It's Saturday, October 3rd 2015, 9:35am CST. You're hungover at a PTQ in Omaha, Nebraska. You drove two hours to get here. Sitting across from you at the stained picnic table is that one guy from every LGS in middle America who spent $550 on a playset of Vryn's Prodigy, and with a straight face you cannot hope to replicate, registers his deck as "MOIST JUND" (sic.) The air is pungent, it smells like sour cream and cheddar ruffles, and whatever mold is growing in the AC system and under the carpet. It is (somehow and miraculously) unrelated to the ethanol conversion overclocking your liver and seeping from what feels like every pour in your forehead. I mean there is a *real* stench in the room. Behind you are two children yelling. The autumn sun seeping through the grubby windows stirs in you a profound nostalgia that doubles as dread. You consider shuffling. Moist Jund Matt gives you a "high roll?" and, in the same breath, launches two (mini) Chessex black D6's with pink pips across his playmat and into your half-crossed arms. Everything hurts. And one day, without a measure of irony or remorse, you will look back and miss this.
What stands out to me as somebody that stopped playing (luckily, and by happenstance) right before MH1 hit, and was primarily a Modern player - seeing a Modern list that contains close to 0 cards that I recognize from that pre-MH era is insane. A format whose whole identity was that you could invest into a deck and be set for basically the lifetime of the format, save for a small upgrade here and there when a random card from Standard would be playable for your archetype, is now a format that is in a constant nuclear arms race with itself. RIP to what Modern was, which was IMO the pinnacle of what TCG’s can be.
I am not sure it was the pinnacle of anything... It was like Legacy with bad counterspells and slower combo. Far from how Magic was supposed to be played. For sure there were many way cooler standard formats
"You can just convince your entire playgroup to play within a difficult-to-define set of boundaries before every game to get around the problems in card design!" You never hear anyone say this aboot Vintage
Also how is anyone going to have this conversation with their playgroup if when anyone brings up design flaws in recent printings, someone just wants to plug their ears and yell. Like, ultimately yes I agree that EDH is still a flexible format and that you can get a lot of different experiences out of it depending on what table you play at, but getting upset when people try to have these conversations doesn't help anyone; and I see it happen way too often.
I have fluctuating play groups. I need to either adhere to a common standard, or change the deck list any time I play with a different group. Group rules are nice and all, but solid standards in the overall game are preferable.
The sad thing is that discussion just isn't working. The older designers on the team seem to be getting worse about digging in their heels and doubling down on bad decisions. There's this visible undertone like, "Well, of course our cards will look broken when you play them wrong. That's a you problem."
I think a key point here is that every non-chaff card is getting so mechanically dense that it's just getting harder and harder to fully evaluate or understand new cards. People joked about Questing Beast's design but now that's just the norm.
It’s very different from 1 on 1. 1vs1 you know exactly what’s going on the board state, and your plan to win or interact with your opponent. But EDH is way out of control. You don’t know everything that’s going on. All the cards have full text boxes so you don’t realize everything the cards do. You forget things do things. You get confused because you don’t see interactions coming. Or can’t stop it because you are more focused on another player.
Back in the day, Wizards was terrified that doing this stuff would kill the game. They were terrified of recreating Time Spiral and Lorwyn limited because there were so many moving pieces that it was very hard to keep track of. But now, because they basically just design for commander, they don't care how complicated their designs are.
I would say that commander has suffered more as a format than most people realize. It used to be a fun format about beating your opponent with big janky creatures. Now it's been powercrept to the point that every commander set add a new broken staple card that you must play.
Moxfield has a feature called "packages" where you can create a group of cards and import them en mass during deck construction. Every time I build a new EDH deck I import my "EDH Starter Kit" package and the deck automatically fills in 50 or 60 cards.
Yes and no. At least in Commander you can play what you want, and focus on fun. If your deck is built to win 1 out of every 4 games, and the rest of your pod is the same, then it's perfect. In Modern I can't roll into FNM, where the only stakes is just that store credit for the evening, with a deck pre-LOTR and expect to win.
Why do you "have to play" these cards? Who is holding the gun to your head? EDH is not a tournament Format, just ask the table if they want to play meme decks or lower power decks.
I definitely hate the commanderification of all magic cards. but also because it doesn't even help commander. I hate seeing commander super-staples every game. the power level of commander is so pushed up now that when you're like "yeah my deck's a 6" that usually still includes things like Rhystic and Tithe. These cards do have a place in higher power games, but one of my fav ways to play Magic is to dig into my collection and assemble commander decks from what I have. Then slowly buy cards I think are cool and will work well. I try to avoid cramming super staples into everything because the game just gets boring really fast.
It really doesnt matter for commander, since its not a tournament format. You can just decide not to play with or against cards you dont like, its that easy
Then dont play EDH if you dont like it. Its Part of the format to check with the table what you want to play. cEDH and casual meme decks cant really be in the same game. In tournament Formats, this discussion doesnt happen because everyone knows the "goal of the game" is to win, so you should build your deck to win. In EDH the goal of the game isnt always to win.
@@ich3730 If you're justifying the design requiring people to have drawn-out arguments before playing the game with "then don't play the game", that's not a good defence. Game design should make things fun, and certainly shouldn't be encouraging you to not play at all.
@@danielcornwall1585it's healthy to discuss expectations for Commander groups. Walking in with a land destruction deck or a CEDH in a group that plays lower power level is a power imbalance and the player should develop a more reasonable deck for the group.
Wizards has kept printing product and saying “if you aren’t satisfied with this product then it isn’t for you” and I fear they’re going to keep doing that until the game of Magic isn’t ‘for’ anyone anymore, it’s just to sell cards to collectors.
If it's not for anyone it isn't for collectors either. If the game has no players the collector market will basically collapse along with wotc. Beyond a certain few cards most will lose all their value. Then eventually with no players, new cards, or interest the cards will have little to no collector value outside of a select few like the lotus or one ring.
It's not so much that "Magic is copying Yu-Gi-Oh's design" as "Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh design are now operating under the same set of incentives." Yu-Gi-Oh has been subject to rampant power/complexity creep over the years because, unlike Magic, they didn't have the reset button of rotation to help keep things in check. Magic managed to control this, to some extent, back when the main format they were designing for was Standard. Now that they're primarily designing for a non-rotating format, (Commander) they're stuck in the same arms race as Yu-Gi-Oh designers, so it's only natural that they will reach some of the same conclusions. Now, saying "we have adopted the Yu-Gi-Oh method of rotation," on the other hand, is absolutely true.
Yugioh and many other Japanese TCGs somehow got it in their heads in around 2015 that players only enjoy the pop off turns where everything lines up and you go nuts and win. It seems to be the same conclusion WotC came to later when people became obsessed with Voltrons or infinites in EDH. Who cares about healthy play patterns when you can reprint this strange piece of an infinite combo in a precon and print a Legendary creature into a standard set that happens to facilitate it with perfect color identity and make a couple bucks?
The most egregious part of this is that initially commander was a reprieve from competitive play and powercreep, since people showed up with whatever dogwater cards they had lying around and just did whatever. Commander shouldn't need powercreep to sell cards; novel effects which allow you to do goofy things should be enough, since most casual tables will literally allow you to do things to see you pop off. WotC's shift to focus primarily on commander is hurting all of MtG including commander. 2024 commander is dogshit compared to playing it in like 2017
@zyroberk I'll gladly admit that rotation is not the ONLY way to combat power creep, but I'd be very interested in hearing what you're basing the claim that "Magic has proven this" on, especially when all evidence I have seen demonstrates that Magic has proven the exact opposite. Is your argument just, "Magic has always had power creep, therefore your argument is invalid"? If so, that is just... such a terrible argument that I don't even know what to say. Compare the power creep between, say, Alpha and Siege Rhino, at the time the most terribly power crept creature ever, over a period of OVER 20 YEARS, vs. the power creep we've seen just over the past 4-5 years, since Commander has started to eclipse Standard in popularity. Yes, creatures were weak in Alpha, but it took them decades to get there. Meanwhile, over just the past few years, powerhouses like Snapcaster, Tarmogoyf, and Bob have been rendered unplayable. Moreover, how do you explain the fact that, while creatures have been power crept steadily over the years, other spells generally have not? (At least, up until the past few years, of course.) And even more importantly than THAT, how do you explain the difference in power creep between Magic, which has had relatively little, and games like Yu-Gi-Oh, which do not have rotation? Like I said, I'll admit that there are other ways to combat power creep, and corelation does not necessarily mean causation, but when you've got such incredibly strong corelation between lack of rotation and power creep, there's most likely something there. Again, I apologize if I'm putting words in your mouth, here, but I literally can't imagine what data you're basing this claim on. If Wizards has released some kind of study or lessons learned document that supports this idea, please let me know!
A knock-on effect of the length and complexity of rules text that I rarely see discussed is that flavor text necessarily suffers because the cards simply don't have the space to exposit the nature of the world and characters. In theory this mean's we'd get more external material like novels and short stories, which isn't ideal but has worked in the past. In practice the worlds and stories just feel half-baked.
I would actually argue the opposite. Flavor Text imo was never good at World building, it was mostly puns, quotes or dry exposition. With more complex designs, cards can tell stories through gameplay. Like sagas can convey a story without ever breaking immersion. Or how a character can be shown to be evil through their gameplay, instead of writing "yo this guy mad bad" at the bottom.
@@ich3730 Hard disagree. Flavor text adds a distinct richness to the game. Look no further than Mirage with the Love Song of Night and Day. The reason older villains like Lim-Dul are still remembered and referenced by players and WotC today is that we had those quotes and bits of exposition that informed us of their character. Those bits of lore provide necessary context to the thousandth card that kills a creature with a spooky guy casting a purple swoosh in the art. More importantly, the flavor is one of the first interactions new players are going to have with the game's lore. Those scraps of story and setting help get people invested so they can unfortunately go online and read all of the bad webfiction WotC graciously supplies us.
@@mg95594 thats fair, especially since new players need some kind of opening to get to the story. But still, for me no flavor text in the world beats a design like feldon of the third path, where ability and lore work hand in hand. Bringing a creature back as an artifact that only lives for a turn perfectly reflecting his backstory through gameplay. Or something a bit more whack like shaharazad, bringing the arabian tale to life through gameplay. Flavor text imo always reduces it to "just reading". Like, i can just read a book if i want to read a story directly told to me. But experiencing a story through gameplay mechanics? Thats unique to games as a medium.
@@ich3730 *"Flavor Text imo was never good at World building, it was mostly puns, quotes or dry exposition."* Jesus christ, this is what nearly 10 years of horrendous flavor texts do to a community. Go back and look at older sets, you'll find creative use of flavor text all over the place. You will find some puns and a few quotes, I'll give you that, but they were used sparingly and more importantly, tastefully. In comparison, modern flavor text are mostly marvel-tier quips, forced jokes and, as you said, dry exposition. Most lore fans I know have been screaming for the heads of the flavor department for years. I could go on for hours about some of the best flavor texts and how they heavily contributed to the creation of some of the best planes in MtG's history, but I don't even know if I can do it justice Honestly, just reading the flavor of the Alara or Lorwyn blocks should stand on its own. If you want some specific examples, look up the "flavor text of the day" series by Loreseeker. Most cards in that series don't have a modern card frame and it's not by accident...
It feels like there is a lot of "Because commander players want this/that" and blaming commander players rather than WotC Commander design. I can only speak for myself and the people I know - and The Professor from Tolarian Community College says this too - we didn't ask for this. We didn't want this. Don't blame us. We hate it too.
As a commander player from before dedicated commander product and cards, I was fine with just picking cards out of standard releases that fit my decks. I never needed cards meant for the format. I liked that the format was a build your own adventure using any magic card in history, I thought that was the coolest thing.
@@dominiciannucci5217 definitely agree. The fact that half of edh decks are now made of "made for edh" cards is so unfathomably cringe it makes me hate the format.
@jellyfrosh9102 - That is just factuand demonstrably wrong. Command Tower doesn't break the game. The multiplayer lands were designed for commander but can work outsode of it to, as there are many multiplayer formats - though many of them fail. Moreover, there are many designs which got better because of Commander. Wordings like "twice your starting life total" instead of 40 life and so forth. The command zone is officially where emblems go, so "every" game of magic has the command zone, even draft, byt they aren't all commander games and rhat doesn't brwak the game. Insstead, it made it better because now there is a place for emblems and companions and so forth. In the past, there was no distinction for cards that were exiled vs your sideboard vs your binder and so forth. There was just "outside the game" and removed from the game. Now, there are better defined zones. So, no. I understand what you mean, but you are incorrect.
One aspect of Fable is that it synergizes with nearly *anything* your deck is doing. It's an enchantment for enchantment decks, it makes treasures for artifact sac decks, it fills the graveyard for reanimator, it lets you copy ETB creatures.
Wait, even in the first Jund section... Isn't Bloodbraid Elf one of the OG hated, bad-play-patterns cards, where it's impossible (unless the opponent gets unlucky) to answer cleanly with a 1-for-1, and sometimes does nightmarish things like Bloodbraid Elf -> Blightning? I remember SO much Bloodbraid Elf hate from back in the day. I agree, however, about Tarmogoyf; while it's POSSIBLE for a "merely large" creature for it to be too good, "it's merely large and it dies to removal" are pretty great arguments in favor of a card's fairness! While the old "it dies to removal so it's bad" jokes aren't accurate, "it dies to removal so it's fair" is usually correct or correct-ish.
