Magic: The Gathering C/D

err priority passes per turn that you can just get rid of without really impacting the game much

Would love to merge untap/upkeep/draw, but I think that's basically saying Arena will never have older cards

End of combat seems like an easy one to eliminate though. Yes, it affects play but the times you need to do something end of combat are quite rare

Have been enjoying Arena. Haven't experienced any bugs personally since the beta opened and they're making incremental improvements the whole time. Meanwhile, I fired up mtgo for the first time in a while for UMA and filed for reimbursement on my first event.

start of combat can be eliminated too, it does affect gameplay in that you have to use tappers before the opponent's last chance to play things precombat but if we're already streamlining the game with major functional changes then i think it's fine. you could even get rid of the priority pass between declare attacks and declare blocks without changing the core gameplay of magic combat though it would have bigger ramifications than the others

birthing pod is back baby

WE'RE EXCITED WE GET TO MAKE THIS ANNOUNCEMENT! IN LEAGUE WITH DRAGONS: THE CURE FOR SUMMONING SICKNESS. 12 NEW SONGS FROM @mountain_goats, WHO PLEDGE THE OATH OF THE COWL PROWLER. RELEASED 4/26 AND AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW AT https://t.co/m9O2ZdSkx7. pic.twitter.com/FqrHtQFn3O

— Magic: The Gathering (@wizards_magic) January 28, 2019

that was a surprising ilx in real life moment for me

wotc investing in ilx instead of gp coverage

haha yeah I learned about this by stupid magic players complaining about just that

sweet album cover, wish magic art could still be that cool

there's been occasional arts in the past few sets that give me older magic vibes (see: Bedevil)

my LGS posted a pic of the card Snowfall on FB (for obvious reasons) and it made me really nostalgic, not just for the days of art like that but also the era of cards that featured a wall of text and were effectively useless. Ice Age was such a goldmine for that sort of thing.

This Soccer Mommy track was the last thing I cut from my ballot.

Oops, ignore

balduvian shaman is still the funniest wall of text card especially since it was a common

hahah I remember that card well, I got one in the first pack of Ice Age I ever bought and felt really intimidated by it since I didn't even know the rules of the game yet. it was really strange how early Magic was obsessed with stuff like that, cards that changed color words or landwalk abilities, given how few cards even had that sort of text to begin with. how many cards could you actually use the Shaman on, anyway? The COPs, Justice....anything else ???

another favorite was Ice Cauldron, I recall *no one* being able to figure out what the hell that thing did back in the day. not that the concept was hard to figure out, it's just the way they worded it was so convoluted (see also: Camouflage and Animate Dead). It's kind of a neat card though - I remember someone used to use it to "preload" counterspells so they could tap out during their turn. Wouldn't be surprised if there's some bizarre modern-day rules-abusing combo with that one today.

anyway, anyone have deep thoughts about deep thoughts about wizards slow strangle of gps? it feels like the business decision I would probably make if I were in charge of wizards, since nobody actually watches the coverage, but it sucks for me personally, as someone who enjoys going to gps and finds scg events pretty meh. I feel like there needs to be some sort of competitive arena circuit for the rest of the world and they haven't really planned that out yet.

oops -1 'deep thoughts about' or you can give meta-level thoughts I guess

xp yeah it was basically supposed to be an anti circle of protection card as far as i can tell, because blue is the color that needed that??

cutting gp coverage sucks but it seemed inevitable with their pivot to arena/esports model. definitely empathize with that post criticizing it on grounds of diversity - after spending years slowly trying to increase the visibility of women on the competitive side of the game, suddenly dropping that in favor of laser focusing on an elite group that afaik is going to be 100% men is shitty

also not posting the round by round standings publicly online is awful, that is the absolute minimum they should do. they'll probably just get the TO to do it though.

xp - I think that's backwards, it allowed you to play any color COP you wanted in your deck, and then 'change' the text to whatever color you needed for as long as you could handle the Cumulative Upkeep (which made it kind of worthless, but whatever, it was a 1 mana creature)

just reminds me of how brutal color hosers were back in the day, cards that literally said "destroy all islands" or "bury all green creatures" priced at 3 or 4 mana. kids these days will never know the feeling of hopelessness that comes with a turn-2 COP:Red when your deck is mono-red, just frantically trying to outpace your opponent until you get 8-for-1'd with a Wrath of God

I think they could probably get way more women on camera than they do at a gp if they host more invite only competitions w/ the goal of diversity in mind.

xp

also on the subject of women in magic, my gf opened up a foil jace in chaos sealed at the gp. (last time she did one she opened up a snapcaster.)

xp yeah i have to assume that is what will end up happening? its been a bit since i read the new plans, are there invitational events worked in that aren't just based on the top 32 performers or whatever?

my other concern is the modern format getting the legs cut off it, it was really picking up in popularity and its entire purpose was to have a sustainable non rotating format and a lot of people felt comfortable investing in a deck for it because of that, and now it suddenly doesn't seem to have a place in the ecosystem

kinda just saw scg evolving into the modern-show

i haven't paid attn to scg lately, are they running a lot of modern?

yeah quite a bit

im actually interested to see what the inevitable arena 'classic' format looks like down the line if they really don't plan on adding old sets. modern's gotten a little too critical mass-y, i always liked the extended cardpool size more

As of this last weekend, SCG finally started doing time shifted matches, which fills a bunch of dead time. I suspect they will move away from Modern a bit in the future, but they embraced it pretty hard last year.

