This is deliberately made to stop people from doing that I think. Its not ok in competitive.
You orient them that way so you dont have to search through your gy to determine what spells you can cast at any given point. Its a timesaver.
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Magic: the Gathering |OT10| Aether Revolt - That shit that make your Soul Burn slow
- Thread starter SigmasonicX
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You orient them that way so you dont have to search through your gy to determine what spells you can cast at any given point. Its a timesaver.
Joe Molotov
Member
What is the correct thing to do with your exiled cards?
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
They need to be in a different pile because they aren't in the same zone. I put them sideways in a different pile. Usually my GY is below my library and my Exile pile is sideways to the left of the library.
Finally got my first 2 boxes of MM17. It was loaded!
Foil Blood Moon
Foil Marsh Flats
Foil Serum Visions
Foil Path
2x Marsh Flats
Liliana
Snapcaster Voice
Scalding Tarn
Damnation
Cavern of Souls
Deaths Shadow
Phantasmal Image
Basillisk Collar
Bonfire
Goblin Guide
Venser
Domri Rade
Have another 2 boxes waiting for me at home!!
Foil Blood Moon
Foil Marsh Flats
Foil Serum Visions
Foil Path
2x Marsh Flats
Liliana
Snapcaster Voice
Scalding Tarn
Damnation
Cavern of Souls
Deaths Shadow
Phantasmal Image
Basillisk Collar
Bonfire
Goblin Guide
Venser
Domri Rade
Have another 2 boxes waiting for me at home!!
charlequin
Banned
My guess (and we'll see when we get the inevtiable article discussing the design here) is that they started out saying they wouldn't use DFCs for this, then they specified that the layout had to make it clear that they were different from both regular spells and split cards, and then at that point the utility of the sideways graveyard display was either the impetus for or the deciding vote for the final layout.
If this mechanic helps eliminate that habit then that's just an extra benefit IMO.
Big Icarus
Member
One thing that this new mechanic almost ensures: that we will not see any substantial graveyard hate in yet another expansion.
I would hope that maybe in Hour of Devastation we might start to see the seeds of them shifting the pendulum over to the side of more powerful answers. I think that from a flavor perspective that set would be a great place to get a five card cycle that gives each color a distinctive way to deal with planeswalkers.
I would hope that maybe in Hour of Devastation we might start to see the seeds of them shifting the pendulum over to the side of more powerful answers. I think that from a flavor perspective that set would be a great place to get a five card cycle that gives each color a distinctive way to deal with planeswalkers.
charlequin
Banned
Nah. "There's a method to our madness" is much more likely to mean they pulled back hate to Amonkhet than that they decided to just completely avoid any graveyard safety valves for two simultaneous blocks with significant graveyard mechanics, I think.
Mild GY theme probably.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
"There's a method to our madness" doesn't mean anything, which is why people think MaRo's being a twit when he says it. There's a method to the madness that created the current Standard environment. That doesn't actually have any impact on whether any of those methods were good ideas.
They would have to have failed colossally to not have graveyard hate in Amonkhet with Consequences cards because its functionally different from something like Delirium. Delirium is a mechanic where the cards in the graveyard don't actively give you additional value beyond increasing delirium count. When a creature dies, it stays dead unless something actively returns it (Scrapheap Scrounger does but its a one-off card and not a block mechanic). Consequences is a mechanic where cards actively provide you with additional value in the graveyard because the part of the card that came from your hand is only half of what the card does.
That said, I would be more surprised to see something like Rest in Peace and less surprised to see something that works more like Grafdigger's Cage (not specifically that card), because Cage doesn't hate on delirium, it just prevents you from getting added value out of things that can be used from the yard.
They would have to have failed colossally to not have graveyard hate in Amonkhet with Consequences cards because its functionally different from something like Delirium. Delirium is a mechanic where the cards in the graveyard don't actively give you additional value beyond increasing delirium count. When a creature dies, it stays dead unless something actively returns it (Scrapheap Scrounger does but its a one-off card and not a block mechanic). Consequences is a mechanic where cards actively provide you with additional value in the graveyard because the part of the card that came from your hand is only half of what the card does.
That said, I would be more surprised to see something like Rest in Peace and less surprised to see something that works more like Grafdigger's Cage (not specifically that card), because Cage doesn't hate on delirium, it just prevents you from getting added value out of things that can be used from the yard.
charlequin
Banned
To be clear, I was one of the people saying he was a dope for trying to answer that question and trying to explain why it was a bad call, and I definitely agree they fucked up real bad. This is just about tea-leaf reading. When Rosewater says that, he means there's something surprising in a future set that will recontextualize it, and at least in his designer mind "justify" it. Graveyard hate as part of a theme two blocks later would match that idea, just continuing to have absolutely nothing would not.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
The problem is that there's a "justification" for every decision they made, but you justify anything under a specific lens. If they intentionally wanted to create a standard dominated by shit like Gideon, Ally of Zendikar and pushed vehicles, they did their jobs.
charlequin
Banned
I don't think you're talking about the same thing I'm talking about.