Elf was a bad card because Cascade is a bad mechanic, which was proven when the Discover mechanic broke Pioneer. Bloodbraid was a problem card (and still is on occasion), yet it pales in comparison to things like the Scam game plan.
Yes but you're looking at Bloodblaid Elf in a vacuum which isn't the point of that section or the video at all. The point was "look at the medium power level of this deck".
It's because while there are valid points with clearly pushed cards, they also complain about basic power creep which happens in all games. I love amnio2 content but there are genuine times it just feels like pure complaining vs real criticism
@@FreshPrinceOfBelA17 That is a criticism they engage directly. It's not the power creep, it's the power explosion that took place with the release of Throne of Eldraine and Modern Horizons.
@@pirakalord55 I don't see them as Explosion because the mechanics from some of these cards are old enchantment effects just put on creatures and walkers
@pirakalord55 modern needed the shake up. Pre mh the format was a slog and considering the worst of Mh was hogakk. Mh2 just made ppl who hated mh, hate mh2 as well. I've been playing mtg since 2015 and I enjoy being able to know metas and be able to play multiple viable decks vs like 3 or 4
From my experience Rule Zero only works among friends in a dedicated play group. Out in the wild, Rule Zero never goes beyond figuring out if we are playing cEDH, or just playing casual.
@@masonfoster151 People miss evaluate all the time. Just because you have some janky win combo it doesn't mean your deck isn't high powered. I've heard but my dockside lets me cast my big dumb creature, or I'm not drawing anything good off my rhystic study so many times.
Yeah, Rule 0 *can* work in some places, but there's lots of decks that just run Dockside/etc and it's basically just a step under cEDH, just without the fast mana/interaction and instead more gas. One LGS I end up going to has a sign up you tick if you play cEDH or casual, and then they pair you off. It is iffy at best as sometimes you'll get into a pod where you're playing slightly upgraded precons vs sometimes someone is entomb reanimating a broodlord saw in half combo in Magar and you have to just accept that, which makes in infuriating that nobody is actually playing interaction so you just gotta pray you're the only person deciding to interact at the table. Let alone the fact that people just inherently do not ever pay for Rhystic Study in the wild, so it becomes 2U: idk draw as much as you want.
You don’t need power creep in rotating formats, which is the initial way Magic was built. As strong cards leave standard, the weaker cards are given a time to shine. Unfortunately with new design, the new cards bully out the previous set, so rotation is just a formality anyway. Eternal formats are not “eternal” if deck lists are just showcases of the last 5 standard and horizon sets.
Despite its other shortcoming, the fact that a competitive metadeck in the Pokemon TCG is fucking 30-50$ just shows how much standard pricing sucks, let alone other formats
@@williamdrum9899 Magic decks, even standard deck, were also 250$+ back then. I've been playing since 1996 and i also played competitively around 2011/12, decks were that expensive
@@williamdrum9899 there’s been exceptions but magic has always been pricier even for standard. I played a ton in khans standard like near ten years ago and most decks would be $300+. If Pokémon’s gotten cheaper recently that’s great magic should too
there's also another thing about ignoring powerful meta cards, yes you can ignore them and not play with them but you better be ready to play against them
At the risk of sounding like a boomer, I think Oath of the Gatewatch was the moment this game took a sharp spiral. It's such an obvious turning point where they saw the mainstream success of the Avengers and turned the game into the cardboard equivalent of "bigger and bigger CGI explosions and fanservice"
It may have happened a little sooner, or a little later, but it definitely happened around this time period. I enjoyed Khans of Tarkir a lot, especially because it was the first time Wizards grew a pair and finally reprinted some fetchlands, but at the same time, that was the beginning of Commander Precons and a disastrously restrictive Reprint policy. Theros/Khans Standard was some of the most fun I ever had with the game, but it was also the precipice for which power creep would never return us to.
it's insane to see how far we've come since 2015/16. siege rhino was a 4/5 for 4 with big upside and immediately forced into modern, BFZ standard had 4-colour hell piles and $100+ flip Jace, and now these and many more are pretty much unplayable garbage. @@shuttlecrossing1433
The absolute saturation of things you have to remember to avoid getting into an illegal game state is absolutely out of hand, especially in 4 player EDH. This speaks to the larger trend of WotC trying to push players into the digital formats, where these issues are contained within the programming playing the game for you.
I remember when Baneslayer Angel was considered a game winner... Now everything is a combination of "commander horizons" set, powercreeped to sell more packs and designed to work on arena but not really in paper.
1:57:00 as a person who runs a card shop and goes to local game store each week, the problem with current prices is that the card is so back breaking that it commands a $30+ so to make up for that everything else is dirt cheap, this sounds like a good thing until you realized 1. It’s unprofitable to have standard cards besides the big hits and 2. No one wants to sell us standard since they will get nothing price wise. This cause a bigger barrier to entry that’s not good for anyone
I always thought one of the biggest problems for singles prices was Collector Boosters flooding the market with more "low tier" rares while not significantly affected the supply of "chase rares" like Sheoldred, Fable, etc. Thoughts?
@@AmmiO2 tbh I don’t think the problem is chase rares, it’s stupid how expensive some of them are, magic has always have cards that are a cut from the rest, for example when Jace the mind sculpter was in worldwake people crack those packs to death trying to find one for standard, including people cracking till they got one and reselling the rest of the packs. But cards from that set still had value in its packs at the time. The real problem is that foils are actively worse to pool, when you used to open a foil, it would be usual double the price of the card, sometimes more, sometimes less. Now it’s the same price because how many foils are out in the wild. A foil rare and a non foil rare are the same price now, and magic players fall into 2 camps. The person who just wants to play the card and the people who want bling. The people who want to just play the card gravitate towards non foil since they won’t Pringle, people who want the bling gravate to the showcase with special foils. So standard foils do not have a home nowadays. And you see when foils are more limited (for example timespiral remastered having one pack) they retail value better or even the battles since it was only foil and no foil the rares retain that double price compared to everything else.
One other thing about Bonecrusher Giant...you look at that cycle, and Bonecrusher is the only one with zero downside. Brazen Borrower can only block flyers. Murderous Rider costs life, can't be recurred, and is only a 2/3. Lovestruck Beast can't attack without a 1/1. Giant Killer ties up resources. Meanwhile Bonecrusher Giant is an undercosted body with 3 positive abilities and the adventure half ALWAYS has a target, even if it's face. It's just so pushed.
In looking through the most unfun cards on the collage, I counted them up and the least of them are in White/Green/Colorless, while the most are Blue/Black/Red, particularly Red. I don't know if that means anything.
@@refuse2lose1985 at what point did I say that it was "not that good?" I said that it was MID, as in average. I've got it as a SB card a Rakdos Pioneer Shadow build that I run. It isn't the best card.
Soul cauldron's ability order is following the template. Effects that are available off the battlefield -> cast altering effects -> static effects -> Triggered abilities -> activated abilities
Another problem with cards like Inti is they are a wall of texts with various mechanics bunched together. Old cards with wall of texts had few mechanics attached to it, it was just a long text to do very little in the end most of the time. With so many cards like this being released at high pace, it makes memorizing what they do more of a hassle. Also, lot of games devoid into more reading and less playing. Draft are less fun overall. EDH is slower by nature of format, but with all the reading interruption it can become a slugfest.
I’d hear all the time how modern is self correcting the format is eternal cards do not change etc etc so I got into magic from yugioh wanting card interaction and fair trades then two weeks later modern horizon came out lmao
Agreed. I came over to MtG from YGO because YGO became too powercrept and stale for me and I was craving thoughtful deckbuilding and interaction. It feels like Magic started losing that almost immediately after I started getting into it. I was worried it was just me starting to see cracks in the system that might’ve been there all along, but the more I dug into the game’s history, the more fair older cards (specifically pre-War of the Spark) seemed, and how slow and gradual the powercreep felt until recently.
Play pauper. It's a commons only format but it's highly interactive and for the most insulated from wotc and their power creep. There are things that do trickle down and shake things up but they're not terrible and there's still room for creativity. Plus there's PDH (Pauper Dragon Highlander) that's the pauper version of commander and it's what I've been playing a lot with my play group because I've given up on regular commander at this point as well
@@passedjudgements4729 I definitely built elves in pauper elves and goblins were always something I was really nostalgic about when I tried playing mtg when I was way younger I agree I love pauper it’s like legacy lite lol
My biggest complaint is that you bring up the Oko canard repeatedly. I don't believe that bullshit for one second. They absolutely knew what people would use Oko for. They may not have known how disastrous it would be, but they are shoveling mountains of shit when they say the utility took them by surprise. I think that's another, more subtle aspect of the game's decline: WotC will just lie to you. Whether it's Mark Rosewater trying to shepherd players to his line of thinking, lying about the secondary market, or R&D covering their asses, WotC has been increasingly dishonest with the player base.
Oh, WotC knew damn well how Oko would break the meta of every formats just like they knew how OP the One Ring would be. It's just a way to assure that booster boxes get sold. Put 1 or 2 extremely high value mythic rare into a set, wait for that set to be completely sold, and then AND ONLY THEN ban the card. As I like to say, one of the issue with the game is that the company that makes the game shouldn't be the same that decide what card gets banned, its a classic case of vested investments against the consumer. If WotC wanted to make easy money, they would reprint cards from the no reprint list, but again I only see a vested investment in this case why they don't print it. Why? Because everyone at the top OWNS those very cards that are worth fortune. If they didn't owned them, the wouldn't care and print them into oblivion, honestly they don't care about what cards get a reprint or not. But since so manyof the people inside the business have those cards that are worth hundreds if not thousands, they obviously don't reprint them for the day where they will want to sell them. Like wise, I firmly believe that before distribution of a new set, the same people have pocketed a few of the cards that will have value to "re"sale them in the secondary market.
I think the problem we've seen is that actually Oko and One Ring are not very powerful cards. They are not Storm, you know? The problem is that they exist in the sludgey modern environment where every single deck is entirely about value and grinding.
@@lostalone9320 This is literally the opposite of reality. Storm cards are not broken, the storm _mechanic_ is broken. Oko and TOR are absolutely broken. TOR is because it protects you, allowing you to chain multiple copies (which conveniently resets burden counters). Oko is because it permanently neutralizes creatures on a plus ability while also being cheap at 3 cmc. It also wins on an empty board, but that's just icing on the removal cake.
@@lostalone9320 I could understand saying that The One Ring isn't a very powerful card outside of a grindy matchup, it's a 4-drop artifact that draws you 1 card the turn you play it and drains your life total, but Oko is an incredibly powerful card. A 3-drop that turns whatever you want into a 3/3 elk each turn as a is objectively a very powerful effect, the worst that Oko can be is a sorcery speed generous gift, the best it can be is a persistent elk-factory that removes any of your opponent's utility and yokes up any and all of your smaller creatures. Fundamentally if any card is so strong that leaving it on the board for more than a single turn is virtually always a guaranteed loss, that card is a very powerful card and Oko very much fits that criteria.
I encourage everyone to go to the wayback machine and search up old standard deck prices through the years, and also the cost of modern and legacy and their metagames.
@@StickyBombLauncher Also the most expensive period of standard ever was Khans-BFZ because every standard deck was running 12-16 fetches. Standard is currently much, much lower than its highs. You're also right that modern has gone down but people also complain about "rotation" with new sets. I think it's ultimately kinda a wash with modern because deck price is down (and the cheap deck is about as cheap as ever) but you may have to pay more to upgrade later. It's also a format with bans - as a mox opal enjoyer I had an extensive part of the $$ invested into the format bricked because of a ban. I can see how people get upset with new sets ruining things but that "feels bad" has always been a part of the format. It's funny because I do consider myself a "magic boomer" compared to some (appreciation for old cards, designs, etc.) but compared to the people in this vid / pod or w/e I'm a fucking zoomer. There are real problems with the way cards are designed and I think they can tone it down some but I just don't feel like a lot of people complaining have actually tried to experience these formats as they exist. Yes the game has heavily changed but when we talk about UW control... they're complaining that people who don't understand the format don't know what to play around? That's always been the case they just aren't use to the new designs so they feel stronger about it. At a certain point you have to realize the games changed. Also they don't even talk about my biggest issues with new card design which is all the fucking widgets I'm keeping track of. Roles, maps, etc.
Really enjoy these videos as someone who's trying to get into Modern for the first time - it's good historical context as to why things are the way there are when I go to FNM.
About a month ago I was telling one of my friends the best thing that could happen to MTG is if they just stopped printing new cards. Full stopped then people could figure out what formats and restrictions actually lead to fun games.
I'm a very ex-magic player now, I quit the tournament scene back during Combo Winter, when Recurring Survival was the dominating threat. We had started as kids making up our own cards and games around Ice Age, and it was pure fun, then as it got more serious and high pressure that fun went away. So I understand and relate to everything in this video, and the only thing that surprises me is that it lasted this long, before it got this bad.
I don’t consider Commander to be “Casual” anymore. Casual to me denotes 2 things, it is not competitive and it is not costly. For example, a Standard Merfolk deck costs $300. A casual Merfolk decks costs $40. Way back when, EDH decks were filled with Jank that didn’t see competitive play, and because of that many cards in the decks were “bulk rares”, and very cheap. But now a Commander decks has like $500 value. Or atleast Way Higher than a $20 or $30 casual 60 card deck would. I get it’s not Competitive, we need a new term to differentiate between a casual budget deck and whatever a $500 Commander deck is. And that’s being generous, we’ve all run into Many Many Commander decks that are $2,000+.
