@@rafaeldavis2615 What is it with people's weird obsession with stupid numbers? You know the minute you finished posting that someone else liked it without caring. Just like the 69th like, and so will be the same with the 666th like
As a Polish guy I have years of experience in finding Polish woman. I've to say that Rack's disguise is not as clever as he thinks. Even untrained observer should be able to see through it in less than minute into this video. Amateur.
I used to think One with Nothing was bad. Now I think One with Nothing is far better designed than most contemporary magic cards, if only because it's easy to remember what it does and hasn't been banned yet.
@@jeezuhskriste5759Creatures have to do something amazing when they come into play and have like 5 good abilities on top of that to be good these days. Power creep on creatures has gotten pretty bad.
@@Icameron259 a Belgian is to be impressed they had both the knowledge and balls to speak truth. You can be proud of your nation as it currently is and still criticise it and recognise the horrendous events in it’s history.
As the proud owner of the title "The Ghost of Karl Marx in 4D", hearing you giggle that made me so happy. I finally found myself in a position to be able to afford to help someone on Patreon and you were my first and only thought!! Keep making glorious content and thank you so much for the hard work :)
One of the things that Wizard's did some testing with was whether or not players liked drafting worse cards or cutting better cards and they found that players preferred to cut bad cards. My favorite reason though is that 99% of players have no problem giving away a huge amount of "bad" cards to new players, meaning you can get a huge amount of players learning and playing at no entry fee. If many of us think back to our first magic experiences, older players giving us free cards built out our collections and kept us coming back.
I would make some clever MTG-related pun on "breadtube", but I'm kinda stuck. Unsurprisingly, there's only one card in Magic with the word "bread" in it (Gingerbread Cabin; doesn't really work), but apparently the word "conquest" somehow doesn't appear in the name line of a single Magic: the Gathering card, which is wild to me.
@@mad7monkey423 same, but i also thought it was Unsleeved Media (formerly titled MTG Headquarters) cuz I remember he got into some hot water for his, lets say, unfavorable takes
Honestly the worldbuilding in Legends of Runeterra through flavor text is sourly underrated here, I mean look at cards like Commander Ledros, She who wanders and Lissandras the Watcher and you have beautifully written flavortext that dosen't feel jarring on a card because all that *is* put into a drop down and dosen't interfere with the card or its mechanics, bar that great video as always!
I'd like to add to that, there is a lot of "flavour text" hidden in voice lines and interactions between cards, that only occour when they are played. It's extremely rewarding to hear what some of the characters in runterra have to say to each other after looking into some of the lore. For a digital only Card game I find that is a very efficient way of presenting Lore, and something Magic could do with copying in Arena. Right now Arenas Cards only spout one-liners only just a cut above the nonsense that comes from whatever Hearthstones Cards are trying to communicate.
Example: You have Lissandra anywhere on Board and Trundle enters the Battlefield. Trundle: "King of Trolls, coming through!" Lissandra: "King of nothing without my aid..." The Tone is als important, but it's immediately clear that Trundle has Power through Lissandra, she is pulling the Strings though and there is something sinister about her and what she is plotting, but Trundle is oblivious to any of this, he just cares about being the King.
Absolutely love how your presentation style and tone, in each video, is different. My girlfriend and I love listening to your videos as we play commander or are driving in the car! Keep them coming good sir!
I'd argue there's multiple layers of flavour text on CCG's, the actual text but also the often great voice lines that hearthstone (probably others) has. not to mention excepting the first few sets the flavour text of many hearthstone cards is incredibly good and the voice lines can spawn copy pastas based around them being so memorable and fun to hear.
Whose next from Breadtube? Going to get Dan Olsen? Maybe Thought Slime? Abi from Philosophy Tube? Innuendo Studios? Also how much more do we have to bully CommandZone to have you guest in an episode of Game Knights?!
As an indie game designer it makes me happy to see creators going into this kind of nuance about the mistakes that happen when making a game as complex as magic because it allows so much genuine conversation to happen!
And it may have been fundamentally questionably designed with overly ambitious ideas and a weirdly notable lack of self awareness of its impact on future generations/formats. #whyisElkingsomethingnotaminus #whydoeshehavetwoplusabilities #noreasonable2dropcankillhim
I feel One with Nothing fits into “the good” more than the bad. It as part of a standard set where hand size and your opponents hand size mattered as a mechanic. Being able to discard your hand could boost creatures, blank spells, or perform other utility.
Great video overall! I think it does leave out the significant effect of the profit motive though. To get a bit Jim Sterling for a minute, I think some of the ideas from the loot box economy, which arguably have their origin in trading cards games, have fed back in to Magic in a toxic way. When you consider buying a pack, you have some idea of its value, a lot of which is driven by the rare and mythic chase cards. So to drive sales, Wizards has an incentive to print a lot of big, splashy, exciting cards. But in doing so, they almost guarantee that some of those cards will break the game completely in half, and will have to be banned. So a lot of those exciting cards you're hoping to crack during the prerelease might actually end up being worthless in a few weeks or months. And if Wizards prints those cards *knowing* that this will be their strategy, that seems like deceptive advertising. And it's never enough to just make money. Every year a business needs to make *even more* money to satisfy shareholders. So the pressure on designers gets ratcheted up all the time. That, in my opinion, is what led to the absolute avalanche of bans in 2020, where banning a clearly busted card like Fires of Invention just cleared the field for the next broken thing to take its place I still remember the collective madness when Jace the Mindsculptor and Stoneforge Mystic was banned, and the tone of both the communication from Wizards and the response from the community have done a complete 180 since then. Emergency bans in standard went from being a colossal embarrassment which will *never be repeated* to just a routine part of the release cycle, and fans have gone from being outraged at having hundreds of dollars erased on a whim to shouting for bans right out of the gate. All of this is to say that I think the unpredictable value (even on average) of a pack of Magic cards is a feature, not a bug, and that flavor of bad cards is a big factor.
