Magic: The Gathering C/D

when it was just Fynn, poison counters were a cool sometimes thing that relied on deathtouch synergies - Toxic is kinda irritating in Standard already just because there's not much you can do against it except "win faste" although Cemetery Desecrator could help out if you make it to T6, also Dramatist's Puppet -- but a lot of these new Toxic creatures get active a lot quicker than T6. in Historic run 4x Solemnity to halt the plague of poison counters deck in Historic imo

Reprint Leeches, you cowards

poison is way neutered this time compared to its previous run in standard from 2011. toxic can't kill people on turn 2 like infect could

I got into Arena a couple years ago after a nearly 25 year hiatus from the game. I’ve been mostly playing standard but got into alchemy recently

It’s nice to win, but I mostly like having fun? I keep creating green/black decks where winning is contingent on milling as many of my own cards as possible

lol did you just whip my ass on arena

was the player name “watts”

Still haven't gone back to Arena but my Fynn deck was probably my most fun/memorable deck. These new poison/corrupted cards look insane though.

I did just finish four or five matches and won a couple. I smoked some blue/artifact guy who for some reason blocked my legendary with deathtouch with his 8/8 trample artifact and ended up in a deadlock with some all-wolves deck

I think I snuck in a Dreadhound/Ghoulcaller’s Harvest combo in, too.

Love to damage an opponent by killing my own guys

wolves decks are hard to beat and kinda boring, though some of the more bonkers wolf guys are at least funny

they slap down that guy who lets you draw more wolves and I start groaning

placed 2nd in a private pauper gathering this weekend

mono red blitz ftw!

I don't read the spoilers in advance anymore so let me just say this format has been full of me reading the text of some rare a few times and going "yeah there's actually nothing I can do about that, gg"

putting first strike and deathtouch on the same creature just feels wrong to me. especially a 3-drop 3/3 that ALSO has another ability. don't even get me started on the 4 mana 5/5 that you can't even deal damage to

yeah, that 5/5 is obnoxious

I am looking forward to the day where I drop a Meathook Massacre on that stupid thing

I started playing in like 1998 I think. I was 12. Ice Age and Alliances were the most recent sets. Back then there just weren't a whole lot of cards around so we did this thing in our group where we allowed people to make up their own cards on printer paper and play 2 copies in their deck. And of course some people would design the dumbest shit like "2R for a 3/5 flying, first strike, 2: deal one damage to any target" which our group would have to veto. But they really do design cards like that now. I guess it all started with Spiritmonger, the instant I saw that I was like "wow, that's insane and probably bad for the game"

I threw in the towel around Eldraine, but the steady rise of feel bad cards started well before that for me

the shit that broke me was playing against endless wilderness reclamation/nexus of fate decks

thats like the complete opposite from undercosted/bloated creatures though. was a brief moment of magic decks playing like what they were in the late 90s / early 00s

yes, thanks for reminding me why I don't post here

I remember around the time I started, Fallen Empires was the current expansion. It was kind of a dire time to get into mtg, because they had realized that some things were insanely overpowered and seemed to be paranoid about creating anything that’d break the game. There were some interesting bits, but overall, it was an underpowered and boring set. And magic had just gotten really big, so they printed eight zillion cards.

i really like the visual look of the cards in that set at least. i remember stores sold packs of it really cheap but it still wasnt worth it

looking it up now and Fallen Empires packs are going for $15 apiece, nothing in them is particularly valuable (Rainbow Vale is 7 bucks) so I guess it's just a nostalgia thing. though it's hard to tell if any of these are actually selling. iirc Homelands was even worse, just a real weird era of Magic design where the cards were not only underpowered but also had basically no utility. some of that bled over into Ice Age, I remember cards like Balduvian Shaman and Ice Cauldron that were so wordy and strange and when you actually did figure out what they did you realized they were essentially useless. I remember Necropotence seeming like that too until a few months later when some guys were like "wait a second, this is insane"

I mean they went through the trouble of doing the snow-covered land thing which is inherently confusing especially since there was very little benefit to them, especially compared to the number of cards which would punish you for them. One of my early Magic memories was playing snow-covered Forests cuz they looked cool only to lose to something which randomly had "snow-covered Forestwalk"

all this makes the Urza's stuff so surprising, idk if the game was flagging around then (didn't Tempest block do well?) but good lord, some of those cards were just obviously insane. I remember coming back to the game and seeing cards like Tinker and Time Spiral and wondering what the hell was going on in the design room.