1:10:19 This is a point that's a bit off base. Cards have gotten more wordy, but a lot of the Ojer cards are very "grokable". They're conceptually simple cards that need wordy explanations in order to fit magic's syntaxt and legal rule text standards. Ojer Axonil is especially simple despite how long his text is. If I sit down with a friend who has rarely ever played MtG and he sees Axonil for the first time i can tell him "My red burn effects do damage equal to Axonil's power, not their stated value." that's instantly understandable. A lot of newer cards are longwinded but conceptually easy to understand and intuit. Taq is "if you'd make a guy you make 3 of him". The saga praetors are way way worse because they just have many unrelated effects, not many moving parts that ultimately culminate in one cohesive effect. Ironically, I think Axonil illustrates a totally unrelated, also recent bad design philosophy though! Axonil's text bloat is owed to the fact he has lots of little conditions that are meant to eliminiate "feel bad" moments. He only changes the power of red burn effects if they hit an opponent, not yourself, and he only changes the power of them if it would increase the damage dealt. This is a ton of text just to saw off the actually interesting edge cases where you could decrease an axonil player's damage output with a minus power effect, or make an axonil player kill themselves with symmetrical burn by pumping their creature. All to make sure a player is never punished for the ramifications of their own card. If Dark Confidant was created today it would say "if this would decrease your life total to 0, instead exile that card face down".
And Dark Confidant would be a 3/2 ; ) I disagree with you about Ojer Axonil being grokable but putting that aside, the complexity problem compounds when you have _so many_ cards like it even if them some of them would be fine individually.
To be fair, for the first point, this is literally what happens with Endymion, the Mighty Master of Magic in Yugioh. Endymion really only has 3 effects that just have a bunch of restrictions and costs, but it is infamous for just being very wordy to the point that it's confusing despite the actual effects themselves being quite simple (Remove counters to special summon from pendulum zone, negation effect, search spell on death).
One thing I noticed is you didn’t mention was how it’s seeming that more and more cards and mechanic’s are being designed for digital. You seemed like you were starting to talk about that with the gatcha cards but ended up going in a different direction. In my opinion the day and night mechanic is a good example of this, because once introduced it has to be continually tracked because even if the card that introduced it is removed you or your opponent may have something that has day/nightbound. I believe the prof did a video about this and I was just a bit surprised that you didn’t mention it especially because you had said that things are getting harder to track due to double faced card and how complicated those cards in question are
Agreed. A lot of the cards that are dropping nowadays are quite hard to keep track of if you’re playing in paper. They were definitely designed with Arena in mind.
@@akshooter271 It's not hard its just annoying because if you mess up and forget (something not impossible if you only run one daybound creature as a 4 of) and then it gets reintroduced its a mess
I think some of what you're contributing to 'designing for commander' is actually more a result of 'designing for Arena'. Specifically the white kills everything issue. In a best-of-one environment, you can't really include situational cards in your deck and can't sideboard, so you need stuff that can interact with anything you come up against. I concur that it's made the game worse, but don't think it's strictly a designing for commander issue.
@@SmashCentralOfficialBest of 1 is very popular because it let's people have fun with playing weird off-meta strategies. Past game 1, your opponent will just sideboard and beat you everytime.
It is jaw dropping to hear someone decry Inti for having too much variance when, 10 minutes earlier, reminiscing fondly about Bloodbraid Elf. The most common play pattern for Inti in my cube, thus far, have been 1: Play Inti and attack with a 1 drop. 2: discard a card, put a counter on the one drop, exile a card that is uncastable due to it being only turn two. 3: Opponent untaps, kills Inti and takes their free 2-for-1 because the opponent discarded a card for a measly +1/+1 counter. Like, Inti is a fun build around but far from backbreaking. Sure, left unchecked it can threaten to take over a game, but the exact same thing could be said about Dark Confidant. And if we're talking variance, Bob flipping lands two turns in a row and drawing a spell for your draw step for the turn is borderline game over. Confidant has the same variance issues Inti has where the top of your library determines how broken he is. Edit: And I know we're not praising Aetherling, right? I won a ton of games back in the day playing INN/RTR UW Control, and that is one of the most miserable cards ever printed. Insinuating you could interact with it is a straight up lie. The control player just waits until 8 mana, casts it with two blue up, and says go. If you'd somehow been saving three hard removal spells, you could three-for-one yourself to kill it, in which case they'd just Rev to find another. It's the one card I've seen more players tilt off against because it was utterly uninteractable with.
You've completely missed the point. The main problem is the power level. Aetherling requires actual investment. You have to get to a substantial amount of mana to protect it and continue investing that mana for the remainder of the game. The same isn't the case for present day control finishers. I also dislike the variance from BBE and Bob, but again, the issue is the power level. If you discard a card to Inti while tapped out then you're (probably) playing the card wrong.
@@AmmiO2 I disagree with only power level being enough to be a problem, you compared pioneer to standard, obviously pioneer will have a more powerful answer, also there is counterplays such as edicts and wipes and cards indeed are a resource so it can happen that they are forced to slap turn 5-6 with too little protection like 1 or 2 cards in hand and then if neither is a land, you removed something of value from them, also 3/5 is not the biggest body of the world to trade. Those issues are indeed so big that dream trawler wasn't even the standard wincon at the time of the video, it is Regal Caracal, which just screams draft rare Now if you compare to current standard's uw control, most win cons are heavily flawed Ezrim: uses a really limited resource to protect itself and also costs mana Jace: pretty matchup reliant because milling the opponent is too slow on most matchups (other than control mirrors and domain) Horn whale: works both as removal early game but actually slow/awkward to be placed (compared to the last wincon) and despite having ward is still removable Hullbreaker horror: The slowest one but with most inevitability...if you have cards. However, I played a lot with it and on that point it is decently common that is not the case and then is actually the most unprotected one, also you don't permanently deal with the removal, just slows it down, you need more cards to slow it down again next turn
@@drugsdelaney2907 watched more of the video here, this is just heartbreaking and makes me incredibly sad. the simple fix to all of this is to just slow down, give them the time to put out quality products instead of constantly pushing. it's sad and heartbreaking, good for no one
@@LizaPlz I’m extremely bummed about it as I’ve been playing for 30 years and I can remember when I loved the game so much that I thought I’d never quit. I was able to get paid to teach kids how to play through the ymca and also at comic con. Maybe it was always unhealthy consumerism idk, but I feel dirty supporting this game any longer.
@@drugsdelaney2907 RIGHT EXACTLY I've been playing since 2015 and I'm like man I will never stop playing this game there is just so much talent here and now I'm openly happy to bash the company on their decisions, both Hasbro and wotc
I've been playing since 2010 (Rise of the Eldrazi) and thought I'd never stop. Played almost all the formats: Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, EDH, Booster Draft, Sealed, Cube. Now I don't have fun in tournaments anymore, win or lose. Atlanta might've been my last tournament, although I can't say I've quit completely since I haven't sold my collection.
I agree with most of your points. Here’s the thing. They no longer design for what we love. 1vs1, where resources matter, colors have limitations. They design for multiplayer, where there is no Aggro, everything draws a card, colors don’t matter they all do everything. Once you realize this is what they are doing, yea it still sucks. But it’s their plan, their aim. We just have to accept that.
A change in direction that inti demonstrates is putting payoffs directly onto the engine cards. Whenever you discard exile and play this turn is a really exciting engine to build around. But you dont even need to build around it for it to be good. Old engines were much more about having to build a deck around them. I think over time they changed this because too many engine cards werent good because they were too reliant on being turned on, so they started turning them on by default
In Drive to Work, Rosewater occassionally touches on "AB mechanics", meaning any mechanic which has a set up-pay off dynamic. Discard is an AB mechanic for instance, there are cards which discard cards, and cards which benefit from being discarded. Rosewater posited that AB mechanics were inherently bricky because you often simply drew only one half of the interaction, or you had a board state where the A half was more expensive than the B half and it ruined your curve to utilize them together. In the podcast he said the solution to AB mechanics was to either create modal cards that could be A or B, or a small selection of cards that were both A and B (and tuned down as a result of their flexibility). In addition to the As and Bs of AB mechanics, there are also Cs. These are persistent engines which neither facilitate an action or benefit from the action being applied to them, but provide value as a third wheel whenever the mechanic is engaged with. Let's go back to discard as an example. The A is cards which discard cards. The B is cards that benefit from being discarded. Cs in this context are value engines which can neither discard cards nor do something when discarded, but accrue some sort of value when you discard another card. Aristocrats often have C cards too, cards which neither sacrifice things nor are sacrificed, but do something when another sacrifice happens. A common deckbuilding mistake among new players is to fill their deck with tons of C cards to extract hypothetical maximum value from playing A cards. Sometimes they'll make A+C cards, but restrict the C bonuses to only cards affected by its own A function. A lot of planeswalkers were initially like this. A lot of play cards from exile engines are like this. All of the problems with AB(C) mechanics are exacerbated by the commander format. Finding your As, your Bs, and your Cs in a timely fashion in a 100 card singleton format is a nightmare. So you're going to see a lot of A+B cards, B+C cards, and A+C cards. Maybe even some A+B+C cards. The other thing you're going to see is cards that are continuous engines which have ETBs attached to guarantee a minimum value threshold. "When you attack or ETB", "during your upkeep or ETB", "ETB or when something else ETBs".
I think that might be the wrong way to look at it, if 20% of cards in a set are broken thats definitely still bad design, even if the remaining 80 are perfectly fair.
I personally don't think the modern card designs is what ruined magic or currently killing it (though companion was probably the absolute worst idea in recent memory), no what's currently making MTG in such dire straits is how WotC is handling their product: - Giving us too much of it in so little time, with spoiler seasons being too frequent, and close to each other, having too many universes beyond crossovers products in one year, shilling out huge products with little actual card value in said products not making it worth buying, not reprinting valuable cards that desperately need reprints more consistently, over saturating the market with promo, gift and collector's product and having such extremely rushed and shitty storytelling that ultimately contribute to more shitty product (MOM: Aftermath). The cards within these sets aren't necessarily bad as a whole, but certain cards are hella pushed and will most likely become extremely expensive over time due to staplehood and possibly not seeing reprints due to being in a crossover product (hello one ring), though those are honestly outliers in generally fine card design. No I would say the way WotC is doleing out the product is doing far worse for the state of MtG's health. Especially since they have been focusing too much on Commander and not focusing on the health of their other formats due to the fact Commander makes them the most money as a format. Even though in business sense it makes sense why they are doing this, and considering how badly the rest of the company in Hasbro is doing, their forcibly pushing WotC to sell what makes them the most money, which further diludes and creates problems with the products they cater to those business sense mindsets. The only reason I am optimistic about the upcoming year is that I like the fact they are taking a risk with new planes that aren't simply revisits like yet another ravnica set like recently, although I will admit that one at least I feel was handled well. I really am curious about Outlaws of Thunder Juction and the redwall inspired set Bloomburrow, which has me the most excited. Overall I think the health of the game and its deterioration is due to this overreliance of pushing out too much product, not giving much value in newer products to warrant the large price tags and too much focus on commander on the main format to be pushed.
1:37:25 in the hypergeometric calculator, it shows the probability is 0.06, but the graphic mistakenly states that as 0.06%, not 6%. A hypergeometric calculator is not actually necessary here since it’s only a sample of one, the probability is just 3/50 which gives you the 6%.
Coming from a primarily Yugioh background, most of this sounds like the problems Yugioh has been dealing with for nearly a decade. The person is chat is spot on. Yugioh's philosophy of bad untested design to sell sets that power creep everything else with the balancer of simply banning mistakes has made me become entirely disillusioned with Yugioh. I can see through this video that Magic did the same thing.
Has been an issue since 1999, Yugioh has been a design mess since release (lots of old game cards are like that tbh), the powercreep everyone complains really just started in 2015-2016
I remember when the base set of the game was ONLY reprints. So the main buyers were new player interested in standard long term and collectors that might be wanting the newest art versions of card they might already like. Between the creation of the Mythic rarity and the decision to add new cards for standard in the yearly base set, the fix was in. This is not a game meant to be played. It's meant to be collected, and playing is a secondary goal. Commander is both worse and tragic. A format meant for casuals to play all the cards that simply weren't good enough for constructed formats now is being overrun with staples being made every single product. It's absurd.
This presentation articulated a lot of things that I had felt, but hadnt sat down to really process properly. One of the biggest casulties of this power creeping, wall of texts is the flavor lore. The story in general is practically non existant at this point.
@@tobomy Power should wax and wane. In the past (Pre Hasbro getting their hands into things) Wizards would purposely print lower-powered sets to scale back on the power creep, increasing the overall longevity of the game. See: Invasion/Odyssey and the OG Kamigawa blocks. The problem now that Hasbro is constantly looking at quarterly gains, you can't scale back the power ever, because the lower powered sets aren't purchase incentives.
@@patterofheads256 MKM is selling poorly atm, because players don't like it, looks like everything is weak except a few utility cards... so expect higher powered sets in the near future to compensate for it.