I keep having to rewind your video because I'm knackered from my 8h work day and I can't keep up and now I'm laughing at myself. Am I too tired for RUclips??? You pack so much into every minute, it's amazing really, love that. I'll be back after a nap.
Well I think wayward guide beast has many layers to it, the surface being a 2/2 haste is great, then you get to the bounce land thing, but then you have to remember landfall is a mechanic and that this card pairs really well with other cards, it just depends on how you utilize it.
Shout out to the yugioh localization guy who decided to make the only flavor text of a highly lore-relevant main character of a major storyline be "Check this out!"
It's funny seeing Scornful Egotist with the bad cards, as in Scourge draft you could actually use it as an easy way to get a high CMC card down, which went well with cards like Rush of Knowledge and Reward the Faithful. So it's not even all that bad in the right context!
Re: Vanilla - it's worth noting Vanillas have 4 mechanical areas to explore: 1. Devotion. Maybe your Devotion to white deck wants a 1/7 for WW 2. Creature types. Maybe Crab Lackey lets you drop Crabs for free when it deals combat damage to an opponent. 3. Power & Toughness. Does a card let you draw a card whenever you cast a 4 power creature? Maybe play green's (U) 4/1 for 1G. Wait, that doesn't exist? Someone get on that. Or Pendelhaven stuff; whatever floats Memnite. 4. Vanilla creatures have no abilities. So print cards that reward you for having such creatures; maybe a legend that lets vanillas cantrip, or lets you play vanillas from the grave as though they're in your hand, etc. The hard part about Vanillas is printing fair ones that might see constructed play. Taking advantage of 1-4 helps; but sometimes you just need to stop power creep. 2/1 for W used to be the best you got, but not that you get 2/1s for W w/ upside, Savannah Lions have bought the farm. A Catlord of Vanilla Cantrip lord or the like might help to make them fringe playable as well; but not obsoleting "the best" vanilla creatures a color gets at it's pricepoint (2/2 first strike for 1R @ (R) w/ upside? Screw you WOTC!)
Man, I forgot Scornful Egotist. It's my favorite bad card, if only because the gatherer discussion is plastered with "ALL HAIL THE GREAT LORD EGOTIST." It's like the more expensive Storm Crow in terms of Magic memes.
Love me a Spice video especially one with a spicy take. One piece of criticism/point I wished was addressed was that of "trap" cards. I don't know if there is specific terminology in the mtg community to refer to that, but in at least d&d optimization any choice that a player makes which presents itself as doing one thing but actually does that thing poorly or does something different entirely is referred to as a trap (one example of this is ironically the find traps spell, which doesn't actually tell you the locations of traps nor any hazard, with another being witch bolt, which does very poor damage for the level and is very easy to stop). The problem associated with the "traps" is that someone new to the game could choose or use it without any knowledge of why it is bad, and while for someone who really wants to learn how to identify strong vs weak abilities this could be a learning tool, for a casual player they might not understand why what they are doing is ineffective. I don't see any reason why the same principal couldn't be applied to mtg, where a new or casual player might pick up a pre-con and play with it, see they are doing poorly when compared to other decks and not have fun, but not be able to recognize why. Perhaps more people get utility out of it than develop bad preconceptions but that seems hard to demonstrate?
I have two things to add to this fantastic video! First, while Legends of Runterra's flavortext might not be as prominent as Magic's, since you have to expand the card to read it, it is very important worldbuilding! When a new set of cards comes out, the League Lore community digs into every card to find new things that expand or start stories! As well, with Lutri, even if you couldn't find a playgroup to play with that lets you use Lutri, you can always honor the otter by getting an art print, which is what I do with a lot of my favorite cards that aren't exactly commander playable!!
As someone who plays Ojamas, a 0 ATK archetype fueled by 0 ATK vanillas In a game about hitting the opponent with big bunguses, The second category is what I think of when people say bad cards. While I'm not familiar with the MtG examples, But I have played a fair bit of the Official Anime Spin-off. Duel Masters has multiple mechanics dedicated to using bad cards together to make them better. For example a creature with Wave Striker is functionally a Vanilla that cannot use Vanilla support, However when there's 2 other creatures with Wave Striker on the field, Then all of them become effect creatures, Usually gaining the effect of the other Wave Striker creatures on your field in addition to their own effect. Similarly the Knight Magic mechanic introduced spells which had a creature type and the effect that they'd activate their effect twice if a creature of the associated creature type was on your field at activation. This meant that these overpriced spells were secretly more powerful than their regular counterparts, But required you to consciously choose between cheap reliable cards and janky but impactful cards. This way game designers can make bad cards good, without falling into the bad on accident category.
the absolute emotional miasma when you mentioned clipping in a seemingly negative-ish capacity was as amusing as it was rollercoasteresque good point in the end cool
Wayward guide beast shouldn't have been one of your examples, it's super situational but because it has haste it may as well just be a 1 red sorcery that says return a land, which is super useful in that set because of all the landfall abilities plus being able to pull stuff like emeria's skyclave that you already played as lands.
Just use the YuGiOh style of limiting cards to 1 or 2 (or 3, in the case of MTG) to help fix cards that aren't broken enough to be banned but still are unhealthy for the game.
On the topic of rewording cards for balancing them post printing: I remember that I was furious when I learned that "Eladamri, Lord of Leaves" had gotten both of his abilities reworded from "All Elves" into "Other Elf creatures" And he has not even been reprinted, you have no chance of knowing this unless you look up the card on Gatherer (or some other mtg card site)
There's a good reason for that though : when Eladamri was printed, the Legendary supertype wasn't a thing for creatures, they just had creature type Legend. So at the time, Eladamri himself wasn't an Elf. He didn't boost himself with the "All Elves" ability. When the creature type mess was solved and Eladamri became an Elf himself, they HAD to change the text, otherwise he would have suddenly started boosting himself, which he isn't supposed to do. Funnily enough, this was a "change" that was precisely to KEEP the card's effect the same as it always was.
