@@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 :)
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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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!
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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!
00:49 I mean attempting to be "Woke" over making a good product usually results with a bad product, but that isn't what makes a bad card. Fallen Empires wasn't particularly Woke, but managed to include some astonishingly bad cards.
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.
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 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.
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
Also, if they only printed good cards, power creep would roll out of control and then you'll end up with 2 mana 8/8's with haste and lose by turn 3 (over exaggerating to make a point) They would have to always print better cards than the cards before, and the previously good cards would become bad
Why MTG makes bad cards Long answer: 1.- Teaching new players to recognize good cards by placing them in preconstructed decks hoping they will eventually come around to replacing them with better cards or cards that work in a cohesive way with the rest of the deck. 2.- Little snippets of lore and flavour you can play with enticing players to want to learn more about the world the game is based by collecting other cards. Plus an easy filler to add a theme to the factions of the game. 3.- A way to add variety to gameplay for other competitive formats such as limited. Short answer: MONEY BABYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
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.
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.
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”
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.
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 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!!
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 ^^
The term "bad card" here is too broad; I think we need to draw a distinction between "useless outside of limited" and "niche playable" cards. Take Gates; these are "bad limited fixer" cards, but the Gate subtype has let WOTC slowly build around them, making them fringe playable in Standard, Pioneer, and Commander. Are Gates good? NOPE! But Gates aren't BAD. Compare this to STX's Campuses. Campuses are Gates, but with no subtype, and an overcosted Scry ability. No cards interact with Gates in the set. No cards benefit from scrying in the set. The cards play the same limited role as Gates, but without the constructed upside. Also, I hate strictly worse cards within the same set. Hill Giant is strictly worse than Roc of Kher Ridges, so if I open them both in the same booster, I don't get a choice. But suppose Hill Giant had been a 4/4 for 3R, and Roc of Kher Ridges a 3/3 flyer for 3R. Now I have a choice. I probably still go with the Roc, but there may be reasons for me to prefer the Giant over the Roc. In contrast, a person who takes the 3/3 Hill Giant over the 3/3 flying Roc just doesn't understand the game. They've made a clearly bad choice, and giving players the option to make that kind of choice takes away from the game, rather than adds to it. Also, each year they publish more than 1,000 cards. I kind of wish they rotate some (C)/(U) through standard more often, like the Grinning Ignus in STX. It might be good, it might be bad, but it's no Hill Giant. (I'd also like to see some more "vanilla" payoffs, so the top-of-the-line 1/5 for 1W, 1/3 for W, or 3/3 for GG can have a "vanilla tribal" deck.)
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... :^)
Scornful Egotist came in torment with a card or two with "highest cmc" and "+x/+x\-x/-x where X is the highest cmc of creatures you control." A friend of mine Miv Nizzet'd me with that.
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
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🖤
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.
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
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 think my favourite bad card is Aquus Steed from Return to Ravnica as it is just terrible in so many ways. Not only is it another low power/toughness to CMC like most other bad cards (a 1/3 for 3U), it has the single worst activated ability I've seen in the form of 2U T: target creature gets -2/-0 until end of turn. So not only are you removing a blocker you're also spending vital mana on reducing 2 entire damage points; and worst of all, you already have blue cards in RTR that can do its job better: Need a blocker, use Hover Barrier, need a 4CMC creature? Use a Runewing. Insist on a 3CMC activated ability that blocks, you have Doorkeeper for that and it is half the mana cost! Thank you for reading this essay on why Aquus Steed is the worst.
Nope. Just play LoR and you will see that the game feels WAY better when the variance in powerlevel between cards is thin. There will never be any good reason to continue having busted cards alongside useless ones in the same drafting pack.
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.
"many cards exist to teach you to avoid them" - but if they never were there, you never would have problems avoiding them and therefore wouldn't have to be taught on that. I agree with bad cards which are good in specific situations (which can fix the meta game of converging into few same decks) or well adapted to their limited environment and bad outside, as well as very specific combo pieces which function only in handful of decks over decades of sets. But having bad cards on purpose, also vanillas with intentionally increased mana costs, does not make any sense to me, no matter how you turn it. And I experienced that myself when designing my own card game (still in development). And connecting strength to rarity is in my opinion just a bad decision considering people are addicted to TCGs and spend way too much money just to get the overpowered rares (overpowered in regard of manacost vs. effect compared to cards with similar cost or effect; rares are *almost* always better in of both) EDIT: Yes, I agree with the precons and having bad cards there which must be replaced. This is part of the fun and makes decks more individual. However, you do not need a universally bad card for this, you can simply put cards into precons which just don't synergize that well or at all (which is basically the difinition of a bad card), but would still find use in other decks. Having cards which are not used in any decks are just a waste of design space and card board, which could be filled with beautiful masterpieces otherwise.