Love Dylan's thought that Limited (specifically on Arena) is only getting better. Unlike the rares and mythics that are being pushed to absurd limits to ensure people buy things, commons and uncommons are now being designed with limited in mind, meaning good play patterns and interesting limited formats are the goal. Nobody's buying new sets for the commons. But drafts are getting butts in seats, they're getting Arena players to spend their gems, they're increasing the EV of prerelease events. And it doesn't matter how complicated the mechanics get when you have arena doing all the legwork for you. I've recently switched to playing primarily digital limited and it's been tons of fun.
re: Inti.... remember what a big deal it was in Shadows over Innistrad when red got it's first vanilla bear? When people want to try to say the game hasn't been pushed, this is a good reference point.
When you point out the situation of "opponent has 4 mana so you have to guess if that means you'll run into Emperor, Deluge, or Absorb" it felt like a bit of a weak argument to me because the "healthy" RTR era list you show earlier has the potential to do the exact same stuff with 2 mana - you either attack and enable Azorius Charm, cast a spell and run into Syncopate, or do nothing and let them Think Twice. Also, while I can understand the dislike for Teferi HoD, I think it's also worth keeping in mind that control usually doesn't want to have to rely on Aetherling style cards to close out games, and that's not a new thing at all. Like how Elixir of Immortality let players like Ivan Floch in that famous Pro Tour completely drop ways to close out games. It's always better for them if their win condition is incidental, either through lands (going all the way back to stuff like Kjeldoran Outpost, or more recently but still predating Aetherling, Celestial Colonnade) or through stuff that does other things in the meantime like planeswalkers ("planeswalker that draws cards, removes stuff, and wins the game" can describe JTMS just as much as it can Teferi). Also weird to point to Shark Typhoon when it's just a colourshifted (and a bit stronger to be fair) Decree of Justice. Making blockers at instant speed while drawing a card has been a thing for a long time.
@@AmmiO2 I'd agree with Emperor since it's pretty unique in what it does, but not the rest. Absorb is not a new card. Deluge is very good but many 4 cost instant speed draw spell could be used in its place and do similar things. Would it be any different if it were Fact or Fiction instead? Teferi is analogous to JTMS. Shark Typhoon is better overall than Decree, but I think power creeping a card from 2003 isn't really a big deal. And I don't think the Ward on Hall of Storm Giants is problematic when activating it still trades down on mana with commonly played removal spells like Fatal Push or Get Lost.
I played in RTR standard and while you're correct in finding the similarity, it never felt as back breaking if you "guessed wrong". Now if you don't attack into emperor and they deluge, you likely put your opponent in a position where they can easily beat you. All of the examples you stated in RTR were one for ones. All of the 4 mana examples are 2 for 1 minimum
I think a big part of the complication of magic is the departure from the block structure, obv it wouldve happened anyways but the way sets are released, theres always one or two pushed cards for each mechanic so it sticks out, and each set needs a new mechanic
On the Collage segment: -Atraxa isn't very fun, but Reanimator and Show & Tell need some good cards, and it's nowhere near as bad as Griselbrand -Blood Moon is a fair card. -Boseiju can die in hell forever -Rhinos is too good, but if they did a trimming ban on something like Dead//Gone or some other part of it that only it runs, it'd be more reasonable -Companions are annoying, because nobody is playing them in a fair way. They're basically all broken, or their restrictions aren't big enough and that's a design failure for sure -DRC is insane, but without Murktide lurking 5 steps behind it in the alley it would only be half the threat it is now -Some of the pitch elementals from MH2 are fine. It's just the red and black ones that ruin your gameplay experience lol -Force of Negation is an important card for the safety of the format -Force of Vigor should only break one thing, it's not reasonable to have it go card neutral with the opponent at zero mana -Amulet is a fair deck without Urza's Saga. I know amulet players have it in their opener 101% of the time, but I promise it's not as bad as it seems XD -Karn the Great Creator isn't the card I hate the most in Magic, but it's within the top 25. Designers need to think before they just print shit like this... -Narset is anti-fun, but that's just how some cards are. She doesn't block, and if you're behind then she's almost always the last spell you cast before you pick up your cards lol -Three-feri is some bullshit. I hate it more than Karn, but not quite as much as Ugin... -Do you really hate the 1-mana cyclers from LotR? I'm surprised, I wasn't expecting that -Murktide is the glue desperately holding Legacy Delver together. I could see it being banned in other formats, but not there -Orcish Bowmasters is a massive feels-bad, but it's as fair as anything else. It's just there to beat the shit out of control and combo decks -Mind Goblin (namesticker) is one of those things where I'm still sitting around waiting for Wizards to call it all a prank and ban all the cards from that set, taking off the silver border was PURE GREED on their part and nothing from it should exist in competitive (sorry comet, you're a good boy but we're putting you in the woodchipper) -Five-feri is a reasonable card. Nothing more to add. -The One Ring was pushed way too far. I don't have anything witty to say, it's just too much... Maybe if it was naturally restricted to one copy per deck? -Thoughtseize is annoying, fair magic. You wouldn't complain about Counterspell, would you? -Tibalt's Trickery is one of those cards we all know is fucking terrible in a fair sense, and only exists for degenerate reasons. Just... no. -Underworld Breach is wacky, what with it granting everything Escape for the turn, but it's not THAT much more egregious than Past in Flames. -Beanstalk is wild. I was tired of the green card advantage enchantments always costing 3, but this is too much... It should have only counted green spells, or it shouldn't have drawn a card on entry. -Urza's Saga, much like its namesake, is way too broken. I enjoy the options it gives, but maybe flip abilities two and three? Ehhh... that looks broken as well, fuck -Archon of Cruelty falls under the same umbrella as Atraxa; it's just another giant reanimator/S&T/Creativity body, and they're basically all the same - it kills the opponent, and the deck would have roughly the same winrate if it was substituted for anything else in the pool. -Hammer is fun and dumb. Remember the argentum armour decks back in Zendikar? that's what this feels like, it feels like someone going all-in and praying, like any combo deck lol -Creativity is an interesting design. It's inherently begging to be broken in bad and unfun ways, but it's so easy to interact with, it's about as close to fair as combo gets -Transmogrify is an effect that's been around forever with polymorph, it's NOT a recent design problem at all. -Ragavan is the monkey that haunts my nightmares, he makes me big sad. -The TRON lands are fine, there are enough checks and balances in place that they can never get TOO out of hand -Wren and Six should be illegal -Yawgmoth is what happens when the intern forgets to include a (1) in the activation cost of an ability that DRAWS FUCKING CARDS WITHOUT TAPPING -Silly Vampire is silly, moving on -Curious Obsession ruined my arena experience for months, but that's because it's a cesspool of BO-1's and needs to be marched in front of a firing squad -Fable is really good. I can see the arguments that it's too good, but it's a hard sell that any one part is too much. -Greasefang into Parhelion is the kind of shit Timmy lives for, and while sometimes design goes too far, this is a safe thing to include in magic -Inti is pretty good. Still don't think it's game-breaking, but it's a fine card. -Lotus field should have had shroud, and there's nothing anyone can say to convince me otherwise -Mayhem Devil should cost 4, the effect is a little too good on a fair body -Quintorius fails basic design, including Discover (card advantage and/or mana cheating) PLUS a strong passive ability on a card type that should only be generating incremental value once per turn. Holy shit they need to stop printing planeswalkers with whole-ass enchantments baked in -Smuggler's Copter was definitely pushed when it was printed, but that was in 2016, but that's 3 years before the estimated collapse of design so I'm giving it a pass (it's still really strong tho) -Treasure Cruise is medium in a lot of formats, but damn does it shine in pioneer. I wouldn't call it bad design, unless we're going to lump together all Delve cards and put them in the "affronts against God" box -All that Glitters is a blight on the land. I appreciate strong aggro cards that reward deckbuilding, like Tempered Steel where the card itself can't attack, and has both hefty colour and deckbuilding requirements. All that Glitters isn't it, chief. -Tolarian Terror is pretty gross, definitely dislike the card because of the impact it has in Pauper. If it were an uncommon I doubt I'd care about it at all -Entering the Dungeon is a fine mechanic. Well made, even if the cards that do so are a tad underpowered. The Initiative, however, is AWFUL. Why does it automatically proceed? Who decided this needed to be so goddamn oppressive -The monarch rides the line between being too powerful and having enough counterplay to be reasonable. I think it's probably a little too strong, but I'm glad it exists. -Sheoldred is turbo-fucked, and I'm not just saying that because I don't own any copies of her XD (I own a LOT of the cards on this list, and my opinion on Boseiju isn't strong enough for me to pass on running my playset XD) -Thoughtseize has been a fair card from day one, and I've played against it in standard the entirety of each time it's been legal. It can be the difference between winning and losing, and can make you want to pick up your cards and leave the building before you've taken a goddamn turn, but Magic is just like that some nights
Regarding breaking the color pie, I'm fine with it if the effect comes with a downside that a correctly colored card would not have, reflecting the higher effort/cost you have to expend to do something that's not in your nature.
In the past (for like 20 years straight) the rule was black could never touch artifacts or enchantments except in extreme examples like Gate to Phyrexia. Red could never touch enchantments, which was a flavor choice AKA red deals with things by smashing them, you can smash lands, artifacts and sometimes creatures but never enchantments. Magic was more interesting when the color pie truly mattered.
I think you make alot of really interesting points in this video and i agree on many of them, especially the increase in complexity. However your comments on the competency of the designers was spoken like someone who has never had to work on a large project professionally. Some real backseat game design, and it comes across as super pompous and ignorant. I do think wizards is constantly struggling with the demand for product from hasbro (and us) versus the available labor and time. But You cannot possibly imagine the stress test a public release is versus playtesting. Ive literally spoken to a designer that helmed Eldraine and saw them reconsiling with where they felt they could do better in real time as they did back to back to back events at Magiccon Vegas. There needs to be some degree of expirimentation, risk taking, and trying to do better on old mechanics that didn't work. Thats literally how Devotion happened. Also wizards prints cards to test in house what the fuck are you talking about that they dont play with the cards enough? Be more careful about making claims you cant or wont back up. Again, I agree with plenty of your points but i think you are burning yourself out with these constant mtgo events and public online discourse. Go build your own cube and take it to a con, make a commander deck for a small discord that brews to be creative and fun, play more prereleases. Idk but i genuinely think you are putting some of this on yourself. Im really glad you enjoyed that pioneer cube and I hope you get to do more stuff like thay.
THIS. Also, not liking some aspects of a product is no reason to shittalk it, in general. For example: I had a chat with Gavin at a convention about Throne of Eldraine design, a few months after release: he was proud of it, and rightfully so. The worldbuilding was great, the art was great, the mechanics were great, the limited experience was quite good, many iconic cards are still used, and the set overall was so well received that we already had a revisit. Honestly, who the hell cares if some elitist grognards spent months complaining that too many cards were busted? I certainly don't. Actually, at that time I was happy that there were so many bans, it meant that the B&R mechanism was working, finally.
On that I agree totally, with even more layoffs but so much sets this year despite that, I just can't see how they will be able to design mostly balanced and fun cards with that much work. And I think that it is fine they taking risks that sometimes happens to make broken cards, the accidents can be funny to remember and makes that memorable, e.g.: tarmogoyf and Oko, for example, but another thing is trying to make intentionally pushed cards and doing nothing against it or reluctantly trying to stall as much as possible (e.g: Ragavan, Wren & Six, the evoke elementals, and so on)
One thing that made me quit MtG was when I realized that no matter what format you're playing, the best decks are STILL running the best cards from Standard. Before Fable was banned in Standard, the modern and pioneer Rakdos lists were just the core Standard list with slightly improved supporting cards. Sheoldred, Bloodtithe Harvester, Graveyard Trespasser and Fable were often still the main threats in the format. And NONE of them were fun to play against. Power creep has always existed, but nowadays it feels very, very intentional. It makes the whole game feel stale when all you ever see is the same 4-5 cards in each color.
I think one of the problems that I don’t think you mentioned is that modern WOTC designers don’t know how to balance deck color consistently with deck multi-color power. Let me explain. Traditionally in magic, there is an inherent deck building tension where you want to play the most powerful cards in a format but those cards are hopefully spread out across multiple colors. If you went too far into the multi-color power end of the spectrum, your deck would be more powerful but your mana base becomes too inconsistent and you would inherently lose games due to variance. If you went too far into the single-color consistency end of the spectrum, your deck was far more consistent but you lost out on powerful cards. This creates interesting deck building decisions. Previously, you would have to choose what you wanted to do with your deck and stick to that plan. Boomer Jund didn’t also get to play counterspells. Burn didn’t have good card draw options. Azorius Control didn’t get to play busted early threats. You had to choose and that made games of magic more varied and interesting. Now, with the creation of fetchlands, triomes, and other color fixing options, there is almost no meaningful incentive to build a mono-color, two-color, or even three-color deck. In fact, it feels like a liability. Screw it. Just play Ragavan because it’s the best one-mana threat and it creates you treasures. Screw it. Just play Wrenn & Six because it’s the best two mana planeswalker and it let’s you reuse your ideal fetchland forever. Screw it. Just play Teferi, Time Raveler because it draws you a card and invalidates control and certain combo decks. The list goes on and on. The fact that decks can consistently hit RG on turn two, UW on turn three, and have B for Leyline Binding is insane. This makes decks homogenous and boring to play against. As previously stated, the most problematic cards become more frustrating to deal with because you see them all the time. As a control player, Teferi, Time Raveler was less of a pain in the past because you really only saw him in control mirrors. Now he’s in control decks, midrange decks, etc. It makes the card way more frustrating than he otherwise would be. This wouldn’t be the end of the world if there was decent hate against soup decks. The only semi-viable options in Modern being Blood Moon and Spreading Seas. The problem with them is that they’re too slow and easy to counter. My opponent is casting Blood Moon? Float a generic and green and cycle Boseiju (which is an already main deckable card). Fetch a plains and wait to cast Leyline Binding or Prismatic Ending in a turn cycle (again, main deckable cards). Nice job wasting your turn for nothing. nerd. Now let me overwhelm you with my superior card quality. WOTC could address these issues by printing more hate pieces for non-soup decks to use against the money pile ones. The problem with this idea is that casuals hate land hate and WOTC has already said they don’t like this design space. Folks, you registered the soup deck. You should know it’s inherently more vulnerable to Blood Moon. This is a competitive game. Stop whining that you don’t get to play solitaire. This is one of the major reasons why my favorite formats are currently pauper and legacy. The dual lands suck and fetching costs mana in pauper. Legacy has wasteland and effective, early Bloodmoons. This is why decks are far more and varied and interesting in these formats than in modern. Again, I don’t expect WOTC to address this issue and that’s why I’ve lost interest in the format. Oh well.