Ice Age at least seemed cool at the time. I can’t remember if it was the first time they made an expansion that was also standalone, in that you could buy both decks and boosters and they included land

not to mention it had Scaled Wurm, a 7/6 (!!!!) for the low low price of 8 mana. most importantly it was a common. god, I still remember scouring the store's box for 4 of those, plunking down two quarters, putting all 4 in my deck, not being able to cast one until like eight games in, and then immediately having it die to a Terror

lmao

I wonder if kids today still experience the joy that comes from actually getting that one card in play that you always wanted to

do kids today still play magic i assumed they shifted to making it for former kids like every other media property

yeah, I think there are a bunch of card games kids are more into

My Hero Academia seems to be a big one at the moment

you could just be making up a ridiculous name there and I’d have no idea

I started real early and got out around the time of Ice Age, I remember it seeming boring in comparison to the previous sets (Legends, the Dark, etc), lol.

yeah, it was only interesting compared to Fallen Empires lol

I was just thinking of The Dark, which kind of had some themes but was mostly a collection of weird cards

xp ah that makes sense if theres a card game for that. honestly have no idea what the media landscape is like for tweens or teens now besides anime. magic's aesthetics are rooted in stuff that hasn't been cool for a minute

i had this book as a kid which had every card up through 1996 and probably did a lot to save me from wanting to buy packs of those weaker mid 90s sets
https://i.imgur.com/BYd90jT.jpg

lol I had a friend who had that, I totally remember scouring those sets looking for secretly broken cards and coming up with nothing

do kids today still play magic i assumed they shifted to making it for former kids like every other media property

― ciderpress, Monday, February 27, 2023 10:45 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

from like age 12-19 there was this card shop I hung around pretty frequently with a bunch of kids around the same age (and some who were older), just messing around playing Magic and other games, hanging out, wasting time, etc. a lot of those people are still friends! but I do wonder if they still have shops like that anywhere. I visit local stores every so often and it's a bit depressing how there's never anyone in there anymore outside of like, FNM or whatever. back in the day it seemed like there were always people around.

Moodles I hate wilderness reclamation too fwiw

real kill or be killed vibe to this set. you either have to get a bunch of insane rares or build a tight aggro deck that constantly applies pressure. all the durdley proliferate stuff is okay but a lot of times these games just end with you getting trucked by a really stupid planeswalker. seriously I feel like 2/3rds of the decks in this set have one, it's absurd.

There's several PW in the rare slots this set, which might explain that. I'm guessing there's a story reason for it. I was only able to make proliferate matter in poison decks, where obv it helps. In a lot of RG decks, adding a counter to your permanents really doesn't matter (eg the game is usually over before Lattice Blade Mantis makes its third hit).

I think I've had my fill of the format for the reason you mentioned. Too focused on aggro, too punishing to fall behind, in spite of being fun to play for a few weeks or so

ILX magic players, how do you feel about WotC sending literal Pinkertons to harass somebody at their home because they accidentally received cards before release date and made a youtube about it?

https://kotaku.com/mtg-aftermath-leaks-pinkertons-wotc-magic-the-gathering-1850368923

yeah its pretty fucked up

insanely fucked up and the details are like… pinkertons?! for fucking magic the gathering?!

they've been weird about spoilers for a while. I remember back in like 2002-2004 this dude on a forum named "rancored_elf" would post spoilers as apparently he had an inside man. WoTC wound up suing him into oblivion and basically ruining his life. I remember him being like "they could've just asked me to stop"

iirc it ended ok for him but apparently they really brought out the heavy artilery

i was just astounded that Pinkerton still existed

I really know nothing about this game, except now this

Post Malone pays fan $2m for Magic: The Gathering 'One Ring' card

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66399865