Oh, and in addition to the previous reply : considering you were upset about the Eladamri rewording, and seemed to consider it a nerf, this seems to indicate that you thought Eladamri was supposed to benefit himself (and probably unintentionally cheated with him a couple of times). No one could blame you for that, and this is a fantastic example of how the "Legend" type sucked donkey butt back then, by causing these kinds of unintuitive interactions.
So i've been following you since your Rakos video but i don't think i've ever commented. Just wanted to take the time to say that this was a video i enjoyed greatly, which i hadn't since your power and toughness video nearly a year ago now. Thank you for the video, i had a blast and i hope others did too.
I’m sorry but I’m @6:28 currently and hearing my favorite mtg youtuber collab with my favorite ✨variety✨youtuber made me audibly gasp and I’m incredibly happy thank you so much
Didn't really finish watching the video yet, just stopped to point out how absolutely wonderful is to hear Cosmonaut, Rhystic and Bomberdude in the same video. Thank you Spice, bless you, you beautiful creature.
I really liked the 10th edition-Alara block power level. So I've been proxying all the cards from after that as if they'd been created back then. So things cost more/have lower power levels and my friends have a lot of fun.
I love that you brought up clipping's Visions of bodies being burned as an example for a good follow up album!! I really love their work and you for mentioning them ^^
I personally have made weenie decks with all my bad cards, including Pillarfield Ox in order to have simple and inexpensive base decks in which I could give to younger players who would struggle with wordy cards with more than flying/vigilance/deathtouch/haste; or tap to do something simple, such as Llanowar Elf and Prodigal Sorcerer. They get so hyped to play that Tusked Collosodon or Alpha Tyrranax, even though there's probably a thousand better cards, if that's all they have, and it works for them, and it works for me who has to get a bunch of functional decks on the cheap, well, it's actually a good thing! Also, I guess some of them can fit into tribal decks I guess... :^)
I wanna thank you for your video awhile back that turned me onto Thought Slime. Watching him has helped me a lot and helped me put my feelings into words. Without you i wouldn’t’ve found him
I never accepted the "some cards are bad on purpose so players know what bad cards are like" because like, that's a very small time of a player's career after which those are just dead cards in a pack, and also that skill wouldn't be as needed if the purposely bad cards weren't made to make the power gap between good and bad cards much bigger
You have never seen the good the bad and the ugly?! Wow! You are in for a treat! What ever you do, watch it with a good sound system! "The Ecstasy of Gold" by the sadly late Per un pugno di dollari is just *chefs kiss*. It gives me goose bumps each time I think about it.
One With Nothing is not a "bad" card. It's a "johnny" or "combo" card. There are cards with combo and synergy in mind, and they may seem to be very bad outside of their niche, because they usually are.
I’m late to the party, but I quite literally choked on my coffee laughing while watching this! You are an absolute gem of a human and have quickly become my favourite creator on RUclips (sorry Professor...) Thank you so much for all that you do for the community Spice🖤
So at around 13:50 it looped, so it went from saying “they would do better to have” and then it looped to say “drafted a deck around an over expensive counterspell that they failed to cast in a meaningful way”
So, a couple of things: one the "teaching argument" has always struck me as a bit circular. "This card teaches you what a bad card is...which are things in the game because we keep making intentionally bad cards..." Seems to me like that lesson is not as useful as just...not printing the intentionally bad cards. There are more important lessons for new players to learn. In terms of printing such cards at rare, the teaching argument may be why, or it may be that printing dud rares increases the payoff gap and furthers the gambling aspects of packs. There are some rares that make a pack as close to containing 0 cards as it can get. And while this might not be intentional, it is the effect of this disparity nonetheless (but I'm not actually going to hand WotC the benefit of the doubt, they know by now exactly how much their packs are slot machines marketed at the whole family). Lastly, "mistake" cards that are on the other end of the power curve and at higher rarities has a pretty clear monetary benefit both for WotC and for secondary dealers, and a monetary hazard for players, especially post bans. And when these "experiments" happen frequently enough, well it seems like the right lessons aren't being learned, if they were ever meant to be. To be clear I am not claiming any special inside knowledge of the designers or any conspiracy on their part, but looking at the material outcomes of these cards being printed and wondering why it is they apparently aren't aware of them, or outright deny that they are happening. Again except for the gambling thing which they don't get to claim ignorance of.
Never liked the "teaching" argument either - not knowing the real value of the cards you're seeing and not being able to play optimally is already a teaching element that has players re-evaluate their cards. They don't need cards whose sole purpose is to be thrown away as a "valuable lesson".
Came to say/see roughly the same thing. I've always heard arguments for printing objectively bad cards and they just never hold up. Ultimately it's something we've all been made to live with, so we do, but we shouldn't be pretending like that status quo is actually a good thing.
Volcanic fallout is actually an amazing card and saw tournament play. It was fantastic in draft as an early bomb, and in standard burn was an excellent way to keep up damage pressure while slowing the wave of low drops.
13:15 “Without bad cards in the game, you’ll never learn to avoid them as time goes on” But you wouldn’t need to learn to avoid so many useless cards if so many useless cards didn’t exist...? It sounds like you’re saying here that purposely bad cards deserve to exist because they help solve a problem that their own existence only increases the scale of in the first place, making the game needlessly more bloated/complicated for new players. New players would eventually learn the same lessons on recognizing less effective cards due to the _accidentally_ bad cards that’d be made anyways, they would just need to waste less time and money to do so because there wouldn’t be as much garbage for them to sift through. I don’t see how making bad cards on purpose is an effective learning tool for new players, it just sounds like inefficient game design that tries to fix a problem by making it worse. Your other points make sense, it’s just this one that sticks out to me as weird.
By necessity some cards are too weak or niche to see play so there will always be "bad" cards. Knowing this, why not add a few obviously bad cards into the set to help players learn and understand that the range of power in cards is wide and uneven?
@@TheEvilCheesecake Because in my view those "bad" cards already exist, only they actually have an honest (but narrow, situational) purpose to them. Recognizing that hidden utility is already a challenge for new players to learn.