How would you prefer to represent exiled cards? I've never actually seen it done any other way that I can recall.
charlequin
Banned
Separate pile turned sideways as a whole and placed apart from the graveyard, usually.
This is usually how it is best to do it. As someone that puts the cards in the graveyard sideways, what do you do with cards exiled that weren't in the graveyard, just place them on top and exiled? Do that if you have to exile something face down as well?
Just seems really weird to do that for anything other than cards already in the graveyard.
Big Icarus
Member
I agree with this100%. I typically disregard any of Maro's obtuse hinting as being meaningless attempts at giving the fanbase that he interacts with small, inconsequential bread crumbs just to placate them a little.
I'd expect neither. I'd imagine by now we are more than overdue for a way to interact with delirium. If the artifact block featuring the smallest graveyard play in black and red wasn't where they allotted themselves space to print cards that interact with the previous block's graveyard mechanics; then it probably just hadn't occurred to them to actually print these kinds of cards.
Whoo. I narrowly dodged that. I bought my set on Saturday, and was worried if I jumped the gun before it dropped further.
divisionbyzorro
Member
Scrabbling Claws would be an on theme reprint.
Hope out is better than the second box I just opened up, super feel bad box.
Foil Cruel Ultimatum
Arid Mesa
Blood Moon
Tons of garbage. 2 Might of Old Krosa, 2 Serum Visions, 1 IoK, 1 Path to Exile.
2 Mythics, Sphinx Rev and Bonfire. Only the one Fetch. Feels super bad.
Edit: Path to Exile was the 3rd most expensive card opened. Don't remember opening a box this bad since Avacyn Restored.
Finished opening it. Not bad; not great, but not bad at all. Highlights were:
Damnation
Death's Shadow
Craterhoof Behemoth
Linvala, Keeper of Silence (man, this set did a number on her price)
Verdant Catacombs
Misty Rainforest
Abrupt Decay
Resto Angel
2x Might of Old Krosa
1 IoK
1 Foil IoK
1 Foil Phantasmal Image
Priced out the value of all the rares and notable uncommons using the lowest available near mint value on TCGPlayer and my box comes in to about $170 in value. Assuming this is the low point for some of these cards for a while, I'm satisfied with indulging a bit of pack opening on a $190 box.
Damnation
Death's Shadow
Craterhoof Behemoth
Linvala, Keeper of Silence (man, this set did a number on her price)
Verdant Catacombs
Misty Rainforest
Abrupt Decay
Resto Angel
2x Might of Old Krosa
1 IoK
1 Foil IoK
1 Foil Phantasmal Image
Priced out the value of all the rares and notable uncommons using the lowest available near mint value on TCGPlayer and my box comes in to about $170 in value. Assuming this is the low point for some of these cards for a while, I'm satisfied with indulging a bit of pack opening on a $190 box.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I bought a single pack today. No commons or uncommons of note. Got a Thragtusk and a foil Boros Reckoner. I celebrated by partying like it was 2013.
I was thinking the same thing. Was going to get a playset if they went down to $30-$35, but I don't even have a deck I want to play them in. Guess it will remain the only fetch I don't have at least a playset of.
you could argue it is if you add vintage, legacy and commander
I'm holding out for Damnation to hit $15. The thing sees marginal play in modern and probably has most of it's demand from EDH, I'd wager.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
They all see pretty similar level of play in EDH but Legacy and Vintage are like barely a blip.
Speakign of Tarn, anyone wanna trade a Tarn and a Misty for a Tarmogoyf? =D
Kamigawa works better as a Japanesque fantasy album project than full-scale worldbuilding or game design. An actually well-realized Japanese setting will not be nearly as abstruse and unrelatable, simply because it will be deeper rooted in how real people live, think and behave, rather than dreamt up by Westerners who read a few books on samurai and yokai.
So if we are to synthesize these ideas without turning Magic into a living card game:
These annual Essential sets, inserted into the main sets rather than sold separately, can be flavored as the skill set of our protagonists (the Jacetice League) and their rivals (if their involvement is already known at the outset), leaving the main set to entirely focus on introducing new things: the current plane, a few storyline cards, new planswalkers, and the villain's nefarious new schemes you can never guess.
