Magic: The Gathering C/D

UG and GW ones basically already have standard decks and GB is easy to build around. and i don't think anything other than a combo deck is going to compete at 7 starting cards vs 8 in standard. lurrus won't be a problem though at least!

all the pushed cards they've made since WAR are so unsatisfying to look at & read too, its nightmare wall of text after wall of text. give me back smuggler's copter, i'll live with that now

whoever's designing the cards now has no nuance, every rare is a sledgehammer

I don't know where they lost the script, but each new set is making me feel less likely to jump back in

Planeswalkers

I came to the game well after planeswalkers and enjoyed it for years. However WAR does seem like a more recent tipping point.

All I play is limited and from that perspective it's been really fun. Drafting against human players on Arena is a big improvement, too. Signals in the draft are readable now. Just went 7-1 with a BW go wide deck, feels good.

Also I have no idea what to do with the 80 mythic and 200 rare wildcards I've accumulated on Arena. Maybe I'll try historic or smthg

other than JTMS planeswalkers were fine for their first 10 years. they intentionally started pushing them after Origins

maybe elspeth knight errant and liliana of the veil were a little too good too but whatever, i'll accept that as the high end of planeswalker power

and the former doesn't even cut it anymore in any format i don't think?

yeah even veil and jtms see less and less play in older formats

was looking at some of my decks from delver standard and i want to go back to that format where you could play birthing pod and it wasn't the boogeyman somehow

it did seem pretty clear at a glance when the set was first released that oko was gonnna break a few formats prolly

oko felt like an honest mistake - they saw it as something that made 3/3s every other turn and occasionally swapped them for something

there's no excuse with companion though - it was obvious that this mechanic was going to change the game significantly. edh is popular - probably even the most popular way to play magic, so it's easy to understand their urge to push the game in that direction. but edh only works because it's a casual format.

I think this set will sell terribly, will go down as a saga-level disaster and I hope they don't blame it all on coronavirus.

i don't know if this set will sell terribly but i think people will start to check out and the next few sets will take a hit

they really need the fall set to be confidence-restoring, it's going to be a make or break moment for the entire competitive portion of the playerbase

the ??? part of oko is its loyalty numbers are way better than other 3 mana planeswalkers so they clearly thought his abilities were low impact or something

Saga was busted in more ways than just one, idk if you can compare it to anything. there are so many "what the fuck were they thinking" cards in that block. iirc it sold quite well, it was Mercadian Masques that people weren't really thrilled with

whoever's designing the cards now has no nuance, every rare is a sledgehammer

as a strictly limited player for the last decade I agree with this, kinda sick of every bomb rare being a 5-mana 6/6 that 3-for-1s when it enters play

saga was a mistake you can justify because they had a very basic understanding of what they were doing at the time - most of the sets before that were underpowered, some so underpowered that it might have been a real threat to the game's future. they pressed the gas pedal too hard, but that had basically never happened before.

but everyone knows better now - any competitive player could have told you that giving a player an extra card that goes in their hand every game was going to be a disaster.

some of the stories that came out of Saga block were insane. Tinker was originally supposed to have the Transmute Artifact "make up the difference in mana" clause but they axed it because the card got too wordy. Time Spiral was supposed to be a 6 mana Timetwister but they wanted big splashy cards to put the "untap x lands" mechanic on. Tolarian Academy was originally just colorless but was changed to blue to fit the mini cycle. Memory Jar....first card to ever be banned before it was even released. even my 13 year old self knew this stuff was obviously insane BUT as you mention it had been a long time since a truly broken card had ever come out

underworld breach is the most saga ass card they've printed in a while and they managed to top it immediately

you just know there were meetings where the sole topic was "how do we print another Yawgmoth's Will"

whats funny is that post-Saga I remember that Maro had written a bunch of articles about what went wrong, and what design rules should never be broken, stuff like "don't circumvent mana costs" and "avoid lands that tap for more than 1" and "don't just let players draw as many cards as they want", then after 3-4 years of sets that made basically zero impact on older formats they decided to start breaking things again

btw Companion cards are super annoying in Draft too, it sucks to pick them and just be unable to draft the cards you want. at the same time starting with 8 cards is very good

this limited format is pretty fun and full of synergy but its also feels pretty flawed. I've played a lot of games that have gone into stalemate and Mutate can do some strange things, I've seen a number of games punted because a creature had 6 lines of abilities and wound up doing something unexpected.

i don't really like this set at all, even ignoring the balance issues i don't like any of the mechanics except cycling

I've also had that happen to me, where I missed an ability a mutated creature had. Also had a game where I needed to find out what creatures were in a pile of mutated creatures but I wasn't able to figure it out quickly when I was playing and made a bad decision. And then had a game where I tried to remove the counters from Momentum Rumbler in combat only to discover it gains actual double strike, it doesn't gain a double strike counter... still too early to say how much I like the set, but the learning curve has been high, with lots of feel-bad moments similar to figuring out the static walker abilities the hard way in War of the Spark