This is perhaps the biggest issue with the video which resulted in comments like yours Cards are not bad or good in a vacuum. They are only good in comparison. The cards that see play are the cards that are better or more optimised or fit better in a deck than the rest. So no matter how good you make cards, some will be better, set a new standard of what good means, and the rest wont see play and be concidered bad cards Lets take the ox for example. In a game you can cast oketra for 4 mana a vanilla 2/4 is bad. However in a game where the next best card you can cast for 4 mana is, lets say, a 2/3, the ox is suddenly good and playable. Bad cards are an inherent part of the tcgs nature. They cannot be removed, not all cards can be good by definition Bad cards made by design are more so ways to utilise the inherent bad cards in a productive way rather than existing in and of themselves because they have been designed to be bad Limited as a format also is much the same. Its a format made to offer these cards a home. Mamy tcgs don't have limited and still have bad cards, like pokemon, or indeed magic itself in the early days
My god this video has so many smart jokes, meaningful critiques, and well developed arguments. Sadly, you’re wrong and bad, it’s a real shame.
No u
I would like this but it has 420 likes already
@@rafaeldavis2615 You can like now lol
@@rafaeldavis2615 What is it with people's weird obsession with stupid numbers? You know the minute you finished posting that someone else liked it without caring. Just like the 69th like, and so will be the same with the 666th like
@@the-engneer It's just another way to say "Admire me, just look how respectful I act!"
*chuckles*
You're my favourite several cleverly disguised polish women I know
Bless you :3
As a Polish guy I have years of experience in finding Polish woman. I've to say that Rack's disguise is not as clever as he thinks. Even untrained observer should be able to see through it in less than minute into this video. Amateur.
This several cleverly disguised polish women is pretty handsome
What about your favorite cleverly disguised polish women you don’t know?
How many several cleverly disguised polish women do you know?
"one mans jank, is another mans combo piece"
making a combo with a terrible card is one of my favorite things about mtg
Me too thanks
i live for the moment i am able to assemble my rube goldberg combo
Words to be passed from generation to generation.
Your comment recieved a like from Spincrusher.
"Stop! You just experienced a reductionist perspective." is possibly the best thing that's been said on the internet.
Omg so many good crossovers, YOU EVEN GOT THE REACTIONARY REACTION GUY THAT DUDE NEVER COLLABS
Spice is actually going more insane each video and we all enjoy it very much
Can't wait for the event horizon of chaos where my content ceases to make any sense
@@Spice8Rack "Event horizon of chaos" sounds like either some bullshit Jordan Peterson would say, or a pretty good name for a band.
the event horizon would invoke within you the same identity crisis that Brian gilbert had
@@seanmurphy3430 Yup, seems pretty in line with the matriarchal world of darkness.
Twinky RUclipsrs going slowly insane is my aesthetic (poor BDG.)
I used to think One with Nothing was bad. Now I think One with Nothing is far better designed than most contemporary magic cards, if only because it's easy to remember what it does and hasn't been banned yet.
The best Magic cards are the ones that make you go “…huh.”
Tell that to the Adventure that makes a role token and has other text in the non-adventure side.@@jeezuhskriste5759
@@jeezuhskriste5759Creatures have to do something amazing when they come into play and have like 5 good abilities on top of that to be good these days. Power creep on creatures has gotten pretty bad.
@@ManaDrain315 *cough* Evoke Elementals *cough cough*
Yeah, Magic is in a very sad state right now.
that is such a ridiculously good card.
it's only bad if you are woefully inexperienced
As a Belgian I'm legally required to be impressed whenever the country is mentioned.
Same here, had to google Belgian vanilla creatures... Never heard this term before. And so does google: no results :-p lol
What if it's in the context of "King Leopold II was a bad dude who did bad things in the Congo"?
@@Icameron259 a Belgian is to be impressed they had both the knowledge and balls to speak truth. You can be proud of your nation as it currently is and still criticise it and recognise the horrendous events in it’s history.
@@michaelflamel2611 not in USA
I'm American and I approve this message
As the proud owner of the title "The Ghost of Karl Marx in 4D", hearing you giggle that made me so happy. I finally found myself in a position to be able to afford to help someone on Patreon and you were my first and only thought!!
Keep making glorious content and thank you so much for the hard work :)
Ayy! Thanks so much for the support and for the GREAT name lol
"Someone hand me my emergency copy of Atlas Shrugged!" is going to be my mantra from this point forward
This was so good what the heck. I’m always impressed with how much effort you put into these videos.
Ayy ta very much! Love your work! X
@@Spice8Rack 🥰
😯😯😯 fancy seeing you here comrade
Magic and leftist politics and I am just so happy right now.
Magic and communism, 2 of my favorite things together!
Can we talk about how creative spice makes his videos? They Are All work of art and absolutely hilarious!
:333333 You're far too kind omg
No, you're supposed leave complements to Spice with the nearest pigeon. It will find it's way.
I agree that spice is a great concentrator.
"I am offensive and I find this vanilla."
- Yargle
Murganda Petroglyphs and Yargle two card combo!!
“Wizards includes useless cards like Bonder‘s ornament”
*Angry pauper noises*
The intro to this video is the perfect mixture of irony and just cutting enough to make me concerned for Spice.
Your concern is appreciated
Spice is no more. There is only the Spicening
@@Spice8Rack You may as well put "Beep/Bop/Boop" as yer "pronouns", LOL
IDGAF.
Poe's Law is a powerful force
@@nunyadambidniss get out.
One of the things that Wizard's did some testing with was whether or not players liked drafting worse cards or cutting better cards and they found that players preferred to cut bad cards. My favorite reason though is that 99% of players have no problem giving away a huge amount of "bad" cards to new players, meaning you can get a huge amount of players learning and playing at no entry fee. If many of us think back to our first magic experiences, older players giving us free cards built out our collections and kept us coming back.
Incredibly stoked HBomb is on a SPice8Rack video!
