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Magic: the Gathering |OT9| Kaladesh - Cruisin' Down the Street in my 6/4

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Curse%2Bof%2BVengeance%2B%255BC16%255D.jpg

Pretty neat, even though there's a decent possibility of decking yourself.
 
Jesus Christ those Simic commanders are like everything stupid about that color combo. Absurd mana acceleration and a mana sink that draws cards and looks for combos.

Meanwhile Rakdos gets fucking Vial Smasher the Fierce.

WotC does not understand what effects are powerful in Commander. At all.

If you think about it, blue and green should be the strongest colors in Magic. Structurally, the game limits both mana development and card draw to one per turn. Every other action you take in the game is dictated by how many cards you have and how much mana you have. It shouldn't be a surprise that the colors that break the limited development of these resources are the best colors, especially in a format that encourages games to go long and discourages aggression.
 

OnPoint

Member
What? The controlled version? What the hell is that?

Basically they've continued to confirm:

Red: It's like blue, but worse

Thanks WotC!
 

OnPoint

Member
Oh man, more red winners please.
____________________

Mystical Realization 1R

Enchantment

Whenever an opponent plays an
enchantment,you may Pay 2. If
you do, shuffle your library, then
sigh loudly.

Nope. Just nope. - Mark Rosewater
_____________________​

Look, I love the double Polymorph. But take the WHOLE thing out of blue. I'm so sick of blue having red's stuff but better (besides DD, and even still, they don't print good DD now).
 
What? The controlled version? What the hell is that?

Basically they've continued to confirm:

Red: It's like blue, but worse

Thanks WotC!

They're straight-up adding something that's a perfect fit to the red color pie and your reaction is to complain about blue? That's silly. The game is not automatically well-served by taking away blue abilities. And in this case it's actually two different things anyway; find-a-guy-in-the-library polymorph and replace-guy-with-a-token polymorph are two very different mechanics, and red doesn't really have any use for the latter.
 
To clarify, the "controlled version" of transformation refers to cards like these:
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Though that does make me wonder about this:
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All in all, the transformation effect doesn't appear that often even in blue, so I don't expect too many red cards with this.
 

Yeef

Member
The "Quest" system on Magic Duels is one of the worst implementation of daily tasks I have ever interacted with. It honestly feels random with when it updates your list with a new quest.

Each slot says "Come back tomorrow" - But you can wait a full 24h and not have it update. Almost any F2P game has a better implementation... It does not instill me with confidence in any sort of "Magic Digital Next" if neither Wizards nor their outsourced developers can do the most basic of modern retention systems in their current games.

The system which is supposed to encourage me to log in every day makes me annoyed and, as a result, NOT want to log in because it's legit indecipherable.

Solution:
* Timer
* Known Refresh Time (War Thunder does this, it's like 3AM Moscow time)
* 24h from last completion in that slot
* Anything else from what they are doing
I don't know what platform you're playing on, but on Steam it updates at 0:00 UTC (8pm EST). Back when the game first released, when quests would refresh was based on the time that you logged in for the very first time, so it was different for each player. One of the updates changed it to a global reset for everyone at the same time at 0:00 UTC.

There was a bug where certain players would not receive new quests, but I've never personally had that issue. Supposedly, it was fixed at the same time that the global quest change patch happened.

You only get 1 quest per day; up to a max of 3 at a time. That's what the slots are for.

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicduels/comments/54wa1a/kaladesh_bugs_megathread/
 

OnPoint

Member
They're straight-up adding something that's a perfect fit to the red color pie and your reaction is to complain about blue? That's silly. The game is not automatically well-served by taking away blue abilities. And in this case it's actually two different things anyway; find-a-guy-in-the-library polymorph and replace-guy-with-a-token polymorph are two very different mechanics, and red doesn't really have any use for the latter.

Yes, my reaction is as such because they justified it by saying "but blue gets something similar still". Don't sit there and make it look like I'm doing this unprovoked or without reason haha I'm not going to get into the whole thing about it, just know that I'm on the side of "blue shouldn't have creature kill" and I hate that Polymorph in any form is in blue. I don't like things like Pongify and Curse of the Swine being blue.
 