Fetches are just way too crazy - and ironically, they probably weren't when they were first printed, since they could only really go bonkers in eternal formats with dual lands... But then came more and more graveyard interaction, then Zendikar printed the rest of the cycle in modern alongside starting the rise of Landfall and with the shocklands already there, then Tarkir reprinted the old ones into modern, and then in the last few years triomes appeared... they were alright pieces of fixing in standard, probably a bit stronger in Zendikar but still only giving access to the two colors they were supposed to, but crazy as soon as they got in modern and only got better from there as engines or two very common archetypes - lands and graveyard matters... They're almost definitively the biggest thing to ban from modern (honestly, at this point I'm not sure banning every non-basic land with basic land types would be enough to make them bad, just worse than Prismatic Vista - which is still a $25 card - since landfall and graveyard got so strong), though a number of other things are close behind...
The problem is, soup monkeys that have all 5 colors in their cost are pretty and marketable money bait, so it's in Hasbro's best interest to make every Deck a soup Deck and every boss a soup monkey that they can. Exhibit A: Their dragon mother goddess turned cash cow mascot Tiamat. In the actual D&D source material, she's the 5 elements of chromatic dragons combined into the literal mother of all chromatic dragons, but those elements are fire, ice, electric, acid, and poison, and in Magic, dragon, fire, ice, and electric are all red while barf and burps are green, so realistically Tiamat should have been a R/G Dragon support boss, or at most R/G/B because she also has evil and darkness that led to her moving into Hell and making connections with Devils, but instead *"ZOMG she's the 5 colors of color dragons and they happen to have the same 5 colors as MtG mana, and she's our big "flaunt we own both Magic and D&D" mascot, so slap all 5 colors on her and make her the biggest, shiniest, most impressive Soup Commander possible to grab those nostalgia bux and soup bux!!1!1!!* We want everyone to know we're the Disney of high fantasy, we will assimilate everything and resistance is futile, ha ha!"
Im 100% sure people would have complained if tiamat wasnt 5c. The whole point of the design is to be a fancy commander for casuals coming from DnD. These people would have been confused why the mother of dragons is actually just the mother of a tiny fraction of dragons xD
Not to mention the fact they print cards like Smothering Tithe; presumably to fix the issue of white "not having ramp," but by not costing it appropriately to restrict it to mono white, they've effectively made one of the most powerful ramp cards in the format into a staple card for any deck with even a little bit of white.
Commander is much more a victim of the legacy card pool than it is of modern card design. You don't need modern cards to fast combo. If wizards had never printed a card for commander, cEDH would still have labman and foodchain combos.The "golden age" of commander was just a an unsolved format.
Yes and no, while yes, a lot of old cards from legacy card pool are as problematic as new ones, but you will have a large disadvantage playing without thoracle, dockside extortionist, orcish bowmaster, the one ring, and so on. Although I would argue that he was speaking mainly about the casual commander and forcing staples into there, which is still problematic, and I think suffers way more with new cards than old ones, by making linear commanders, and cards that scream goodsutff/generic value engine (like the one thousand boring effects that doubles triggers, boring because they copied literally the same effect) and so on
@@xaropevic7918Boomer cEDH lists (Pre flash hulk dominating literally everything, despite flash hulk theoretically existing) like Zur Doomsday still play plenty of broken cards. I've played a fair bit of preDH as someone who just likes old cards and there's still a substantial pregame required to verify we're not going to see someone's pile of french vanilla creatures versus someone playing the most broken noncreature spells printed in the era.
Have you considered making a cube to illustrate what kind of balanced magic you would want to play? Especially after this talk and your Legacy Cube sessions. Edit : And could we have access to the list for Dylan's Pioneer cube? I'm periodically interested in building one
On the U/W control discussions: I'm going to assume we're looking at the Innistrad/RTR standard since you said 2013, and only one Theros set was out in that window. I remember a LOT of people playing Thragtusk around then, as well as U/B control lists with forbidden alchemy and Nephalia Drownyard. It was a glorious time to be playing Magic, for sure, since the options available in standard were a gold mine. Personally I was on a U/B list featuring Duskmantle Seer and the aforementioned Drownyard as the main ways to close out a game, but the choices were outrageous. Some weeks you'd see people bring in U/W/R Boros Reckoner lists with the paired charms to gain infinite life, and all sorts of other shennanigans. A+ environment design, even if we had to play through Abrupt Decay and Counterflux. Aetherling was a nightmare to play against, but as a 6-mana creature that required mana to protect itself, it was completely fair. I'm a firm believer in the Bosh&Roll school of thought in regards to Shark Typhoon - if you cast it, you've wasted your time, mana, and card. It's 100% a card you should be cycling, and goddamn is it strong. It's not a problem in a vacuum, but it's one of the building blocks that slowly squeezes the life out of people. Pairing it with The Wandering Emperor and Supreme Verdict is a blight on pioneer, no doubt about it. -I played in a large Pioneer tournament last November (Face to Face games hosted it in Toronto) and my rounds one and two opponents were running that shell. I easily disassembled them both, since I chose to field U/B ninjas, and having threats on turns 1-3 with the option for spell pierce and negate backup is something they can't handle. Turns out the secret sauce is, as always, playing a tempo list that doesn't let the control deck see hall of storm giants mana
Thank you for talking about EDH because the state of that format frustrates me to no end. I wish it wasn't the format pushed the most by wotc, the effect on 60 card formats is disastrous, and I think the general culture of playing commander has gotten pretty bad. People don't really wanna play the game, they just wanna sit and watch their value engine go off with no interaction and it makes for really boring play patterns.
I once played with an EDH player who ran the Locust God, who would combo with a bunch of wheels. He got mad when anyone interacted with his spells and he refused to play _any_ counterspells despite being in UR.
@@AmmiO2 I had somebody running a deck that just wanted to lattice karn lock everyone and he got very very vocally angry when anything happened to him. another player had a combo that basically couldn't be interacted with because of how sacrificing works. The Karn player kept trying to say he could interact when three other people the table knew he couldn't. he did it so much that he made another guy leave the table. eventually he locked us with karn and lattice and kept playing. me and the remaining player had to physically stop him and tell him the game is over and then he got mad. I really only play Commander with friends who I know well. and we usually play it only when we're waiting to play cube. I really do not like playing with random people because the rule zero doesn't work and you don't know what to expect
@@AmmiO2 it's absolutely wild. you hate to see it. I am literally SO motivated by hate for most commander deck archetypes that I have built mono black "interaction: the deck" just out of spite for people who rely WAY too hard on their commander and make games take 3 hours.
I quite enjoy Rielle's value dynamic, capitalizing on discard spells/effects. Turned Nahiri's Wrath into a powerful removal spell with low commitment, I use counter spells that have solid synergy with Rielle in one form or another.
i do something similar and start most of my commander decks with imprison in the moon, kenrith's transformation, or dark steel mutation. also delay has become my favorite counterspell in commander@@mikusheep
The best analysis of what the fuck is going on in Magic the Gathering that I've seen in ages. Good thinkers, too, who discard many sacred cows and nostrums. Excellent, excellent!
I think treasure tokens feel in flavor for red as a temporary ramp to put you ahead of curve a little. i like it more on cards like the big score though more than ragavan or a shaman token.
The only issue is they've made Treasures too abundant and too easy to make. They, for sure, should have been Red exclusive or perhaps just Red and White as white collects taxes, red likes the shinies. But every color gets them and it's just too easy to churn out a fuck ton of them. Then they become value engines when you no longer need the extra mana.
@TaskMaster5 Blue also likes shinies and Black is greedy, but Green? _Green!?_ The reject modernity, return to munky, mud hut Communist color that hates all civilization, artifice, and possessions in exchange for access to pure nature's full power over all mana? I call lore failure.
Treasure's other problem is it makes mana bases incredibly splashable, especially in limited formats where a pushed common can set you up to also ramp into a splashed bomb, this also derails drafts as people force 5 colour good stuff.
I feel the outlook on EDH is too grim. cEDH might be like that, but casual EDH is still thriving. I play regularly at a pub in my city and I encounter all level of decks and a big variety of stuff. I'm currently planning on building a Breena deck because I think it can be a lot of fun at a casual table. I do however agree on everything else. I had started streaming mtga last year but I quit because I cannot stand it anymore. In 1vs1 (any format) games are completely one sided, you either manage to get out an unmanageable threat first or your opponent does and you just loose. Every competitive card is so insane that it being around a few turns simply snowballs into so much advantage that your opponent is very unlikely to recover... it's just frustrating and even worse when ti comes to formats like Historic Brawl, where people are playing absolutely broken stuff like Golos or Atraxa... so stupid. Casual multiplayer EDH is really the only format that is still playable. Outside of stuff like cube of course, which however is quite a different way of playing
Thank you, for addressing modern cards just do too much all the time at a ridiculous rate that also require very little thought into deck construction and play patterns. My go to examples are Dockside and Deflecting Swat. Cards that are very aggressively costed, which also have very high power ceilings making them great at all stages of the game and are hard to prepare for and combat. Oh let's not forget that because cards do so much there's also so much text to remember and you can't rely on art either because there's 10 different card frames for each new card. Dockside Extortionist: - Can do all the things a creature can do - Provide the undisputed best legal ritual (that's not really a ritual) in the game. - Provides an insurmountable advantage to one player - Forces you to play dead sideboard cards unless a dockside hits - Very powerful in both casual and competitive settings Deflecting Swat: - In many game winning board states it's a straight up counter spell - It's always a 2/1 (which is the one downside of a counter spell) - In most scenarios it power creeps fork. - It forces what/if decisions by making commanders a must remove for certain decks (else i could die to my own spell/ability) - Forces you to play dead sideboard cards unless someone plays many free spells - Very powerful in both casual and competitive settings My commander group actively bans cards that require too much account keeping. However there are still some like the two above that I would be very happy to also see banned
I really enjoyed this discussion. I will say I don't agree with every point, but I understand how you got there. I'm glad this was a presentation with evidence as I feel like I understand your perspectives so much better and I can be a better magic player because of it.
I think the greatest evidence for the present state of 60 card magic is the number of alternatives popping up to fill the vacuum wotc is leaving. One Piece, Digimon, Lorcana, FaB, even the new Star Wars tcg and Sorcery each are at least in part around because 1v1 magic is no longer the face of tcgs
I am so lucky to have 3 local game stores that have commander multiple times a week, but it's also free entry. One store does 8 hours on Sunday, free commander open play. No prizes. All promo packs are raffled. So we all get to play what we want and the sweaty pods can be sweaty and the battle cruisers can cruise. I've met some of the best people in my life at these stores. I would have never gone if they charged me to play and made me have to win to feel included in the fun.
This has been my experience as well with all my local gamestores. They just let people free play and form their own pods, and have random raffle prizes. It's not THAT hard to find a good game because people are mostly honest about their power level, cEDH over there, precons here, etc. I couldn't imagine playing at a store that does commander night like a standard FNM, where you're playing for prizes and matches are randomly assigned.
My biggest problem with modern commander is not even the power creep. Sure, it sucks when I want to sit down at a TCG and play casually with some strangers, but most of my time is spent playing with my friends. My friend group can collectively decide what power-level we want to play at, and can rule out specific cards that are too strong. Something that's much harder to collectively rule out is complexity creep. Complexity creep has made every EDH game, even with my close friends, feel exhausting. I feel like you have to have super-computer brain to evaluate the board states and make threat assessments these days. There's so many mechanics like Daybound, Initiative, and Monarch that affect everyone at the table and add so many layers of complexity that it's easy to overlook them. Then there's cards that have entire essays of text on them and fry your brain just trying to comprehend what they do. It gets maddening in long games where no one has swept the board in a while, and everyone has to slow their turns to a crawl because they have to reread all the permanents across the board. It's become so much of a problem that I lack the motivation to sit down and play with my friends anymore.
As a Magic refugee who went to Flesh and Blood, I encourage anyone finding themselves irritated by current MtG design to try out FaB. It really scratches that competitive card game itch, and the creator is adamant to keep it that way.