SAME OMG
I would make some clever MTG-related pun on "breadtube", but I'm kinda stuck. Unsurprisingly, there's only one card in Magic with the word "bread" in it (Gingerbread Cabin; doesn't really work), but apparently the word "conquest" somehow doesn't appear in the name line of a single Magic: the Gathering card, which is wild to me.
@@seanmurphy3430 I mean you have the Bombs Removal Evasion Attackers Duds draft mindset
They kind of have similar talking styles of speech patterns. Coincidence that they like each other?
Dude rips off HB's humour style, so no wonder he tried to het him.
“One man’s jank is another man’s combo piece” 😂 Such a bold and true statement
He knows what's up. Can't believe Brie Larson was Magic's biggest enemy this whole time.
Brie Larson PERSONALLY ruined my life when I invested all my money in the stock market.
Idk exactly how but she did.
Thank you for your BRAVE HOT TAKE @Reactionary Reaction. What would all of us fellow ANGRY GAMERZ do without your reactions!!!
RR here: Keep PWNing those SNOWFLAKES my fellow Gamer!
Wow you actually got a DesolatorMagic Cameo in the first minute!
I thought it was the Quartering.
The way he talked about the game design and power levels was very Desolator but the anti-sjw stuff was definitely Quartering.
I was looking to see if anybody said this lmao
@@mad7monkey423 same, but i also thought it was Unsleeved Media (formerly titled MTG Headquarters) cuz I remember he got into some hot water for his, lets say, unfavorable takes
Honestly the worldbuilding in Legends of Runeterra through flavor text is sourly underrated here, I mean look at cards like Commander Ledros, She who wanders and Lissandras the Watcher and you have beautifully written flavortext that dosen't feel jarring on a card because all that *is* put into a drop down and dosen't interfere with the card or its mechanics, bar that great video as always!
I think that's fair! I'm not as well versed in LORT flavour text!
I'd like to add to that, there is a lot of "flavour text" hidden in voice lines and interactions between cards, that only occour when they are played.
It's extremely rewarding to hear what some of the characters in runterra have to say to each other after looking into some of the lore.
For a digital only Card game I find that is a very efficient way of presenting Lore, and something Magic could do with copying in Arena.
Right now Arenas Cards only spout one-liners only just a cut above the nonsense that comes from whatever Hearthstones Cards are trying to communicate.
Example: You have Lissandra anywhere on Board and Trundle enters the Battlefield.
Trundle: "King of Trolls, coming through!"
Lissandra: "King of nothing without my aid..."
The Tone is als important, but it's immediately clear that Trundle has Power through Lissandra, she is pulling the Strings though and there is something sinister about her and what she is plotting, but Trundle is oblivious to any of this, he just cares about being the King.
@@vipLink
Teemo: 'Nothing like the great outdoors!'
Draven: 'What the *fuck* is that'
The introduction to this video is a thing of beauty; so many carefully layered jokes!
Bless you for the compliment
Everything is Bree Larson’s fault.
I got like 20 seconds in, paused thinking this actually was some reactionary, and the comments have mellowed me out!
No time to sleep, Papa Spice just uploaded
**brings you a warm glass of oat milk to go with the video**
Don't you mean Daddy Spice? :D
@@Spice8Rack Oat milk is honestly just better but no one talks about it
Absolutely love how your presentation style and tone, in each video, is different. My girlfriend and I love listening to your videos as we play commander or are driving in the car! Keep them coming good sir!
Oh bless you! I'm glad you enjoy my work so much :D
"Vanillas do a great job of setting baseline expectations"
Wait, when did this became sex Ed video?
I imagine actually creating 'bad' cards, is probably much harder than creating good ones. I often think about this.
Getting shot by your own unreleased script made me lose it. The slow gun rise was funny as hell.
Took me around 45 seconds to realize I wasn’t watching a desolatormagic video.
I'd argue there's multiple layers of flavour text on CCG's, the actual text but also the often great voice lines that hearthstone (probably others) has. not to mention excepting the first few sets the flavour text of many hearthstone cards is incredibly good and the voice lines can spawn copy pastas based around them being so memorable and fun to hear.
Me watching the intro: ah. I see you've discovered Desolator Magic.
I mean, it’s actually the Quartering, but it’s true Desolator is the prototype
Whose next from Breadtube? Going to get Dan Olsen? Maybe Thought Slime? Abi from Philosophy Tube? Innuendo Studios?
Also how much more do we have to bully CommandZone to have you guest in an episode of Game Knights?!
If Cody from the Showdy were to show up, I think I might die.
@@heronator OMG CODY MUST COLLAB WITH SPICE SO I CAN DIE IN PEACE
Maybe a collab with other leftist card game RUclipsr Joseph Rothschild, aka MBT?
Omg Abi would be amazing
Contrapoints to voice Chandra please
The Ayn Rand bit was just an excuse to strike a pose at 24:58 and I ain't even mad
If Ayn Rand finds out that you're not pissed she is going to be PISSED, just kidding, she (and her fAnS) will be pissed off no matter what happens 💩🤡💩
As an indie game designer it makes me happy to see creators going into this kind of nuance about the mistakes that happen when making a game as complex as magic because it allows so much genuine conversation to happen!
I can't belive just how well Hbomberguy as Bruce Tarl fits
Oko reminds me of American politics. No one wants to think about it but we’re constantly forced to.
And it may have been fundamentally questionably designed with overly ambitious ideas and a weirdly notable lack of self awareness of its impact on future generations/formats.
#whyisElkingsomethingnotaminus
#whydoeshehavetwoplusabilities
#noreasonable2dropcankillhim
It's amazing that you were able to get desalator magic to appear in your video for the intro
I feel One with Nothing fits into “the good” more than the bad. It as part of a standard set where hand size and your opponents hand size mattered as a mechanic. Being able to discard your hand could boost creatures, blank spells, or perform other utility.