Wulfric

Member
CvyHrmEVMAAOCF4.png


I'd bitch about no new art on Progenitus, but because the art is so Iconic, I'll instead bitch about the fact that it isn't a modern playable card anymore

Lol yeah, no vendor at a GP is gonna pay more than $5 for this thing. At least Stoneforge Mystic is legacy playable and had new artwork.

And I usually sell both the card and playmat, but I might actually keep the Milwaukee playmat. Definitely gonna try and get Steve Argyle and Chris Rahn to do a playmat sketch while I'm there.

Nwu2sWp.jpg


So purdy.
 

Firemind

Member
They're straight-up adding something that's a perfect fit to the red color pie and your reaction is to complain about blue? That's silly. The game is not automatically well-served by taking away blue abilities. And in this case it's actually two different things anyway; find-a-guy-in-the-library polymorph and replace-guy-with-a-token polymorph are two very different mechanics, and red doesn't really have any use for the latter.
How about chaotic land destruction?
 
I don't know what platform you're playing on, but on Steam it updates at 0:00 UTC (8pm EST). Back when the game first released, when quests would refresh was based on the time that you logged in for the very first time, so it was different for each player. One of the updates changed it to a global reset for everyone at the same time at 0:00 UTC.

There was a bug where certain players would not receive new quests, but I've never personally had that issue. Supposedly, it was fixed at the same time that the global quest change patch happened.

You only get 1 quest per day; up to a max of 3 at a time. That's what the slots are for.

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicduels/comments/54wa1a/kaladesh_bugs_megathread/

Good to know, thanks - I am playing on Steam. I haven't tested it super thoroughly (since it has annoyed me, clearly), but I will check at 5pm today (PST) and see if a new quest appears. I would prefer if each slot didn't say, "check back tomorrow", since that is misleading.
 
treacherousterrain.jpg


At first I thought it was nonbasic lands, but it's actually lands in general. This seems good. I suspect potentially banworthy, but I'm not too knowledgeable about Commander.

Big post by MaRo about Ludevic. He seems to concede the point that Ludevic probably should have been a top-down design, but explains the two factors that (1) players like when new legendary creature cards are based on existing characters, and (2) the partner mechanic required them to make bottom-up designs, and generally there are times that Commander legendaries need to be designed first then have a character assigned to them.
thornthallid asked: Whilst not all legends should be a top-down design, would you agree that not making Ludevic top-down was a mistake?

Here’s the problem. We made the Partner mechanic which required a lot of mechanical structure. That meant the cards were designed bottom up and not top down.

The cards had to be legendary because of the requirement to be commanders, so we had two options: Make up completely new characters or try to see if we could find existing characters that hadn’t yet gotten a card that made some sense with the existing designs.

Previous Commander products told us players really like when we reference existing characters, so we set out to try and match characters to the designed cards. This is tricky as you don’t have the fine control you have with top down designs.

Should we have saved any characters until we could have done them as top down designs? Maybe. There’s a strong case that Ludevic might have been one in that category.

But I imagine a parallel world where we chose to do less existing characters so we could save them for a future top down design, and people are complaining that we didn’t have enough “known” legendary characters.

“Why haven’t you done __________ ?” Is a very common question here. If we had saved Ludevic for a future time, that might be many years from now.

Designing Magic is hard because so many people want different things and trying to juggle them all so you make as many people as happy as you can is difficult.

I hear that many of you Imagined Ludevic as being a top down design and maybe with 20/20 hindsight, that would have been the correct call, but we didn’t have that hindsight when we’re making things.

Players had said they wanted a Ludevic card and we had an opportunity to make one, and we knew another chance was most likely years away, so we took the opportunity.

The reason I constantly seek feedback is so we can learn. If we did something differently than you wanted us to, tell me, so I can get a sense when we made a mistake (or did something correct) and can adjust accordingly in the future.
 

hermit7

Member
Why doesn't he just admit they fucked up

Who cares about when they make the card even if it years later.

I am sure there will be a third return to innistrad planned out why not intend to make a top down design there.

Realistically they should just make more popular characters top down as a rule. If they have a bunch of history and mechanics defined already through flavor text they should utilize that rather than generic cards that they assign to legends.

