@@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.
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 :)
@@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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!"
24:23 FWIW, the Commander RC's statement that their rules and bans are "just suggestions and you should talk with your playgroup" is comically out of touch with the reality of the format they write rules for. Sure, a large percentage of Commander players are kitchen table players with a small group they can talk to about house bans and house rules, but they grossly underestimate the people playing with relative strangers at their local game stores, or playing with total strangers at big Magic events or similar. In those scenarios, I'm quite frankly not going to ask if they're cool with avoiding any of their decks which contain Command Tower, Sol Ring, Counterspell because they're too broken, any deck with a color identity of three or more, and also don't play Stax, Control, or Aggro. (To be clear, I'm fine playing against all these things and am being hyperbolic, but I've definitely seen house rule lists where I'm genuinely not clear how they even play Magic at all with everything they don't allow.) I'm going to ask if they think they've got something strong, casual, or somewhere in between, then pick a deck to match. Like I want to just grab a member the RC by the shoulders and tell them "believe it or not, there are people who are either too shy to ask their group to ban something in house for them, or are playing with people they don't know and the only common expectation they can reasonably bring to the table is the existing rules and bans." I have literally not met a single person in real life who thinks the RC's leaning on rule 0 is a valid stance. Magic as a community is just a different place from when these guys started playing and created their format, and it absolutely shows.
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?!
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 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 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 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.
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
Great vid on one of the points I sell Magic to my friends, that it's not just a game, but is also a great story (mostly) and the games we play are (stupidly hilarious) stories in themselves
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
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
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
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.
re: Oko lessons learned... the thing is I feel like they don't actually learn. If you look back even further to 2011/2012 they have a similar article about hwo they know they have to be especially careful when it comes to the abilities and design they put onto three mana planeswalkers after printing Liliana of the Veil. If you look at them just on the face, Oko is even stronger than she was coming in with more loyalty, a +2 and a +1 rather than a +1 and a -1, and he ultimates at 5 loyalty (not that you're likely to use that skill) compared to her 6. So how did they learn from her as an experiment if he was still put out? I do hope they learn their lessons... but I do also think they sometimes ignore lessons they should have learned in order to try to drum up excitement and/or sales
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.
Hey Spice! There's this game called Manalink from the 90s by Wizards and a small community keeps updating it to allow almost all cards up to the recent sets in it. You can play against AI with whatever cards you want, no restrictions, commander, draft, and more. I think it's something awesome to check out!
People give up on it? That's a shame. I downloaded it but don't know too much about the community. It seems like they could really do with some extra word of mouth because I don't want it to die, I love the idea of using any card I want against AI to play commander. There's just so many decks I want to make but I don't have enough people to play paper with.
17:20 It makes me happy that you share this story because all too often people defend children's media making bad suggestions like that with "No kid would ever do that." Kids love to imitate things they see in media.
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!
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 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!!
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”
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?
Three things: 1. Great video spice you’re wonderful. 2. I feel the need to acknowledge that you dumped cards all over your floor for a failed bit 3. For the ‘ugly’ cards, I really wish so many of them weren’t my favorite colors. Wizards I can appreciate experimenting, but stop making Simic so broken, please.
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
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.
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 don't quite get the "set the baseline" argument. You can set the baseline just fine by printing cards with an actual use... that also show what you get for that mana cost. My biggest "bad card" issue is that, especially nowadays, common and uncommon creatures are almost always strictly smaller statwise than rares and mythics at the same cost (and with better abilities).
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 ^^
Bad creative cards I can understand. Sometimes your just have to discard your hand. However, a lot of shit is just under valued, made for draft where your just need a random stat block, or another debatable group where they're seeing how far they can stretch a bad mechanic, like gain 5 life for 1 mana which is never needed but we're creeping closer to 8 for 3 with drawing a card
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... :^)
13:02 I remember my first deck of magic had the combo, Lumbering Satyr, Jorael Empress of the Beasts, and Kavu Recluse. I just have to have Kavu Recluse on the field to turn my opponent's land into a forest, play Jorael, drop the Lumbering Satyr to give everything forestwalk, and on the fourth turn I can discard two cards to swing with whatever number of forests I have for hopefully 20 damage.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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
Omg so many good crossovers, YOU EVEN GOT THE REACTIONARY REACTION GUY THAT DUDE NEVER COLLABS
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
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!
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
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.
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.
"Someone hand me my emergency copy of Atlas Shrugged!" is going to be my mantra from this point forward
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.
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.
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!
"I am offensive and I find this vanilla."
- Yargle
Murganda Petroglyphs and Yargle two card combo!!
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
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
“Wizards includes useless cards like Bonder‘s ornament”
*Angry pauper noises*
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!
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'
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
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.
I imagine actually creating 'bad' cards, is probably much harder than creating good ones. I often think about this.
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.
"Vanillas do a great job of setting baseline expectations"
Wait, when did this became sex Ed video?
Getting shot by your own unreleased script made me lose it. The slow gun rise was funny as hell.
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!"
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
24:23 FWIW, the Commander RC's statement that their rules and bans are "just suggestions and you should talk with your playgroup" is comically out of touch with the reality of the format they write rules for. Sure, a large percentage of Commander players are kitchen table players with a small group they can talk to about house bans and house rules, but they grossly underestimate the people playing with relative strangers at their local game stores, or playing with total strangers at big Magic events or similar. In those scenarios, I'm quite frankly not going to ask if they're cool with avoiding any of their decks which contain Command Tower, Sol Ring, Counterspell because they're too broken, any deck with a color identity of three or more, and also don't play Stax, Control, or Aggro. (To be clear, I'm fine playing against all these things and am being hyperbolic, but I've definitely seen house rule lists where I'm genuinely not clear how they even play Magic at all with everything they don't allow.) I'm going to ask if they think they've got something strong, casual, or somewhere in between, then pick a deck to match. Like I want to just grab a member the RC by the shoulders and tell them "believe it or not, there are people who are either too shy to ask their group to ban something in house for them, or are playing with people they don't know and the only common expectation they can reasonably bring to the table is the existing rules and bans." I have literally not met a single person in real life who thinks the RC's leaning on rule 0 is a valid stance. Magic as a community is just a different place from when these guys started playing and created their format, and it absolutely shows.
