Nah, this is just the second time, because the first time they did this (greater creative integration, pushing face cards) they broke everything.
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Magic: the Gathering |OT12| Hour of Devastation - Hour of Jace getting dunked on
- Thread starter SigmasonicX
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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?"
He wrote a Metamorphosis 2 article fairly recently.
Imperfected
Member
I can't really say if he's being truthful or not, but Wizards has been pulling quite a few designer hires and interns, and a lot of them haven't been going to MDN.
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.
SigmasonicX
Member
Ixalan has a card named Walk the Plank. Probably a common black kill spell.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
Yeah and so I just stay away from whole archetypes.
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.
Imperfected
Member
The really funny part about Cradle is you can grab a Cabal Coffers for like $15.
I guess Serra's Sanctum is pretty pricey too, at least.
I guess Serra's Sanctum is pretty pricey too, at least.
SigmasonicX
Member
MaRo is on the design team for a supplemental set now, and it's one he was pushing for them to make, so he felt obligated to be on the team. It isn't an Unset.
It's a Rosanne crossover set.
charlequin
Banned
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.
lmao what are you smoking cavern of souls in each deck
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.
SigmasonicX
Member
That seems likely. He's talked about the idea on Blogatog a lot.
charlequin
Banned
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.
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?"
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.
charlequin
Banned
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?
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
I mean, you could just say "I don't care about this opinion" in response to literally any post.
charlequin
Banned
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.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
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.
RuinerPrime
Member
I'm having a hard time understanding what they're fighting about lol
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
hilariously all you need to break mairsil is
target himself
Imperfected
Member
Keeping a quicksilver elemental transformed into a copy of yourself in an experiment cage is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect a jerkbag mage like Jon Irenicus to do, at least.
I'm not sure I understand.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
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"?
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
yes afterwards pilli palla plus any tap for 3 effect is already enough to generate infinite mana and untaps walking ballista then is just game.
blindrocket
Member
Awesome.
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.
It does seem like that. I think it's just because he's the super happy go lucky spokesman.
Giant Panda
Member
Wait, I thought development was looking at standard too. Are you saying development only really balanced around limited?
SigmasonicX
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.
Hey thank you for this! I went 3-0-1 and the Healer was the MVP, insane card that I would've probably dismissed.
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.
blindrocket
Member
I think out of the C17 decks I like the Draconic Domination deck the best. Just take Mirari's Wake from the cat deck and slip it in there.
charlequin
Banned
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.
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.
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)
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
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
that's not gonna confuse people at all...wotc said:
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.
charlequin
Banned
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.
right, though honestly I've never seen anyone play pauper in paper. I rarely go to game stores, though
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
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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