One with Nothingpilled
also its a MEME in 8walla
That guest voicings are so good every time
Not enough Vizzerdrix apologia, if you ask me. That Clipping analogy was spot on!
#ThisIsBrieLarsonsFaultSomehow ahahahaha i died immediately
Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time
Spicalicious Huit Shelf:
“WoTC keeps printing intentionally bad cards”
KONAMI: *laughs in Unmeasurable power creep*
At least there hasnt been an oko like incident (as far as i know)
@@pokekl Theres been multiple actually but thats mostly because of how YGO is fundementally set up
@@jakestavinsky3480 only one i could think of would be tour guide
@@pokekl needle fiber
@@jakestavinsky3480 pretty sure YGO is all-Oko nowadays.
That intro was desolator magic but he does it unironically
The skits in this are some of your strongest yet, absolutely adore this one
Are those X-Wing miniatures in the back there?!?!
They are! My housemate routinely beats my ass at it lmao
Can you get more of hbomberguy's normal voice reading flavour text in the future please
Great video overall! I think it does leave out the significant effect of the profit motive though. To get a bit Jim Sterling for a minute, I think some of the ideas from the loot box economy, which arguably have their origin in trading cards games, have fed back in to Magic in a toxic way.
When you consider buying a pack, you have some idea of its value, a lot of which is driven by the rare and mythic chase cards. So to drive sales, Wizards has an incentive to print a lot of big, splashy, exciting cards. But in doing so, they almost guarantee that some of those cards will break the game completely in half, and will have to be banned. So a lot of those exciting cards you're hoping to crack during the prerelease might actually end up being worthless in a few weeks or months. And if Wizards prints those cards *knowing* that this will be their strategy, that seems like deceptive advertising.
And it's never enough to just make money. Every year a business needs to make *even more* money to satisfy shareholders. So the pressure on designers gets ratcheted up all the time. That, in my opinion, is what led to the absolute avalanche of bans in 2020, where banning a clearly busted card like Fires of Invention just cleared the field for the next broken thing to take its place
I still remember the collective madness when Jace the Mindsculptor and Stoneforge Mystic was banned, and the tone of both the communication from Wizards and the response from the community have done a complete 180 since then. Emergency bans in standard went from being a colossal embarrassment which will *never be repeated* to just a routine part of the release cycle, and fans have gone from being outraged at having hundreds of dollars erased on a whim to shouting for bans right out of the gate.
All of this is to say that I think the unpredictable value (even on average) of a pack of Magic cards is a feature, not a bug, and that flavor of bad cards is a big factor.
"... quick, pass me my emergency copy of Atlas Shrugged..."
- suggesting there's more than one in the household?! Deeeesgasting!
ReactionaryReaction and Reasonableist Bear crossover when??
Reaaonableist Bear died tho :c
I keep having to rewind your video because I'm knackered from my 8h work day and I can't keep up and now I'm laughing at myself. Am I too tired for RUclips??? You pack so much into every minute, it's amazing really, love that. I'll be back after a nap.
The very aggressive grip on the microphone in the opening skit lol
Every new videos reminds me of how much i missed this content. Power bottom (better than top) notch.
Lmao excellent compliment xD
Well I think wayward guide beast has many layers to it, the surface being a 2/2 haste is great, then you get to the bounce land thing, but then you have to remember landfall is a mechanic and that this card pairs really well with other cards, it just depends on how you utilize it.
Shout out to the yugioh localization guy who decided to make the only flavor text of a highly lore-relevant main character of a major storyline be "Check this out!"
It's funny seeing Scornful Egotist with the bad cards, as in Scourge draft you could actually use it as an easy way to get a high CMC card down, which went well with cards like Rush of Knowledge and Reward the Faithful. So it's not even all that bad in the right context!
Re: Vanilla - it's worth noting Vanillas have 4 mechanical areas to explore:
1. Devotion. Maybe your Devotion to white deck wants a 1/7 for WW
2. Creature types. Maybe Crab Lackey lets you drop Crabs for free when it deals combat damage to an opponent.
3. Power & Toughness. Does a card let you draw a card whenever you cast a 4 power creature? Maybe play green's (U) 4/1 for 1G. Wait, that doesn't exist? Someone get on that. Or Pendelhaven stuff; whatever floats Memnite.
4. Vanilla creatures have no abilities. So print cards that reward you for having such creatures; maybe a legend that lets vanillas cantrip, or lets you play vanillas from the grave as though they're in your hand, etc.
The hard part about Vanillas is printing fair ones that might see constructed play. Taking advantage of 1-4 helps; but sometimes you just need to stop power creep. 2/1 for W used to be the best you got, but not that you get 2/1s for W w/ upside, Savannah Lions have bought the farm. A Catlord of Vanilla Cantrip lord or the like might help to make them fringe playable as well; but not obsoleting "the best" vanilla creatures a color gets at it's pricepoint (2/2 first strike for 1R @ (R) w/ upside? Screw you WOTC!)
Woah I can't believe you didn't credit DesolationMagic for showing up in the first minute
it's Desolator Magic not that it matters
Man, I forgot Scornful Egotist. It's my favorite bad card, if only because the gatherer discussion is plastered with "ALL HAIL THE GREAT LORD EGOTIST." It's like the more expensive Storm Crow in terms of Magic memes.
Pleasant Kenobi and Spice putting out videos referencing Rhystic Studies in one day? I smell a conspiracy
"The entire Kalemne precon..." As a tribal lover I am so hurt by this.
Love me a Spice video especially one with a spicy take. One piece of criticism/point I wished was addressed was that of "trap" cards. I don't know if there is specific terminology in the mtg community to refer to that, but in at least d&d optimization any choice that a player makes which presents itself as doing one thing but actually does that thing poorly or does something different entirely is referred to as a trap (one example of this is ironically the find traps spell, which doesn't actually tell you the locations of traps nor any hazard, with another being witch bolt, which does very poor damage for the level and is very easy to stop). The problem associated with the "traps" is that someone new to the game could choose or use it without any knowledge of why it is bad, and while for someone who really wants to learn how to identify strong vs weak abilities this could be a learning tool, for a casual player they might not understand why what they are doing is ineffective. I don't see any reason why the same principal couldn't be applied to mtg, where a new or casual player might pick up a pre-con and play with it, see they are doing poorly when compared to other decks and not have fun, but not be able to recognize why. Perhaps more people get utility out of it than develop bad preconceptions but that seems hard to demonstrate?