I would like to confess that I bought a Dell & a fuckin monitor from the local recycled-tech-stuff store to play arena, because the prospect of no magic at all until all this shit has subsided was too awful. I am struggling to get into it but it's better than nothing.

dang do they still not have it on other platforms besides pc?

yeah this is probably the most complex limited set in a while, not complex like Future Sight where there were just a ton of keywords to learn but rather in that there are a lot of "I want to do this but I'm not sure what would happen" moments. what happens when you bounce a Mutated creature? what happens when you kill the base creature in response? why do there have to be 4 triggered abilities every time something happens?

even a card text like "enchanted creature loses all abilities" has a lot of room for interpretation

yeah it's funny that they both wrecked constructed to create an ability aimed at casuals/new players and created a limited format that is absurdly complex. playing arena with my s/o she peppered me with rules questions about mutate and I just had no idea what the answers were.

though it's likely maro doesn't care if kitchen table players get their mutate triggers wrong and the joy they get in making a blobby monster is worth it.

also this set reintroduced one of my least favorite limited architypes, the B/U deck that's nothing but high-toughness creatures, counterspells, and removal

welcome to the trap JCLC

not playing paper magic sux

arena is coming to mac and smartphones, soon there's gonna be nowhere to hide

even a card text like "enchanted creature loses all abilities" has a lot of room for interpretation

Oh lord yes, this is the worst set to have a card like that. I forgot one funny moment I had where I had played that card on my opponent's creature that already had a lifelink counter from their Mentor. They attacked and I made a block hoping they wouldn't realize they could still pump their creature with Mentor. They did try to pump but the creature did not get a +1/+1 counter, so we both learned something about layers

yeah it's funny that they both wrecked constructed to create an ability aimed at casuals/new players and created a limited format that is absurdly complex. playing arena with my s/o she peppered me with rules questions about mutate and I just had no idea what the answers were.

though it's likely maro doesn't care if kitchen table players get their mutate triggers wrong and the joy they get in making a blobby monster is worth it.

Maro himself gave an incorrect explanation of what happens when you kill a creature that has mutated in his Ikoria Design article, which had to be corrected. It's a very confusing mechanic

also the whole "can't mutate Humans" clause seems like a poor design choice. for one, newer players don't really pay attention to creature types, and I bet if there was a paper prerelease you'd see people mutating humans all over the place. for two, having the set's marquee mechanic just not work on a third of the creatures creates a lot of frustrating moments, several times I've kept a hand thinking I could ramp into a turn 3 or 4 Mutate and then realize oh actually you can't do it because that's a Druid Human

https://i.imgur.com/IoQONEC.png

https://i.imgur.com/lqi0xV3.png

seriously how are you supposed to play this set in paper Magic

when i saw they were doing keyword counters my immediate thought was "so this has to be instead of +1/+1 counters, just like how they don't do +1/+1 and -1/-1 in the same set, right?" and then it wasn't

you can play arena on a Mac if you do some annoying shit. both my gf's brothers have it set up on their MacBooks

i have a new opinion which is that small sets were good for the game and they should go back to large-small-large-core as their annual cycle like e.g. the zendikar or innistrad years

that would be a nice change back.

i don’t think i enjoy this limited format very much.

and i mostly play on my mac via remote desktop bec im too lazy to pull my rolling desk in front of the tv, lol

everyone otm about the sucky new mechanics

I wonder how long it's gonna take them before they're going to say 'mistakes were made' - there hasn't even been a prerelease yet!

you can play arena on a Mac if you do some annoying shit. both my gf's brothers have it set up on their MacBooks

because my Mac is also essentially my workplace I don't wanna run Wine/Bootcamp, etc, I installed at one point but it created several headaches. However I did buy a refurb'd Dell last week specifically to play Arena, which is tragic, but the prospect of no Magic at all is worse. Arena is pretty much exactly as "it'll have to do" as i suspected but whatever.

Vintage Cube is back on MTGO...kind of suspicious timing

I know it's only at the rare level but Companion also seems like a dud in a Limited setting. It's not really fun to try to draft around them and it's virtually impossible to make a good sealed deck out of any of them but the Highlander one. It's also not fun to play against an opponent to starts with a bomb rare in their hand every game.

ultimately I wish they'd saved the ability counter/ability lord stuff for another set. there's too much stuff going on here already and I don't like how like 90% of the set seems to be in service of its mechanics

ciderpress - interested why you say that re: small sets

just that the game's balance has been increasingly unstable ever since they committed to making 4 limited environments per year rather than 2 or 3 plus expansions. also keeps them honest with regards to how much complexity they shove into a set if they have to hold back some ideas for the expansion

also means fewer instances where a linear mechanic has one shot to be good enough for standard and they overjuice it to make sure it happens, there was much talk about this during eldraine standard re: food decks.

lmaooo I had not seen this, talk about bad timing

https://shop.tcgplayer.com/magic/ikoria-lair-of-behemoths/spacegodzilla-death-corona-void-beckoner

Never played Arena but I'm cautiously curious about it once it hits Android