time. Nothing is guaranteed on the card quality front, just like this return or the return to Ravnica or the return to Mirrodin. If anything, their record with returns- and the mentality it seems to make them bring- has me LESS excited than I'd feel if they were tackling a brand new set or trying to come at a plane that failed from a new angle. At least there they wouldn't be trying to get lightning to strike twice in a similar way.