I have two things to add to this fantastic video!
First, while Legends of Runterra's flavortext might not be as prominent as Magic's, since you have to expand the card to read it, it is very important worldbuilding! When a new set of cards comes out, the League Lore community digs into every card to find new things that expand or start stories!
As well, with Lutri, even if you couldn't find a playgroup to play with that lets you use Lutri, you can always honor the otter by getting an art print, which is what I do with a lot of my favorite cards that aren't exactly commander playable!!
"#ThisisBrieLarsonsFaultSomehow" I'll be laughing at that one for awhile.
i think its a jab at the quartering
As someone who plays Ojamas,
a 0 ATK archetype fueled by 0 ATK vanillas
In a game about hitting the opponent with big bunguses,
The second category is what I think of when people say bad cards.
While I'm not familiar with the MtG examples,
But I have played a fair bit of the Official Anime Spin-off.
Duel Masters has multiple mechanics dedicated to using bad cards together to make them better.
For example a creature with Wave Striker is functionally a Vanilla that cannot use Vanilla support,
However when there's 2 other creatures with Wave Striker on the field,
Then all of them become effect creatures,
Usually gaining the effect of the other Wave Striker creatures on your field in addition to their own effect.
Similarly the Knight Magic mechanic introduced spells which had a creature type and the effect that they'd activate their effect twice if a creature of the associated creature type was on your field at activation.
This meant that these overpriced spells were secretly more powerful than their regular counterparts,
But required you to consciously choose between cheap reliable cards and janky but impactful cards.
This way game designers can make bad cards good, without falling into the bad on accident category.
"I'M DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO FREELY EXPERIENCE JOYYY!!!!!"
the absolute emotional miasma when you mentioned clipping in a seemingly negative-ish capacity was as amusing as it was rollercoasteresque
good point in the end
cool
COSMONAUT CROSSOVER! Spice, you know the best people on the internet
Wayward guide beast shouldn't have been one of your examples, it's super situational but because it has haste it may as well just be a 1 red sorcery that says return a land, which is super useful in that set because of all the landfall abilities plus being able to pull stuff like emeria's skyclave that you already played as lands.
Just use the YuGiOh style of limiting cards to 1 or 2 (or 3, in the case of MTG) to help fix cards that aren't broken enough to be banned but still are unhealthy for the game.
On the topic of rewording cards for balancing them post printing:
I remember that I was furious when I learned that "Eladamri, Lord of Leaves" had gotten both of his abilities reworded from "All Elves" into "Other Elf creatures"
And he has not even been reprinted, you have no chance of knowing this unless you look up the card on Gatherer (or some other mtg card site)
Yo I had no idea about that!
There's a good reason for that though : when Eladamri was printed, the Legendary supertype wasn't a thing for creatures, they just had creature type Legend.
So at the time, Eladamri himself wasn't an Elf. He didn't boost himself with the "All Elves" ability. When the creature type mess was solved and Eladamri became an Elf himself, they HAD to change the text, otherwise he would have suddenly started boosting himself, which he isn't supposed to do.
Funnily enough, this was a "change" that was precisely to KEEP the card's effect the same as it always was.
Oh, and in addition to the previous reply : considering you were upset about the Eladamri rewording, and seemed to consider it a nerf, this seems to indicate that you thought Eladamri was supposed to benefit himself (and probably unintentionally cheated with him a couple of times).
No one could blame you for that, and this is a fantastic example of how the "Legend" type sucked donkey butt back then, by causing these kinds of unintuitive interactions.
Now I'm just wondering where I can get that shirt
It was a birthday gift!
So i've been following you since your Rakos video but i don't think i've ever commented.
Just wanted to take the time to say that this was a video i enjoyed greatly, which i hadn't since your power and toughness video nearly a year ago now.
Thank you for the video, i had a blast and i hope others did too.
I can't wait for spice to have a ton more patrons and then half the run time is just the credits and him reading out his patrons
Harris reading Bruse Tarl flavor text is something I never thought I needed until I got it.
#ThisIsBrieLarsonsFaultSomehow abousletly destroyed me for a few minutes
That Atlas Shrugged bit and brief shout out to anarchist comrades was a spicy thing of beauty *chef's kiss*.
Mother Anarchy loves her children
Chad Ancoms > virgin ancaps all day
I’m sorry but I’m @6:28 currently and hearing my favorite mtg youtuber collab with my favorite ✨variety✨youtuber made me audibly gasp and I’m incredibly happy thank you so much
I was waiting for the hollow taco nail polish chick to arrive
Didn't really finish watching the video yet, just stopped to point out how absolutely wonderful is to hear Cosmonaut, Rhystic and Bomberdude in the same video. Thank you Spice, bless you, you beautiful creature.
Visions of Bodies Being Burned was such a fucking incredible album
I really liked the 10th edition-Alara block power level. So I've been proxying all the cards from after that as if they'd been created back then. So things cost more/have lower power levels and my friends have a lot of fun.
Holy shit that Atlas Shrugged segment was hilarious.
I love that you brought up clipping's Visions of bodies being burned as an example for a good follow up album!! I really love their work and you for mentioning them ^^
I personally have made weenie decks with all my bad cards, including Pillarfield Ox in order to have simple and inexpensive base decks in which I could give to younger players who would struggle with wordy cards with more than flying/vigilance/deathtouch/haste; or tap to do something simple, such as Llanowar Elf and Prodigal Sorcerer. They get so hyped to play that Tusked Collosodon or Alpha Tyrranax, even though there's probably a thousand better cards, if that's all they have, and it works for them, and it works for me who has to get a bunch of functional decks on the cheap, well, it's actually a good thing!