They will be ALL about highlighting the backgrounds and personalities of planeswalkers. Their frames should clearly distinguish them from the current plane, similar to how the walker cards stand out as outsiders when they were first introduced in Lorwyn. I don't know if they should include the walker cards themselves, but they will definitely showcase the walkers' signature spells and favorite summoned creatures. Their artworks can be set in their home planes, as long as they don't conflict with the current block's mood. E.g. During a block set in Kaladesh, Liliana-themed cards can have artworks that reference Innistrad, as long as the gothic horror flavor is not too explicit. The feeling should not be too different from mixing Core and Expansion cards together in the past.
Meanwhile, the story can be kept on a soap opera style treadmill (the "soap wheel"), with multiple parties constantly forming and regrouping, always running into new trouble.
Ideally this should be coupled with a shift away from constantly churning out new walker cards as the selling point of each set: new walker cards are only designed when needed rather than mandatory; well-designed cards become emblematic of their respective characters and are frequently reprinted and used as anchor points in balancing, while unsuccessful cards are winnowed out.
Example:
Block 2019-B: Gideon, Kiora, Liliana, Chandra and Nissa visit Atlazan. They meet a local White planeswalker, and discover Tibalt is causing havoc.
Magic Essentials 2019:
White - Gideon's Theros kit;
Blue - Kiora's Zendikar and Theros kits;
Black - Liliana's Dominaria kit;
Red - Chandra's Ragatha kit;
Green - Nissa's Zendikar kit.
After the block, Standard rotation happens.
Block 2020-A: The Atlazan planeswalker joins the party; Gideon and Chandra leave to investigate another lead; the party chases Tibalt to a more populous world, and meets up with Jace; Nissa switches to using Kaladesh-inspired spells, which are better adopted to the urban environment.
Magic Essentials 2020:
White - new character's spells from Atlazan;
Blue - Jace's Ravnica kit;
Black - Liliana's Innistrad kit;
Red - Tibalt's Innistrad kit;
Green - Nissa's Kaladesh kit.
Well, I went and got another box to open against my better instincts...
Mythics were bonfire of the damned, temporal mastery, and past in flames....
but I also opened 3 misty rainforests, 2 arids mesas, a verdant catacombs, a tarn and a goblin guide sooooo
Don't worry fam, I will break the good streak yall have.
Edit: Is it worth trading my Lily for fetches or should I wait and see?
charlequin
Banned
Yes, exactly. The under-considered aspect of the problem with Kamigawa is that it tries to be extremely "realistic" in terms of including elements from real-world mythology, but it does it all from a super-removed Western perspective that makes it both overly academic and relatively incoherent. The most obvious manifestation of this is in the horrible decision to create Orientalist Samurai and Ninja creature types instead of using Knight and Rogue, which seems like it's intended to let them be "realistic" in their depictions but actually just emphasizes the weird Japanese-culture fetishization aspect.
This is a really, really good pitch. It gives the excuse for why the cards have different frames, it explains why the same subset of cards appears across multiple sets, and it'll make the marketing people happy because it does hard work pushing the #brand. To tackle the PW problem I'd just incorporate those into this directly -- put a simple, repeatable version of each protag in their Essential set (a la the Mxx versions) and then focus new designs for each onto momentous occasions rather than just constantly doing them to make sure the characters stay in Standard. I think there'd be some concerns about limited in terms of getting this right but otherwise I think it solves all the issues at once in an elegant way.
Of course, unfortunately WotC's IP policies are from the Stone Age so nobody from the company is actually allowed to read anything that might possibly have a pitch like this in it.
SigmasonicX
Member
One thing I'm unclear about is what exactly should be essential spells that are always in Standard, which aren't already being reprinted. All I got is Naturalize. Some would bring up Lightning Strike, but in and of itself, I have no issue with the strongest 3 damage burn spell being weaker than that.
Royal_Flush
Member
How do they even control this? Do they hire somebody who filters their e-mails? What if I just asked MaRo directly via his blog what he thinks of the idea? Or if I find out where one of the people responsible for this lives and talk to them in person? Or do they just have to pretend they never saw it?
I'm not sure I can disagree more with the bolded. Samurai and Ninja have more than enough cache and exposure to Westerners to be frankly un-alien at this point. Literally every game that isn't sourced straight from D&D makes a distinction between Ninjas and Rouges. Not having Ninjas and Samurai (especially Ninjas) in the Japanese plane would have been beyond jarring. If Kamigawa was more "Samurai and Ninja" and less whatever the hell "Teller of Tales" was, the block would have been better off.
charlequin
Banned
Short example list: artifact kill for red, enchantment kill for white, Naturalize effect for green, Doom Blade and Hero's Downfall effects for black, suite of 2-mana soft and 3-mana hard counters for blue, base-level non-basic-land hate and graveyard hate either in 2+ colors or artifact, solid 5 mana sweeper in white, PW-specific hate in white, name-a-card outlets like Pithing Needle, etc. All should be stuff that's efficient enough to hypothetically see tournament play if needed.