I am sure they have information on who is popular and who isn't this is WotC after all they have tons of data on who is popular.
 

jph139

Member
I think in general they went too far in the "named lore characters" direction, even where it didn't make sense. Just like how early commanders were a bit too "generic forgettable dudes" without any real story. They'll get the right balance eventually.
 
Some of these mistakes seem so obvious to players that I don't get how R&D missed these things. Let's remember that just as recently as EMN they gave us a generic legendary werewolf and then we're surprised when players said that they wanted the werewolf Legend to be tribal.
 
I know, right? Because they seriously fucked up. At some point someone should have said "there's nothing Ludevic about this card" and put another name on it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

That's really the core trouble. The other callback legends were made with a similar process, but they're all good! Silas Renn and Sidar Kondo both feel enough like themselves that they pass the smell test. They just needed a final pass where they were like "what do we know about Ludevic? a) makes monsters b) is called a necro-alchemist" and saw that this card doesn't evoke either.

I am sure there will be a third return to innistrad planned out why not intend to make a top down design there.

Yeah the funny thing about this to me is that they did Gisa and Geralf standalone cards in C14 kind of on the assumption that "they'd never have a chance" or whatever, then they gave them a pair legend card in EMN two years later.

Some of these mistakes seem so obvious to players that I don't get how R&D missed these things.

R&D aren't allowed to see custom cards which means they're locked off from the best places to get info -- like, nobody in R&D could read this thread because you fools keep posting random fake cards everywhere. So they're going on what they personally like (which is often good -- Ethan Fleischer is responsible for the return characters in C14, which were very positively received) and what they piece together from half-info from players.

Let's remember that just as recently as EMN they gave us a generic legendary werewolf and then we're surprised when players said that they wanted the werewolf Legend to be tribal.

I think they were kinda right on that, inasmuch as legends that are tribal lords are kind of a feel-bad in every other scenario besides Commander. The more I consider it the less I think the issue there was not knowing what people wanted, and more making the really bad choice to try to push a card they created explicitly for one target audience as a generic Standard playable. The right design wouldn't have said "werewolf creatures" or something dumb like that, it just would've been designed in the Ruric Thar direction of helping you transform and keep transformed your guys.

Thank you.
Daretti is an awesome Commander / Planeswalker and it would be nice to get him in foil one of these days (for those that are into foils)

Especially now that new decks will have all the Commanders in foil, I would expect them to keep releasing the more popular face commanders from the first four years as Judge foils.
 

kirblar

Member
WotC's social media policies are so goddamn awful.

Blizzard isn't stopping its internal people from seeing "oh I think _____ would be a good HotS character/HS card/WoW Class!"
 

Hero

Member
The werewolf legend was just so bad.

I mean, it didn't even need to pump your other dudes (though that would've been nice) but like you said, make it easier for your dudes to transform or stay transformed. What we got was just terrible and a complete whiff. Of course it was the one foil mythic I've had to crack open since an Expedition last year...
 

bigkrev

Member
Today in MTGO IS FUCKING GARBAGE

They have triple INN drafts for Haloween... But Memories Journey is currently bugged, and therefore not in boosters. This means that it is impossible to draft a Spider Spawning deck.
 

Yeef

Member
Why doesn't he just admit they fucked up
Two reasons, I imagine.

1. He's basically Wizards' hype-man. He needs to talk up the set before it releases. After the initial release window, he might say as much.
2. He didn't actually work on this product, so him saying it's a fuck up, even internally, could cause problems of the office politics sort. Saying as much publicly would be even worse.
 

Toxi

Banned
treacherousterrain.jpg


At first I thought it was nonbasic lands, but it's actually lands in general. This seems good. I suspect potentially banworthy, but I'm not too knowledgeable about Commander.
It wouldn't be banworthy at all. It's 8 mana and entirely dependent on your opponents' mana bases, and direct damage against opponents is a lot less powerful when they have 40 life.

I think in general they went too far in the "named lore characters" direction, even where it didn't make sense. Just like how early commanders were a bit too "generic forgettable dudes" without any real story. They'll get the right balance eventually.
I don't mind it outside of Ludevic. Most of old lore characters fit. I'd rather have a bunch of cards of old characters with a flavor dud or two than no cards of those characters.
 
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