I’ve been skimming through a lot of low effort rant videos, so it’s refreshing to find a well informed critique with a lot of pictures explaining the problems! Awesome video! It seems like a lot of these problems come from WOTC's desire to make cards which look splashier on Arena, but lead to a poor paper experience.
Is Dylan's Pioneer cube list up anywhere? Also, one distinction you're missing on Japanese gambling laws: one of the loopholes that qualifies pachinko as legal is that you don't win money directly. You win balls which can be traded in for material prizes, and those prizes can be exchanged for money at businesses often set up immediately next to pachinko parlors as long as they can prove they are distinct business entities. (The most popular prize for those wanting to get cash is tiny gold slabs, as they have the best exchange rate.) If you've ever been confused by the Game Center in early Pokémon games having the prize exchange set up in a separate building, that's what it's a reference to. YGO giving their players Nintendo Switches at competitive events is essentially them just applying the prizing structure that circumvents Japanese gambling law internationally, whereas Pokémon chooses to break that out per region.
Really interesting discussion. I agree with the final point that all formats have decreased in fun level EXCEPT draft and maybe Cube? (Shoutout to my vintage cube enjoyers)
I'm just gonna say it and be brutally honest: Magic just isn't a fun game with all of these problems outlined in the video. It's why I've walked away from playing the game, and why I'll probably never re-engage outside of watching a few videos here and there. This video just reaffirms how... pushed everything is, and how so many people who just want the game to go fast, fast, fast don't want to hear any criticism from people who have legitimate concerns about the longevity of how fun the play patterns are. Yes, power creep happens in every game ever. It's a normal process that keeps games interesting and progressing. But, given how insane a lot of card designs have been over the past seven years since I started playing, I legitimately hate almost every single play pattern in any format. Yes, that includes Commander, and it ESPECIALLY includes Commander given how so any card designs are just to appeal to EDH players... all because we're a whiny bunch that wants all of the toys without sacrificing anything for it. I just... Kinda hate Magic now.
That is legit part of the reason why magic in my area died completely. I owned every dual land and many many high rare modern and commander decks. But wizards legit killed the game with Design, Set structure, commanderization and general unfun game development.
It's Saturday, October 3rd 2015, 9:35am CST. You're hungover at a PTQ in Omaha, Nebraska. You drove two hours to get here. Sitting across from you at the stained picnic table is that one guy from every LGS in middle America who spent $550 on a playset of Vryn's Prodigy, and with a straight face you cannot hope to replicate, registers his deck as "MOIST JUND" (sic.) The air is pungent, it smells like sour cream and cheddar ruffles, and whatever mold is growing in the AC system and under the carpet. It is (somehow and miraculously) unrelated to the ethanol conversion overclocking your liver and seeping from what feels like every pour in your forehead. I mean there is a *real* stench in the room. Behind you are two children yelling. The autumn sun seeping through the grubby windows stirs in you a profound nostalgia that doubles as dread. You consider shuffling. Moist Jund Matt gives you a "high roll?" and, in the same breath, launches two (mini) Chessex black D6's with pink pips across his playmat and into your half-crossed arms. Everything hurts. And one day, without a measure of irony or remorse, you will look back and miss this.
You left out the sore throat, headache, and visible obese bumcracks at every seat
Fuck, this touched my soul
based
True
This writing is amazing!!! Please teach me how to write like this!!
What stands out to me as somebody that stopped playing (luckily, and by happenstance) right before MH1 hit, and was primarily a Modern player - seeing a Modern list that contains close to 0 cards that I recognize from that pre-MH era is insane. A format whose whole identity was that you could invest into a deck and be set for basically the lifetime of the format, save for a small upgrade here and there when a random card from Standard would be playable for your archetype, is now a format that is in a constant nuclear arms race with itself. RIP to what Modern was, which was IMO the pinnacle of what TCG’s can be.
That was the whole point of MH, to make it a rotating format.
I am not sure it was the pinnacle of anything... It was like Legacy with bad counterspells and slower combo. Far from how Magic was supposed to be played. For sure there were many way cooler standard formats
Modern has become the new Legacy, and I fucking hate it.
Preach. I stopped playing not long after that- around the time Secret Lair was introduced.
@@azraksash "It was like Legacy with bad counterspells and slower combo"
Sounds like heaven to me tbh
"You can just convince your entire playgroup to play within a difficult-to-define set of boundaries before every game to get around the problems in card design!"
You never hear anyone say this aboot Vintage
Also how is anyone going to have this conversation with their playgroup if when anyone brings up design flaws in recent printings, someone just wants to plug their ears and yell. Like, ultimately yes I agree that EDH is still a flexible format and that you can get a lot of different experiences out of it depending on what table you play at, but getting upset when people try to have these conversations doesn't help anyone; and I see it happen way too often.
I have fluctuating play groups. I need to either adhere to a common standard, or change the deck list any time I play with a different group. Group rules are nice and all, but solid standards in the overall game are preferable.
I never hear anything about vintage because I'm not rich!
The sad thing is that discussion just isn't working. The older designers on the team seem to be getting worse about digging in their heels and doubling down on bad decisions.
There's this visible undertone like, "Well, of course our cards will look broken when you play them wrong. That's a you problem."
But any game will look broken when put in the hands of sweaty min/maxxers
players will find ways to be efficient in anything, complaining about "sweaty" players is cope
I think a key point here is that every non-chaff card is getting so mechanically dense that it's just getting harder and harder to fully evaluate or understand new cards. People joked about Questing Beast's design but now that's just the norm.
Understanding is not really a problem, it just takes one or two more games to remember the cards.
Yeah I love some wacky card once in a while, but now almost every card has paragraphs and it's just a stack of upsides.
It’s very different from 1 on 1. 1vs1 you know exactly what’s going on the board state, and your plan to win or interact with your opponent. But EDH is way out of control. You don’t know everything that’s going on. All the cards have full text boxes so you don’t realize everything the cards do. You forget things do things. You get confused because you don’t see interactions coming. Or can’t stop it because you are more focused on another player.
Back in the day, Wizards was terrified that doing this stuff would kill the game. They were terrified of recreating Time Spiral and Lorwyn limited because there were so many moving pieces that it was very hard to keep track of.
But now, because they basically just design for commander, they don't care how complicated their designs are.
Yes, and it backfires designers, cause it's hard for them to balance all this walls of text.
I would say that commander has suffered more as a format than most people realize. It used to be a fun format about beating your opponent with big janky creatures. Now it's been powercrept to the point that every commander set add a new broken staple card that you must play.
Moxfield has a feature called "packages" where you can create a group of cards and import them en mass during deck construction. Every time I build a new EDH deck I import my "EDH Starter Kit" package and the deck automatically fills in 50 or 60 cards.
Yes and no. At least in Commander you can play what you want, and focus on fun. If your deck is built to win 1 out of every 4 games, and the rest of your pod is the same, then it's perfect.
In Modern I can't roll into FNM, where the only stakes is just that store credit for the evening, with a deck pre-LOTR and expect to win.
Why do you "have to play" these cards? Who is holding the gun to your head? EDH is not a tournament Format, just ask the table if they want to play meme decks or lower power decks.
@@ich3730 so i show up with one deck and someone asks me to not play it ehat do i do?
@@Sean.Thomas2 Most people will let you borrow decks and the vast majority of people who play edh have decks of varying power levels.
I definitely hate the commanderification of all magic cards. but also because it doesn't even help commander. I hate seeing commander super-staples every game. the power level of commander is so pushed up now that when you're like "yeah my deck's a 6" that usually still includes things like Rhystic and Tithe. These cards do have a place in higher power games, but one of my fav ways to play Magic is to dig into my collection and assemble commander decks from what I have. Then slowly buy cards I think are cool and will work well. I try to avoid cramming super staples into everything because the game just gets boring really fast.
It really doesnt matter for commander, since its not a tournament format. You can just decide not to play with or against cards you dont like, its that easy
@@ich3730 Yes, everyone loves needing to get into a debate about game balance and fun with their friends before every match.
Then dont play EDH if you dont like it. Its Part of the format to check with the table what you want to play. cEDH and casual meme decks cant really be in the same game. In tournament Formats, this discussion doesnt happen because everyone knows the "goal of the game" is to win, so you should build your deck to win. In EDH the goal of the game isnt always to win.
@@ich3730 If you're justifying the design requiring people to have drawn-out arguments before playing the game with "then don't play the game", that's not a good defence. Game design should make things fun, and certainly shouldn't be encouraging you to not play at all.
@@danielcornwall1585it's healthy to discuss expectations for Commander groups. Walking in with a land destruction deck or a CEDH in a group that plays lower power level is a power imbalance and the player should develop a more reasonable deck for the group.
Wizards has kept printing product and saying “if you aren’t satisfied with this product then it isn’t for you” and I fear they’re going to keep doing that until the game of Magic isn’t ‘for’ anyone anymore, it’s just to sell cards to collectors.
"This product isn't for you" is the worst marketing/PR slogan in history.
MTG is for "everyone" except for the older fans who are actually invested in the longevity of the game.
The saddest thing is how far we are already in that direction.
"A game for everybody is a game for nobody."
If it's not for anyone it isn't for collectors either. If the game has no players the collector market will basically collapse along with wotc. Beyond a certain few cards most will lose all their value. Then eventually with no players, new cards, or interest the cards will have little to no collector value outside of a select few like the lotus or one ring.
It's not so much that "Magic is copying Yu-Gi-Oh's design" as "Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh design are now operating under the same set of incentives."
Yu-Gi-Oh has been subject to rampant power/complexity creep over the years because, unlike Magic, they didn't have the reset button of rotation to help keep things in check. Magic managed to control this, to some extent, back when the main format they were designing for was Standard. Now that they're primarily designing for a non-rotating format, (Commander) they're stuck in the same arms race as Yu-Gi-Oh designers, so it's only natural that they will reach some of the same conclusions.
Now, saying "we have adopted the Yu-Gi-Oh method of rotation," on the other hand, is absolutely true.
Yugioh and many other Japanese TCGs somehow got it in their heads in around 2015 that players only enjoy the pop off turns where everything lines up and you go nuts and win. It seems to be the same conclusion WotC came to later when people became obsessed with Voltrons or infinites in EDH. Who cares about healthy play patterns when you can reprint this strange piece of an infinite combo in a precon and print a Legendary creature into a standard set that happens to facilitate it with perfect color identity and make a couple bucks?
The most egregious part of this is that initially commander was a reprieve from competitive play and powercreep, since people showed up with whatever dogwater cards they had lying around and just did whatever. Commander shouldn't need powercreep to sell cards; novel effects which allow you to do goofy things should be enough, since most casual tables will literally allow you to do things to see you pop off.
WotC's shift to focus primarily on commander is hurting all of MtG including commander. 2024 commander is dogshit compared to playing it in like 2017
rotation is not the best way to stop powercreep and magic has proven that years ago
@zyroberk I'll gladly admit that rotation is not the ONLY way to combat power creep, but I'd be very interested in hearing what you're basing the claim that "Magic has proven this" on, especially when all evidence I have seen demonstrates that Magic has proven the exact opposite.
Is your argument just, "Magic has always had power creep, therefore your argument is invalid"? If so, that is just... such a terrible argument that I don't even know what to say. Compare the power creep between, say, Alpha and Siege Rhino, at the time the most terribly power crept creature ever, over a period of OVER 20 YEARS, vs. the power creep we've seen just over the past 4-5 years, since Commander has started to eclipse Standard in popularity. Yes, creatures were weak in Alpha, but it took them decades to get there. Meanwhile, over just the past few years, powerhouses like Snapcaster, Tarmogoyf, and Bob have been rendered unplayable. Moreover, how do you explain the fact that, while creatures have been power crept steadily over the years, other spells generally have not? (At least, up until the past few years, of course.) And even more importantly than THAT, how do you explain the difference in power creep between Magic, which has had relatively little, and games like Yu-Gi-Oh, which do not have rotation? Like I said, I'll admit that there are other ways to combat power creep, and corelation does not necessarily mean causation, but when you've got such incredibly strong corelation between lack of rotation and power creep, there's most likely something there.
Again, I apologize if I'm putting words in your mouth, here, but I literally can't imagine what data you're basing this claim on. If Wizards has released some kind of study or lessons learned document that supports this idea, please let me know!
The fuck are you on about, this is just so wrong. Power creep is power creep, and is intentional with the sole purpose of selling more cards.
A knock-on effect of the length and complexity of rules text that I rarely see discussed is that flavor text necessarily suffers because the cards simply don't have the space to exposit the nature of the world and characters. In theory this mean's we'd get more external material like novels and short stories, which isn't ideal but has worked in the past. In practice the worlds and stories just feel half-baked.
I would actually argue the opposite. Flavor Text imo was never good at World building, it was mostly puns, quotes or dry exposition. With more complex designs, cards can tell stories through gameplay. Like sagas can convey a story without ever breaking immersion. Or how a character can be shown to be evil through their gameplay, instead of writing "yo this guy mad bad" at the bottom.
@@ich3730 Hard disagree. Flavor text adds a distinct richness to the game. Look no further than Mirage with the Love Song of Night and Day. The reason older villains like Lim-Dul are still remembered and referenced by players and WotC today is that we had those quotes and bits of exposition that informed us of their character. Those bits of lore provide necessary context to the thousandth card that kills a creature with a spooky guy casting a purple swoosh in the art.