The Magic world has done a miserable job of promoting women competitors, and making women feel welcome in general. It's pretty embarrassing and awful.

<i>anyone have deep thoughts about deep thoughts about wizards slow strangle of gps?</i>

it certainly feels like someone on the business side of wizards did the math on how much it costs to run organized play and started questioning if the roi was really there for gps and pts. i think there are ways to run gps that make sense but like, pay $100,000 for a huge tournament for a few thousand people to play is just a weird use of money and has never seemed to really drive engagement. i imagine there is also belief that in the markets where its profitable smaller tournament series can and will take the place of gps

have they cut money for GPs in ways besides coverage? I felt like the move to make GPs into Magicfests - conventions rather than tournaments - was smart. I love going to GPs for the so-many-players experience but rarely watch them at home. (though part of that is maybe self-fulfilling, due to the fact that the GP coverage has never been great.) I much prefer they go big on coverage for a few tournaments like PTs or Magic World Championship where the player caliber is higher

I don't think they've cut money but at least some value was tied to the prestige of the event, which is tied to the coverage. kinda seems like the plan is to make them 'big ptqs'.

I agree that spending $100k per GP always seemed like it was burning money, though some of the returns on that are a little abstract. NJ was my first MF and unsurprisingly didn't seem much different from any previous GP. I think to really convert it into 'not a GP' you probably need some bigger marquee side-events. but thinking about it more - I haven't seen this specific point brought up yet - killing GP coverage doesn't just save them money, it helps de-emphasize the GP aspect of the MF.

they cut the prize pool both by having fewer gps and by creating the tiered prize pool structure (although that one is pretty negligible its like $15K less in prizes this quarter) and losing the equity that pro points gave is a long-term savings for them, although they are still paying those out atm.

moving from a single tournament model to a sort of convention model in which a bunch of events including one or two more prestigious tournaments take place makes a lot of sense & is obviously the direction they are moving. i wrote an article about this a few months ago before a bunch of the op changes had been announced but it also is in tune with how they seem to want to position playing "tabletop" magic, as a sort of social & creative experience rather than a purely competitive one.

This is all just really weird to witness - like I'm personally fine with it but it's totally surreal that it's all happening so fast, I think of Wizards as this super conservative company and they've just kinda gone wildly all-in very quickly.

they're not super conservative with organized play, they changed the pro play qualification structure constantly throughout this decade

wizards def are here to wring every dollar they can from the game. the big change in direction seems less wild to me, and rather calculated and market optimized. i'm pretty curious about the business aspects of it. making MTG a legit e-sport is probably worth $$$.

wish i had more time for Magic these days. i've gone from a pretty steady limited player to not having played a single draft of the new set :/

yeah i went from doing like 10-20 drafts every set, or even more for ones that i particularly liked, to 'maybe i'll try it once'

they're not super conservative with organized play, they changed the pro play qualification structure constantly throughout this decade

yeah but PTs and GPs have been the core of competitive magic since the dawn of competitive play.

in any case I think that this: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/and-mtg-arena-2019-01-31 is the real eye opener. like the future of competitive magic isn't just 'not the pro tour', it's also maybe 'not the same rules as paper magic'.

this announcement is pretty discouraging for a few reasons but i think it does tie in to what i was saying upthread - i dont know how good the roi on the old model of organized play was & it feels like things really are moving in a different direction.

magic has been my primary non-work activity for like three years, its been a sorta weird few months thinking about what i want to do w/ it, how much i still want to play &c &c

yeah I didn't have a lot of time to play this year but was planning on going to a bunch of gps this year and and now my plans seem really hazy.

i havent been to a gp in a while due to non-magic reasons but would still hit up modern ones in the northeast i guess. i don't really play enough to justify keeping up with standard anymore even though it's historically been my favorite format

Dude from my LGS just took down SCG Dallas with mono blue.

yeah the blue deck seems strong

so, magic

Feeling kind of burned out lately

yeah I've been burnt out since ixalan but still follow from a distance

I've actually been playing a ton more, thanks to Arena. Love how fast drafting and playing goes, and I'm surprised how invested in the ranking system I am (just shy of platinum right now, so still a ways off from the top). Ravnica Allegiance is also one of the better draft sets in recent memory, though the bots consistently underdraft gates and gate payoffs

I don't play constructed at all unless I run out of currency for drafts, and hope not to put any real money into the game. Right now, I kind of like that if I run out of currency, I have to wait for quests - kind of a built-in control on my play time

I am new to it and am so obsessed right now. I play with a friend at lunch every day, and after the kids go to bed, I just build decks, that is my leisure activity. playing mono red today, I don't have a lot of faith in this deck as I don't have a high enough number of the right cards to make it do what I want it to do but the play is so fun to me and I have been working so fuckin hard these past few years, I really can't overstate how much good it's doing me to have this thing that's new to me that I'm getting very incrementally better at & will probably never be better than average at but which allows me to just be a guy playing a fun game & occasionally pulling a rabbit out of the hat & winning 17-0 before getting his ass handed to him by a Sharktocrab again