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?
"Stop! You just experienced a reductionist perspective." is possibly the best thing that's been said on the internet.
"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.
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
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.)
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
"I am offensive and I find this vanilla."
- Yargle
Murganda Petroglyphs and Yargle two card combo!!
"Someone hand me my emergency copy of Atlas Shrugged!" is going to be my mantra from this point forward
“Wizards includes useless cards like Bonder‘s ornament”
*Angry pauper noises*
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“One man’s jank is another man’s combo piece” 😂 Such a bold and true statement
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!
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!
Getting shot by your own unreleased script made me lose it. The slow gun rise was funny as hell.
I imagine actually creating 'bad' cards, is probably much harder than creating good ones. I often think about this.
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!
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
Took me around 45 seconds to realize I wasn’t watching a desolatormagic video.
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
"Vanillas do a great job of setting baseline expectations"
Wait, when did this became sex Ed video?
I can't belive just how well Hbomberguy as Bruce Tarl fits
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.
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
That intro was desolator magic but he does it unironically
That guest voicings are so good every time
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
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!
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 💩🤡💩
Are those X-Wing miniatures in the back there?!?!
They are! My housemate routinely beats my ass at it lmao
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
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
Not enough Vizzerdrix apologia, if you ask me. That Clipping analogy was spot on!
It's amazing that you were able to get desalator magic to appear in your video for the intro
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!)
Can you get more of hbomberguy's normal voice reading flavour text in the future please
ReactionaryReaction and Reasonableist Bear crossover when??
Reaaonableist Bear died tho :c
Every new videos reminds me of how much i missed this content. Power bottom (better than top) notch.
Lmao excellent compliment xD
"... quick, pass me my emergency copy of Atlas Shrugged..."
- suggesting there's more than one in the household?! Deeeesgasting!
The skits in this are some of your strongest yet, absolutely adore this one
The very aggressive grip on the microphone in the opening skit lol
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.
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.
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.
#ThisIsBrieLarsonsFaultSomehow abousletly destroyed me for a few minutes
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!
Pleasant Kenobi and Spice putting out videos referencing Rhystic Studies in one day? I smell a conspiracy
00:49
I mean attempting to be "Woke" over making a good product usually results with a bad product, but that isn't what makes a bad card.
Fallen Empires wasn't particularly Woke, but managed to include some astonishingly bad cards.
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'M DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO FREELY EXPERIENCE JOYYY!!!!!"
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.
COSMONAUT CROSSOVER! Spice, you know the best people on the internet
#ThisIsBrieLarsonsFaultSomehow ahahahaha i died immediately
Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time
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 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 entire Kalemne precon..." As a tribal lover I am so hurt by this.
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
Visions of Bodies Being Burned was such a fucking incredible album
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
Also, if they only printed good cards, power creep would roll out of control and then you'll end up with 2 mana 8/8's with haste and lose by turn 3 (over exaggerating to make a point)
They would have to always print better cards than the cards before, and the previously good cards would become bad
"#ThisisBrieLarsonsFaultSomehow" I'll be laughing at that one for awhile.
i think its a jab at the quartering
Now I'm just wondering where I can get that shirt
It was a birthday gift!
Why MTG makes bad cards
Long answer:
1.- Teaching new players to recognize good cards by placing them in preconstructed decks hoping they will eventually come around to replacing them with better cards or cards that work in a cohesive way with the rest of the deck.
2.- Little snippets of lore and flavour you can play with enticing players to want to learn more about the world the game is based by collecting other cards. Plus an easy filler to add a theme to the factions of the game.
3.- A way to add variety to gameplay for other competitive formats such as limited.
Short answer: MONEY BABYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
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.
So this is what Rhystic Studies has been doing this past year
Tbf he released a video 5 months ago.