More importantly, the flavor is one of the first interactions new players are going to have with the game's lore. Those scraps of story and setting help get people invested so they can unfortunately go online and read all of the bad webfiction WotC graciously supplies us.
@@mg95594 thats fair, especially since new players need some kind of opening to get to the story. But still, for me no flavor text in the world beats a design like feldon of the third path, where ability and lore work hand in hand. Bringing a creature back as an artifact that only lives for a turn perfectly reflecting his backstory through gameplay. Or something a bit more whack like shaharazad, bringing the arabian tale to life through gameplay. Flavor text imo always reduces it to "just reading". Like, i can just read a book if i want to read a story directly told to me. But experiencing a story through gameplay mechanics? Thats unique to games as a medium.
Another knock on effect is I notice my commander games getting less and less personal. People are talking less and its sad to experience
@@ich3730 *"Flavor Text imo was never good at World building, it was mostly puns, quotes or dry exposition."* Jesus christ, this is what nearly 10 years of horrendous flavor texts do to a community. Go back and look at older sets, you'll find creative use of flavor text all over the place. You will find some puns and a few quotes, I'll give you that, but they were used sparingly and more importantly, tastefully.
In comparison, modern flavor text are mostly marvel-tier quips, forced jokes and, as you said, dry exposition. Most lore fans I know have been screaming for the heads of the flavor department for years. I could go on for hours about some of the best flavor texts and how they heavily contributed to the creation of some of the best planes in MtG's history, but I don't even know if I can do it justice Honestly, just reading the flavor of the Alara or Lorwyn blocks should stand on its own. If you want some specific examples, look up the "flavor text of the day" series by Loreseeker. Most cards in that series don't have a modern card frame and it's not by accident...
It feels like there is a lot of "Because commander players want this/that" and blaming commander players rather than WotC Commander design. I can only speak for myself and the people I know - and The Professor from Tolarian Community College says this too - we didn't ask for this. We didn't want this. Don't blame us. We hate it too.
As a commander player from before dedicated commander product and cards, I was fine with just picking cards out of standard releases that fit my decks. I never needed cards meant for the format. I liked that the format was a build your own adventure using any magic card in history, I thought that was the coolest thing.
@@dominiciannucci5217 definitely agree. The fact that half of edh decks are now made of "made for edh" cards is so unfathomably cringe it makes me hate the format.
There is no way to design the game around commander without breaking everything else. The game was never supposed to be played that way.
@jellyfrosh9102 - That is just factuand demonstrably wrong. Command Tower doesn't break the game. The multiplayer lands were designed for commander but can work outsode of it to, as there are many multiplayer formats - though many of them fail.
Moreover, there are many designs which got better because of Commander. Wordings like "twice your starting life total" instead of 40 life and so forth.
The command zone is officially where emblems go, so "every" game of magic has the command zone, even draft, byt they aren't all commander games and rhat doesn't brwak the game. Insstead, it made it better because now there is a place for emblems and companions and so forth.
In the past, there was no distinction for cards that were exiled vs your sideboard vs your binder and so forth. There was just "outside the game" and removed from the game. Now, there are better defined zones.
So, no. I understand what you mean, but you are incorrect.
@@PaulGaither Counterpoint : planeswalkers (and thus emblems) and companions shouldn't exist and the game is worse for having these things in it.
One aspect of Fable is that it synergizes with nearly *anything* your deck is doing.
It's an enchantment for enchantment decks, it makes treasures for artifact sac decks, it fills the graveyard for reanimator, it lets you copy ETB creatures.
Wait, even in the first Jund section... Isn't Bloodbraid Elf one of the OG hated, bad-play-patterns cards, where it's impossible (unless the opponent gets unlucky) to answer cleanly with a 1-for-1, and sometimes does nightmarish things like Bloodbraid Elf -> Blightning? I remember SO much Bloodbraid Elf hate from back in the day.
I agree, however, about Tarmogoyf; while it's POSSIBLE for a "merely large" creature for it to be too good, "it's merely large and it dies to removal" are pretty great arguments in favor of a card's fairness! While the old "it dies to removal so it's bad" jokes aren't accurate, "it dies to removal so it's fair" is usually correct or correct-ish.
Elf was a bad card because Cascade is a bad mechanic, which was proven when the Discover mechanic broke Pioneer. Bloodbraid was a problem card (and still is on occasion), yet it pales in comparison to things like the Scam game plan.
Boodbraid was fine in the first jund because as they said, half the deck was blanks and what you cascaded into was often not generating advantage.
Yes but you're looking at Bloodblaid Elf in a vacuum which isn't the point of that section or the video at all. The point was "look at the medium power level of this deck".
I'm guessing you weren't there when Bloodbraid Elf was keeping Jace the mind Sculpter in check.
oh hey flak!
go off king
It sucks that so much of this rather honest and deep discussion will be dismissed as just "Magic Boomers Complaining."
It's because while there are valid points with clearly pushed cards, they also complain about basic power creep which happens in all games. I love amnio2 content but there are genuine times it just feels like pure complaining vs real criticism
@@FreshPrinceOfBelA17 That is a criticism they engage directly. It's not the power creep, it's the power explosion that took place with the release of Throne of Eldraine and Modern Horizons.
@@pirakalord55 I don't see them as Explosion because the mechanics from some of these cards are old enchantment effects just put on creatures and walkers
@@FreshPrinceOfBelA17 and the near complete rotation of modern from before and after MH1 isn't a major sign of a power level explosion?
@pirakalord55 modern needed the shake up. Pre mh the format was a slog and considering the worst of Mh was hogakk. Mh2 just made ppl who hated mh, hate mh2 as well. I've been playing mtg since 2015 and I enjoy being able to know metas and be able to play multiple viable decks vs like 3 or 4
From my experience Rule Zero only works among friends in a dedicated play group. Out in the wild, Rule Zero never goes beyond figuring out if we are playing cEDH, or just playing casual.
Even then is doesn't work many times. Remember, a casual deck is any deck that doesn't beat mine.
@@masonfoster151 People miss evaluate all the time. Just because you have some janky win combo it doesn't mean your deck isn't high powered. I've heard but my dockside lets me cast my big dumb creature, or I'm not drawing anything good off my rhystic study so many times.
Yeah, Rule 0 *can* work in some places, but there's lots of decks that just run Dockside/etc and it's basically just a step under cEDH, just without the fast mana/interaction and instead more gas. One LGS I end up going to has a sign up you tick if you play cEDH or casual, and then they pair you off. It is iffy at best as sometimes you'll get into a pod where you're playing slightly upgraded precons vs sometimes someone is entomb reanimating a broodlord saw in half combo in Magar and you have to just accept that, which makes in infuriating that nobody is actually playing interaction so you just gotta pray you're the only person deciding to interact at the table. Let alone the fact that people just inherently do not ever pay for Rhystic Study in the wild, so it becomes 2U: idk draw as much as you want.
and even then "casual" doesn't mean just chilling and having fun with stupid cards half the time... or more. At least not at my game store.
You're not alone.@@anthonydelfino6171
Remember when commander precons being 20€ was normal?
Pepperidge farms remembers.
or when we only got precons once a year and not with every single set
You don’t need power creep in rotating formats, which is the initial way Magic was built. As strong cards leave standard, the weaker cards are given a time to shine. Unfortunately with new design, the new cards bully out the previous set, so rotation is just a formality anyway.
Eternal formats are not “eternal” if deck lists are just showcases of the last 5 standard and horizon sets.
Despite its other shortcoming, the fact that a competitive metadeck in the Pokemon TCG is fucking 30-50$ just shows how much standard pricing sucks, let alone other formats
Now, yes. 8 years ago, no. Pokemon and MTG have effectively switched places.
@@williamdrum9899 Magic decks, even standard deck, were also 250$+ back then. I've been playing since 1996 and i also played competitively around 2011/12, decks were that expensive
@@Matti_Mattsen I played Pokemon competitively in 2016 and Shaymin EX was about an 80 dollar card.
@@williamdrum9899 there’s been exceptions but magic has always been pricier even for standard. I played a ton in khans standard like near ten years ago and most decks would be $300+. If Pokémon’s gotten cheaper recently that’s great magic should too
@@Oakwin_mb I played back then too and that was mostly baby jace and the fetches
there's also another thing about ignoring powerful meta cards, yes you can ignore them and not play with them but you better be ready to play against them
At the risk of sounding like a boomer, I think Oath of the Gatewatch was the moment this game took a sharp spiral. It's such an obvious turning point where they saw the mainstream success of the Avengers and turned the game into the cardboard equivalent of "bigger and bigger CGI explosions and fanservice"
It may have happened a little sooner, or a little later, but it definitely happened around this time period. I enjoyed Khans of Tarkir a lot, especially because it was the first time Wizards grew a pair and finally reprinted some fetchlands, but at the same time, that was the beginning of Commander Precons and a disastrously restrictive Reprint policy. Theros/Khans Standard was some of the most fun I ever had with the game, but it was also the precipice for which power creep would never return us to.
it's insane to see how far we've come since 2015/16. siege rhino was a 4/5 for 4 with big upside and immediately forced into modern, BFZ standard had 4-colour hell piles and $100+ flip Jace, and now these and many more are pretty much unplayable garbage. @@shuttlecrossing1433
OGW is absolutely the inflection point. It's also when they banned twin.
The absolute saturation of things you have to remember to avoid getting into an illegal game state is absolutely out of hand, especially in 4 player EDH. This speaks to the larger trend of WotC trying to push players into the digital formats, where these issues are contained within the programming playing the game for you.
I remember when Baneslayer Angel was considered a game winner...
Now everything is a combination of "commander horizons" set, powercreeped to sell more packs and designed to work on arena but not really in paper.
This was an exceptional analysis, but the "like" count was pretty egregious.
1:57:00 as a person who runs a card shop and goes to local game store each week, the problem with current prices is that the card is so back breaking that it commands a $30+ so to make up for that everything else is dirt cheap, this sounds like a good thing until you realized 1. It’s unprofitable to have standard cards besides the big hits and 2. No one wants to sell us standard since they will get nothing price wise. This cause a bigger barrier to entry that’s not good for anyone
I always thought one of the biggest problems for singles prices was Collector Boosters flooding the market with more "low tier" rares while not significantly affected the supply of "chase rares" like Sheoldred, Fable, etc.
Thoughts?
@@AmmiO2 tbh I don’t think the problem is chase rares, it’s stupid how expensive some of them are, magic has always have cards that are a cut from the rest, for example when Jace the mind sculpter was in worldwake people crack those packs to death trying to find one for standard, including people cracking till they got one and reselling the rest of the packs. But cards from that set still had value in its packs at the time. The real problem is that foils are actively worse to pool, when you used to open a foil, it would be usual double the price of the card, sometimes more, sometimes less. Now it’s the same price because how many foils are out in the wild. A foil rare and a non foil rare are the same price now, and magic players fall into 2 camps. The person who just wants to play the card and the people who want bling. The people who want to just play the card gravitate towards non foil since they won’t Pringle, people who want the bling gravate to the showcase with special foils. So standard foils do not have a home nowadays. And you see when foils are more limited (for example timespiral remastered having one pack) they retail value better or even the battles since it was only foil and no foil the rares retain that double price compared to everything else.
"Why would I care about foils when they're just pringles?"
One other thing about Bonecrusher Giant...you look at that cycle, and Bonecrusher is the only one with zero downside. Brazen Borrower can only block flyers. Murderous Rider costs life, can't be recurred, and is only a 2/3. Lovestruck Beast can't attack without a 1/1. Giant Killer ties up resources.
Meanwhile Bonecrusher Giant is an undercosted body with 3 positive abilities and the adventure half ALWAYS has a target, even if it's face. It's just so pushed.
In looking through the most unfun cards on the collage, I counted them up and the least of them are in White/Green/Colorless, while the most are Blue/Black/Red, particularly Red.
I don't know if that means anything.
To be fair, Red needs that advantage. Bonecrusher is a pretty mid card now. It wasn't even that special 5 years ago.
Not that good but it's a 4-of in maybe the best deck in a format made of the last 11 years worth of cards...?
@@refuse2lose1985 at what point did I say that it was "not that good?" I said that it was MID, as in average. I've got it as a SB card a Rakdos Pioneer Shadow build that I run. It isn't the best card.
Soul cauldron's ability order is following the template.
Effects that are available off the battlefield -> cast altering effects -> static effects -> Triggered abilities -> activated abilities
Another problem with cards like Inti is they are a wall of texts with various mechanics bunched together. Old cards with wall of texts had few mechanics attached to it, it was just a long text to do very little in the end most of the time. With so many cards like this being released at high pace, it makes memorizing what they do more of a hassle. Also, lot of games devoid into more reading and less playing. Draft are less fun overall. EDH is slower by nature of format, but with all the reading interruption it can become a slugfest.
I’d hear all the time how modern is self correcting the format is eternal cards do not change etc etc so I got into magic from yugioh wanting card interaction and fair trades then two weeks later modern horizon came out lmao
Agreed. I came over to MtG from YGO because YGO became too powercrept and stale for me and I was craving thoughtful deckbuilding and interaction. It feels like Magic started losing that almost immediately after I started getting into it.
I was worried it was just me starting to see cracks in the system that might’ve been there all along, but the more I dug into the game’s history, the more fair older cards (specifically pre-War of the Spark) seemed, and how slow and gradual the powercreep felt until recently.
Modern was so good before MH.