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
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!)
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!
That guest voicings are so good every time
The skits in this are some of your strongest yet, absolutely adore this one
It's amazing that you were able to get desalator magic to appear in your video for the intro
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 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!
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
That intro was desolator magic but he does it unironically
Great vid on one of the points I sell Magic to my friends, that it's not just a game, but is also a great story (mostly) and the games we play are (stupidly hilarious) stories in themselves
Every new videos reminds me of how much i missed this content. Power bottom (better than top) notch.
Lmao excellent compliment xD
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
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
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
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
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.
re: Oko lessons learned... the thing is I feel like they don't actually learn. If you look back even further to 2011/2012 they have a similar article about hwo they know they have to be especially careful when it comes to the abilities and design they put onto three mana planeswalkers after printing Liliana of the Veil. If you look at them just on the face, Oko is even stronger than she was coming in with more loyalty, a +2 and a +1 rather than a +1 and a -1, and he ultimates at 5 loyalty (not that you're likely to use that skill) compared to her 6. So how did they learn from her as an experiment if he was still put out?
I do hope they learn their lessons... but I do also think they sometimes ignore lessons they should have learned in order to try to drum up excitement and/or sales
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.
"... quick, pass me my emergency copy of Atlas Shrugged..."
- suggesting there's more than one in the household?! Deeeesgasting!
The very aggressive grip on the microphone in the opening skit lol
Hey Spice! There's this game called Manalink from the 90s by Wizards and a small community keeps updating it to allow almost all cards up to the recent sets in it. You can play against AI with whatever cards you want, no restrictions, commander, draft, and more. I think it's something awesome to check out!
I remember mana link It keeps surviving through people giving up on it
People give up on it? That's a shame. I downloaded it but don't know too much about the community. It seems like they could really do with some extra word of mouth because I don't want it to die, I love the idea of using any card I want against AI to play commander. There's just so many decks I want to make but I don't have enough people to play paper with.
@@Thomas-vn6cr well I'm not sure now might stilk be going on
All I know is that the 2020 December patch added stuff up to Theros Beyond Death and its awesome. I wonder if there's any similar games to Manalink.
ReactionaryReaction and Reasonableist Bear crossover when??
Reaaonableist Bear died tho :c
17:20 It makes me happy that you share this story because all too often people defend children's media making bad suggestions like that with "No kid would ever do that." Kids love to imitate things they see in media.
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!
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.
Pleasant Kenobi and Spice putting out videos referencing Rhystic Studies in one day? I smell a conspiracy
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 ahahahaha i died immediately
Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time
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”
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?
Three things:
1. Great video spice you’re wonderful.
2. I feel the need to acknowledge that you dumped cards all over your floor for a failed bit
3. For the ‘ugly’ cards, I really wish so many of them weren’t my favorite colors. Wizards I can appreciate experimenting, but stop making Simic so broken, please.
"I'M DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO FREELY EXPERIENCE JOYYY!!!!!"
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
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
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.
COSMONAUT CROSSOVER! Spice, you know the best people on the internet
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
Now I'm just wondering where I can get that shirt
It was a birthday gift!
I don't quite get the "set the baseline" argument. You can set the baseline just fine by printing cards with an actual use... that also show what you get for that mana cost.
My biggest "bad card" issue is that, especially nowadays, common and uncommon creatures are almost always strictly smaller statwise than rares and mythics at the same cost (and with better abilities).
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 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
Bad creative cards I can understand. Sometimes your just have to discard your hand. However, a lot of shit is just under valued, made for draft where your just need a random stat block, or another debatable group where they're seeing how far they can stretch a bad mechanic, like gain 5 life for 1 mana which is never needed but we're creeping closer to 8 for 3 with drawing a card
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.
So this is what Rhystic Studies has been doing this past year
Tbf he released a video 5 months ago.
13:02 I remember my first deck of magic had the combo, Lumbering Satyr, Jorael Empress of the Beasts, and Kavu Recluse. I just have to have Kavu Recluse on the field to turn my opponent's land into a forest, play Jorael, drop the Lumbering Satyr to give everything forestwalk, and on the fourth turn I can discard two cards to swing with whatever number of forests I have for hopefully 20 damage.
#ThisIsBrieLarsonsFaultSomehow abousletly destroyed me for a few minutes
Now I am far too distracted by this question.
Are you a rotating roster of disguised polish women or just 3 stacked on top of each other?
"#ThisisBrieLarsonsFaultSomehow" I'll be laughing at that one for awhile.
i think its a jab at the quartering
I had to do a double take! Another Spice8Rack video? Today's my lucky day! Great work as always, Mr. Spice :)
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.
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.
Visions of Bodies Being Burned was such a fucking incredible album
Harris reading Bruse Tarl flavor text is something I never thought I needed until I got 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
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.
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.
Cosmonaut variety hour was unexpected and definitely unwanted
Holy shit that opening scene made my week! Thank you spice lord
Bless you :3
@24:06, you said this about 3.5 years earlier than the world needed to hear lol
Thank you for reminding the future world