I think we just did the "burn noticeably worse than Lightning Strike" experiment and it turned out extremely poorly.
They specifically get coached to close out any article or social media interaction that starts to contain "unsolicited design." Because they make a big deal about this, it's sort of a bit self-enforcing -- if person X knows that thing Y was a risk for this and person Z says they read it, they can call them out over it.
Ultimately I'm sure most people aren't particularly careful about it, but the fact that it's restricted means they're much less likely to read forum community stuff in general, and that even if someone did they'd have their hands tied about proposing something in this vein afterwards.
I'm not saying don't have them, I'm saying give them already supported creature types for tribal purposes and use the Japanese-specific keyword abilities Bushido and Ninjitsu to mechanically distinguish them when needed. The idea that Ninja (a sneaky person who does stealthy stealing or fighting) is a fundamentally distinct type of job from Rogue is really bizarre when every other culture's specific jobs get rolled in with the general-purpose creature types.
FreedomFrisbee
Member
I would really like them to have an official 'if you post card ideas here we might use them' forum. Some stuff that comes out of the custom cards reddit is straight gold.
I'd also like to see them release things early on MTGO to test and balance tweak before paper release. Not that they will.
Joe Molotov
Member
It makes almost as much sense as the reserved list being legally binding.
charlequin
Banned
Right, I mean, it's an artifact of WotC being the problematic offspring of two legally oppressive companies (Hasbro and TSR) and coming into its own in an era where the Internet existed and was starting to be very significant to niche and hobby businesses but still wasn't understood well. They've never changed it because it's apparently like pulling a whole mouth of teeth to get Hasbro legal to get rid of even a pointless and outdated rule.
Anyway, it's been a bad rule that should go away for some time, but the absurdity is really just highlighted by Hearthstone's designers (about 50% of which are ex-Magic R&D, it seems like) talking enthusiastically in interviews about how they've taken good ideas from fan discussions.
That would require the MTGO team to have sets ready a lot earlier than they do now, which probably won't happen. It would also probably accelerate the problem of Standard being "solved" too quickly.
It would be better if they just started bringing in small crews of pros to try to break the format over a weekend or at least have them look it over and give feedback on where potential problems might lie. If WOTC can't catch something as obvious as Felidar Guardian + Saheeli, especially when they already thought Saheeli was going to see more play pre-Aether Revolt than ended up happening, they obviously aren't capable of doing it without bringing in additional help from outside.
charlequin
Banned
This will never happen for completely legitimate and good reasons.
Right. Way back in 2002 we saw the whole Judgment set leaked six weeks early due to an MTGO bug and even then (when the half-life of a Standard format was far, far longer) the set took a huge sales and enthusiasm hit. As you say, the solution has to involve finding some way to bring in a tiger team of pro players to bang on things at a late stage.
FreedomFrisbee
Member
Oh ya, plenty. But its not a bad thing to do, just a thing to do that would require them to shift how they do a lot of things. We'd shift to essentially allowing one time balance patches to sets.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
They do, I do it all the time. The public beta for new sets releases the day of the full-set spoiler, well ahead of paper release. If you're asking them to test it on MTGO before finalizing the set, that's not a reasonable request.
Wulfric
Member
This probably doesn't apply to most of you, but WotC is updating their online systems (lol) and merging DCI and Wizards stuff. I assume most everyone here has DCI numbers. But if you want to check your planeswalker points in the future but currently don't, it would be good idea to set that up.
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/keep-your-dciwizards-account-date-2017-03-21
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/keep-your-dciwizards-account-date-2017-03-21
oh I forgot to say what we got out of our MM3 boxes
cards more than $1
Basilisk Collar x2
Craterhoof Behemoth x2
Foil SEANCE LOL
Damnation
Goblin Guide x2
Arid Mesa
Foil Venser
Venser
Death's Shadow x2
Olivia Voldaren
Abrupt Decay
Restoration Angel
Scavenging Ooze
Liliana of the Veil
Blood Moon
Marsh Flats
Ranger of Eos
Voice of Resurgence
Griselbrand
Not too terrible. Wife's box was way better than mine.
cards more than $1
Basilisk Collar x2
Craterhoof Behemoth x2
Foil SEANCE LOL
Damnation
Goblin Guide x2
Arid Mesa
Foil Venser
Venser
Death's Shadow x2
Olivia Voldaren
Abrupt Decay
Restoration Angel
Scavenging Ooze
Liliana of the Veil
Blood Moon
Marsh Flats
Ranger of Eos
Voice of Resurgence
Griselbrand
Not too terrible. Wife's box was way better than mine.
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