Also, I guess some of them can fit into tribal decks I guess... :^)
I got an LOL Dance Dance Dance add and I didn't realize it wasn't a part of your exceptional dissertation until after a few seconds had passed.
Great video, I think I laughed about as much while watching this video as during the rest of the month.
AAH! Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it! :D
I wanna thank you for your video awhile back that turned me onto Thought Slime. Watching him has helped me a lot and helped me put my feelings into words. Without you i wouldn’t’ve found him
Thought Slime is one of the best breadtubers
So this is what Rhystic Studies has been doing this past year
Tbf he released a video 5 months ago.
I never accepted the "some cards are bad on purpose so players know what bad cards are like" because like, that's a very small time of a player's career after which those are just dead cards in a pack, and also that skill wouldn't be as needed if the purposely bad cards weren't made to make the power gap between good and bad cards much bigger
Holy shit that opening scene made my week! Thank you spice lord
Bless you :3
You have never seen the good the bad and the ugly?! Wow! You are in for a treat! What ever you do, watch it with a good sound system! "The Ecstasy of Gold" by the sadly late Per un pugno di dollari is just *chefs kiss*. It gives me goose bumps each time I think about it.
One With Nothing is not a "bad" card. It's a "johnny" or "combo" card. There are cards with combo and synergy in mind, and they may seem to be very bad outside of their niche, because they usually are.
I’m late to the party, but I quite literally choked on my coffee laughing while watching this!
You are an absolute gem of a human and have quickly become my favourite creator on RUclips (sorry Professor...) Thank you so much for all that you do for the community Spice🖤
The voices in this have shaken me to my core
So at around 13:50 it looped, so it went from saying “they would do better to have” and then it looped to say “drafted a deck around an over expensive counterspell that they failed to cast in a meaningful way”
So, a couple of things: one the "teaching argument" has always struck me as a bit circular. "This card teaches you what a bad card is...which are things in the game because we keep making intentionally bad cards..." Seems to me like that lesson is not as useful as just...not printing the intentionally bad cards. There are more important lessons for new players to learn.
In terms of printing such cards at rare, the teaching argument may be why, or it may be that printing dud rares increases the payoff gap and furthers the gambling aspects of packs. There are some rares that make a pack as close to containing 0 cards as it can get. And while this might not be intentional, it is the effect of this disparity nonetheless (but I'm not actually going to hand WotC the benefit of the doubt, they know by now exactly how much their packs are slot machines marketed at the whole family).
Lastly, "mistake" cards that are on the other end of the power curve and at higher rarities has a pretty clear monetary benefit both for WotC and for secondary dealers, and a monetary hazard for players, especially post bans. And when these "experiments" happen frequently enough, well it seems like the right lessons aren't being learned, if they were ever meant to be.
To be clear I am not claiming any special inside knowledge of the designers or any conspiracy on their part, but looking at the material outcomes of these cards being printed and wondering why it is they apparently aren't aware of them, or outright deny that they are happening. Again except for the gambling thing which they don't get to claim ignorance of.
Never liked the "teaching" argument either - not knowing the real value of the cards you're seeing and not being able to play optimally is already a teaching element that has players re-evaluate their cards. They don't need cards whose sole purpose is to be thrown away as a "valuable lesson".
Came to say/see roughly the same thing. I've always heard arguments for printing objectively bad cards and they just never hold up. Ultimately it's something we've all been made to live with, so we do, but we shouldn't be pretending like that status quo is actually a good thing.
Volcanic fallout is actually an amazing card and saw tournament play. It was fantastic in draft as an early bomb, and in standard burn was an excellent way to keep up damage pressure while slowing the wave of low drops.
A classic example of Political Science major explains Magic
Someone once said "There's no such thing as a wrong threat, just a wrong answer"
13:15 “Without bad cards in the game, you’ll never learn to avoid them as time goes on”
But you wouldn’t need to learn to avoid so many useless cards if so many useless cards didn’t exist...? It sounds like you’re saying here that purposely bad cards deserve to exist because they help solve a problem that their own existence only increases the scale of in the first place, making the game needlessly more bloated/complicated for new players. New players would eventually learn the same lessons on recognizing less effective cards due to the _accidentally_ bad cards that’d be made anyways, they would just need to waste less time and money to do so because there wouldn’t be as much garbage for them to sift through. I don’t see how making bad cards on purpose is an effective learning tool for new players, it just sounds like inefficient game design that tries to fix a problem by making it worse.
Your other points make sense, it’s just this one that sticks out to me as weird.
By necessity some cards are too weak or niche to see play so there will always be "bad" cards. Knowing this, why not add a few obviously bad cards into the set to help players learn and understand that the range of power in cards is wide and uneven?
@@TheEvilCheesecake Because in my view those "bad" cards already exist, only they actually have an honest (but narrow, situational) purpose to them. Recognizing that hidden utility is already a challenge for new players to learn.
This is perhaps the biggest issue with the video which resulted in comments like yours
Cards are not bad or good in a vacuum. They are only good in comparison. The cards that see play are the cards that are better or more optimised or fit better in a deck than the rest.
So no matter how good you make cards, some will be better, set a new standard of what good means, and the rest wont see play and be concidered bad cards
Lets take the ox for example. In a game you can cast oketra for 4 mana a vanilla 2/4 is bad. However in a game where the next best card you can cast for 4 mana is, lets say, a 2/3, the ox is suddenly good and playable.
Bad cards are an inherent part of the tcgs nature. They cannot be removed, not all cards can be good by definition
Bad cards made by design are more so ways to utilise the inherent bad cards in a productive way rather than existing in and of themselves because they have been designed to be bad
Limited as a format also is much the same. Its a format made to offer these cards a home. Mamy tcgs don't have limited and still have bad cards, like pokemon, or indeed magic itself in the early days
I had to do a double take! Another Spice8Rack video? Today's my lucky day! Great work as always, Mr. Spice :)