A classic example of Political Science major explains Magic
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.
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”
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.
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
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!!
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 ^^
The voices in this have shaken me to my core
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
The term "bad card" here is too broad; I think we need to draw a distinction between "useless outside of limited" and "niche playable" cards. Take Gates; these are "bad limited fixer" cards, but the Gate subtype has let WOTC slowly build around them, making them fringe playable in Standard, Pioneer, and Commander. Are Gates good? NOPE! But Gates aren't BAD.
Compare this to STX's Campuses. Campuses are Gates, but with no subtype, and an overcosted Scry ability. No cards interact with Gates in the set. No cards benefit from scrying in the set. The cards play the same limited role as Gates, but without the constructed upside.
Also, I hate strictly worse cards within the same set. Hill Giant is strictly worse than Roc of Kher Ridges, so if I open them both in the same booster, I don't get a choice.
But suppose Hill Giant had been a 4/4 for 3R, and Roc of Kher Ridges a 3/3 flyer for 3R. Now I have a choice. I probably still go with the Roc, but there may be reasons for me to prefer the Giant over the Roc. In contrast, a person who takes the 3/3 Hill Giant over the 3/3 flying Roc just doesn't understand the game. They've made a clearly bad choice, and giving players the option to make that kind of choice takes away from the game, rather than adds to it.
Also, each year they publish more than 1,000 cards. I kind of wish they rotate some (C)/(U) through standard more often, like the Grinning Ignus in STX. It might be good, it might be bad, but it's no Hill Giant. (I'd also like to see some more "vanilla" payoffs, so the top-of-the-line 1/5 for 1W, 1/3 for W, or 3/3 for GG can have a "vanilla tribal" deck.)
Harris reading Bruse Tarl flavor text is something I never thought I needed until I got it.
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... :^)
Holy shit that Atlas Shrugged segment was hilarious.
Scornful Egotist came in torment with a card or two with "highest cmc" and "+x/+x\-x/-x where X is the highest cmc of creatures you control."
A friend of mine Miv Nizzet'd me with that.
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
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
im already smiling seeing himwalk onto the camera
Wahoo :3
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🖤
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.
Holy shit that opening scene made my week! Thank you spice lord
Bless you :3
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
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 think my favourite bad card is Aquus Steed from Return to Ravnica as it is just terrible in so many ways. Not only is it another low power/toughness to CMC like most other bad cards (a 1/3 for 3U), it has the single worst activated ability I've seen in the form of 2U T: target creature gets -2/-0 until end of turn. So not only are you removing a blocker you're also spending vital mana on reducing 2 entire damage points; and worst of all, you already have blue cards in RTR that can do its job better: Need a blocker, use Hover Barrier, need a 4CMC creature? Use a Runewing. Insist on a 3CMC activated ability that blocks, you have Doorkeeper for that and it is half the mana cost!
Thank you for reading this essay on why Aquus Steed is the worst.
Nope. Just play LoR and you will see that the game feels WAY better when the variance in powerlevel between cards is thin. There will never be any good reason to continue having busted cards alongside useless ones in the same drafting pack.
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.
"many cards exist to teach you to avoid them" - but if they never were there, you never would have problems avoiding them and therefore wouldn't have to be taught on that.
I agree with bad cards which are good in specific situations (which can fix the meta game of converging into few same decks) or well adapted to their limited environment and bad outside, as well as very specific combo pieces which function only in handful of decks over decades of sets. But having bad cards on purpose, also vanillas with intentionally increased mana costs, does not make any sense to me, no matter how you turn it. And I experienced that myself when designing my own card game (still in development). And connecting strength to rarity is in my opinion just a bad decision considering people are addicted to TCGs and spend way too much money just to get the overpowered rares (overpowered in regard of manacost vs. effect compared to cards with similar cost or effect; rares are *almost* always better in of both)
EDIT: Yes, I agree with the precons and having bad cards there which must be replaced. This is part of the fun and makes decks more individual. However, you do not need a universally bad card for this, you can simply put cards into precons which just don't synergize that well or at all (which is basically the difinition of a bad card), but would still find use in other decks. Having cards which are not used in any decks are just a waste of design space and card board, which could be filled with beautiful masterpieces otherwise.
Unloading a bunch of smells is absolutely something that Magic players are known for