It’s still decent but the problem is that every MH set completely blows up your collection
@@SanguivoreDo you have a moment to hear about our king and savior Gold Roger?
Play pauper. It's a commons only format but it's highly interactive and for the most insulated from wotc and their power creep. There are things that do trickle down and shake things up but they're not terrible and there's still room for creativity. Plus there's PDH (Pauper Dragon Highlander) that's the pauper version of commander and it's what I've been playing a lot with my play group because I've given up on regular commander at this point as well
@@passedjudgements4729 I definitely built elves in pauper elves and goblins were always something I was really nostalgic about when I tried playing mtg when I was way younger I agree I love pauper it’s like legacy lite lol
My biggest complaint is that you bring up the Oko canard repeatedly. I don't believe that bullshit for one second. They absolutely knew what people would use Oko for. They may not have known how disastrous it would be, but they are shoveling mountains of shit when they say the utility took them by surprise. I think that's another, more subtle aspect of the game's decline: WotC will just lie to you. Whether it's Mark Rosewater trying to shepherd players to his line of thinking, lying about the secondary market, or R&D covering their asses, WotC has been increasingly dishonest with the player base.
Oh, WotC knew damn well how Oko would break the meta of every formats just like they knew how OP the One Ring would be. It's just a way to assure that booster boxes get sold. Put 1 or 2 extremely high value mythic rare into a set, wait for that set to be completely sold, and then AND ONLY THEN ban the card. As I like to say, one of the issue with the game is that the company that makes the game shouldn't be the same that decide what card gets banned, its a classic case of vested investments against the consumer.
If WotC wanted to make easy money, they would reprint cards from the no reprint list, but again I only see a vested investment in this case why they don't print it. Why? Because everyone at the top OWNS those very cards that are worth fortune. If they didn't owned them, the wouldn't care and print them into oblivion, honestly they don't care about what cards get a reprint or not. But since so manyof the people inside the business have those cards that are worth hundreds if not thousands, they obviously don't reprint them for the day where they will want to sell them. Like wise, I firmly believe that before distribution of a new set, the same people have pocketed a few of the cards that will have value to "re"sale them in the secondary market.
I think the problem we've seen is that actually Oko and One Ring are not very powerful cards. They are not Storm, you know? The problem is that they exist in the sludgey modern environment where every single deck is entirely about value and grinding.
@@lostalone9320 This is literally the opposite of reality. Storm cards are not broken, the storm _mechanic_ is broken. Oko and TOR are absolutely broken. TOR is because it protects you, allowing you to chain multiple copies (which conveniently resets burden counters). Oko is because it permanently neutralizes creatures on a plus ability while also being cheap at 3 cmc. It also wins on an empty board, but that's just icing on the removal cake.
@@lostalone9320 I could understand saying that The One Ring isn't a very powerful card outside of a grindy matchup, it's a 4-drop artifact that draws you 1 card the turn you play it and drains your life total, but Oko is an incredibly powerful card. A 3-drop that turns whatever you want into a 3/3 elk each turn as a is objectively a very powerful effect, the worst that Oko can be is a sorcery speed generous gift, the best it can be is a persistent elk-factory that removes any of your opponent's utility and yokes up any and all of your smaller creatures. Fundamentally if any card is so strong that leaving it on the board for more than a single turn is virtually always a guaranteed loss, that card is a very powerful card and Oko very much fits that criteria.
I encourage everyone to go to the wayback machine and search up old standard deck prices through the years, and also the cost of modern and legacy and their metagames.
What is the trend?
Standard has been roughly the same cost and modern has gone down in price, mostly because the lands nosedived in price.
@@StickyBombLauncher kinda, modern has had ups and downs and is thankfully kinda in a downswing now again but mh2 did cause some crazy spikes.
Still overpaying for cardboard, I bet.
@@StickyBombLauncher Also the most expensive period of standard ever was Khans-BFZ because every standard deck was running 12-16 fetches. Standard is currently much, much lower than its highs. You're also right that modern has gone down but people also complain about "rotation" with new sets. I think it's ultimately kinda a wash with modern because deck price is down (and the cheap deck is about as cheap as ever) but you may have to pay more to upgrade later. It's also a format with bans - as a mox opal enjoyer I had an extensive part of the $$ invested into the format bricked because of a ban. I can see how people get upset with new sets ruining things but that "feels bad" has always been a part of the format.
It's funny because I do consider myself a "magic boomer" compared to some (appreciation for old cards, designs, etc.) but compared to the people in this vid / pod or w/e I'm a fucking zoomer. There are real problems with the way cards are designed and I think they can tone it down some but I just don't feel like a lot of people complaining have actually tried to experience these formats as they exist. Yes the game has heavily changed but when we talk about UW control... they're complaining that people who don't understand the format don't know what to play around? That's always been the case they just aren't use to the new designs so they feel stronger about it. At a certain point you have to realize the games changed.
Also they don't even talk about my biggest issues with new card design which is all the fucking widgets I'm keeping track of. Roles, maps, etc.
Dope vid. Loved the dynamics between you two - made the areas you agreed on come across even stronger.
Really enjoy these videos as someone who's trying to get into Modern for the first time - it's good historical context as to why things are the way there are when I go to FNM.
Agatha's Soul Cauldron is literally how all cards are templated. Statics then activated.
In this case it was a bad decision.
@@AmmiO2Inconsistency is also confusion. This is consistent with all other cards.
Discover isn’t broken in Commander. It’s broken in many 60 card formats. It shows what they are designing and marketing for. It’s sad.
About a month ago I was telling one of my friends the best thing that could happen to MTG is if they just stopped printing new cards. Full stopped then people could figure out what formats and restrictions actually lead to fun games.
I'm a very ex-magic player now, I quit the tournament scene back during Combo Winter, when Recurring Survival was the dominating threat. We had started as kids making up our own cards and games around Ice Age, and it was pure fun, then as it got more serious and high pressure that fun went away. So I understand and relate to everything in this video, and the only thing that surprises me is that it lasted this long, before it got this bad.
I don’t consider Commander to be “Casual” anymore. Casual to me denotes 2 things, it is not competitive and it is not costly. For example, a Standard Merfolk deck costs $300. A casual Merfolk decks costs $40. Way back when, EDH decks were filled with Jank that didn’t see competitive play, and because of that many cards in the decks were “bulk rares”, and very cheap. But now a Commander decks has like $500 value. Or atleast Way Higher than a $20 or $30 casual 60 card deck would. I get it’s not Competitive, we need a new term to differentiate between a casual budget deck and whatever a $500 Commander deck is. And that’s being generous, we’ve all run into Many Many Commander decks that are $2,000+.
1:10:19
This is a point that's a bit off base. Cards have gotten more wordy, but a lot of the Ojer cards are very "grokable". They're conceptually simple cards that need wordy explanations in order to fit magic's syntaxt and legal rule text standards. Ojer Axonil is especially simple despite how long his text is. If I sit down with a friend who has rarely ever played MtG and he sees Axonil for the first time i can tell him "My red burn effects do damage equal to Axonil's power, not their stated value." that's instantly understandable. A lot of newer cards are longwinded but conceptually easy to understand and intuit. Taq is "if you'd make a guy you make 3 of him". The saga praetors are way way worse because they just have many unrelated effects, not many moving parts that ultimately culminate in one cohesive effect.
Ironically, I think Axonil illustrates a totally unrelated, also recent bad design philosophy though! Axonil's text bloat is owed to the fact he has lots of little conditions that are meant to eliminiate "feel bad" moments. He only changes the power of red burn effects if they hit an opponent, not yourself, and he only changes the power of them if it would increase the damage dealt. This is a ton of text just to saw off the actually interesting edge cases where you could decrease an axonil player's damage output with a minus power effect, or make an axonil player kill themselves with symmetrical burn by pumping their creature. All to make sure a player is never punished for the ramifications of their own card.
If Dark Confidant was created today it would say "if this would decrease your life total to 0, instead exile that card face down".
And Dark Confidant would be a 3/2 ; )
I disagree with you about Ojer Axonil being grokable but putting that aside, the complexity problem compounds when you have _so many_ cards like it even if them some of them would be fine individually.
Out of curiosity, why? The OP's explanation of "your burn now does his Power in damage" seems simple enough
To be fair, for the first point, this is literally what happens with Endymion, the Mighty Master of Magic in Yugioh.
Endymion really only has 3 effects that just have a bunch of restrictions and costs, but it is infamous for just being very wordy to the point that it's confusing despite the actual effects themselves being quite simple (Remove counters to special summon from pendulum zone, negation effect, search spell on death).
@@ich3730 it also not correct, they deal at least his power in damage or max(his-power,normal damage)
One thing I noticed is you didn’t mention was how it’s seeming that more and more cards and mechanic’s are being designed for digital. You seemed like you were starting to talk about that with the gatcha cards but ended up going in a different direction. In my opinion the day and night mechanic is a good example of this, because once introduced it has to be continually tracked because even if the card that introduced it is removed you or your opponent may have something that has day/nightbound. I believe the prof did a video about this and I was just a bit surprised that you didn’t mention it especially because you had said that things are getting harder to track due to double faced card and how complicated those cards in question are
Agreed. A lot of the cards that are dropping nowadays are quite hard to keep track of if you’re playing in paper. They were definitely designed with Arena in mind.
How is day and night hard to track? Just check every upkeep how many spells were cast by the player whos turn it was
@@akshooter271 It's not hard its just annoying because if you mess up and forget (something not impossible if you only run one daybound creature as a 4 of) and then it gets reintroduced its a mess
@@jmanwild87 try putting your day night card on the top of your deck
Day/night isn't a "new" mechanic. It's just the werewolf text from old innistrad sets but as an emblem.
I think some of what you're contributing to 'designing for commander' is actually more a result of 'designing for Arena'. Specifically the white kills everything issue. In a best-of-one environment, you can't really include situational cards in your deck and can't sideboard, so you need stuff that can interact with anything you come up against. I concur that it's made the game worse, but don't think it's strictly a designing for commander issue.
A more broadly encompassing term would be "designing for casual" but it's more nebulous; everyone knows what "designing for EDH" means.
Is Best of 1 really the most popular arena format? I always assumed people preferred sideboarding.
@@SmashCentralOfficial From the looks of it Bo1 is very very popular
@@SmashCentralOfficialBest of 1 is very popular because it let's people have fun with playing weird off-meta strategies. Past game 1, your opponent will just sideboard and beat you everytime.
@@SmashCentralOfficial Yep, easier to jam games. It fucking sucks.
It is jaw dropping to hear someone decry Inti for having too much variance when, 10 minutes earlier, reminiscing fondly about Bloodbraid Elf.
The most common play pattern for Inti in my cube, thus far, have been 1: Play Inti and attack with a 1 drop. 2: discard a card, put a counter on the one drop, exile a card that is uncastable due to it being only turn two. 3: Opponent untaps, kills Inti and takes their free 2-for-1 because the opponent discarded a card for a measly +1/+1 counter.
Like, Inti is a fun build around but far from backbreaking. Sure, left unchecked it can threaten to take over a game, but the exact same thing could be said about Dark Confidant. And if we're talking variance, Bob flipping lands two turns in a row and drawing a spell for your draw step for the turn is borderline game over. Confidant has the same variance issues Inti has where the top of your library determines how broken he is.
Edit: And I know we're not praising Aetherling, right? I won a ton of games back in the day playing INN/RTR UW Control, and that is one of the most miserable cards ever printed. Insinuating you could interact with it is a straight up lie. The control player just waits until 8 mana, casts it with two blue up, and says go. If you'd somehow been saving three hard removal spells, you could three-for-one yourself to kill it, in which case they'd just Rev to find another. It's the one card I've seen more players tilt off against because it was utterly uninteractable with.
You've completely missed the point. The main problem is the power level. Aetherling requires actual investment. You have to get to a substantial amount of mana to protect it and continue investing that mana for the remainder of the game. The same isn't the case for present day control finishers.
I also dislike the variance from BBE and Bob, but again, the issue is the power level.
If you discard a card to Inti while tapped out then you're (probably) playing the card wrong.
@@AmmiO2 I disagree with only power level being enough to be a problem, you compared pioneer to standard, obviously pioneer will have a more powerful answer, also there is counterplays such as edicts and wipes and cards indeed are a resource so it can happen that they are forced to slap turn 5-6 with too little protection like 1 or 2 cards in hand and then if neither is a land, you removed something of value from them, also 3/5 is not the biggest body of the world to trade. Those issues are indeed so big that dream trawler wasn't even the standard wincon at the time of the video, it is Regal Caracal, which just screams draft rare
Now if you compare to current standard's uw control, most win cons are heavily flawed
Ezrim: uses a really limited resource to protect itself and also costs mana
Jace: pretty matchup reliant because milling the opponent is too slow on most matchups (other than control mirrors and domain)
Horn whale: works both as removal early game but actually slow/awkward to be placed (compared to the last wincon) and despite having ward is still removable
Hullbreaker horror: The slowest one but with most inevitability...if you have cards. However, I played a lot with it and on that point it is decently common that is not the case and then is actually the most unprotected one, also you don't permanently deal with the removal, just slows it down, you need more cards to slow it down again next turn
I don't hear enough people talking about the over focus of commander, thank you for this whenever I would talk about it I'd get made fun of lol
Used to be a tolerable format. Now it’s 3 hours of reading new cards.
@@drugsdelaney2907 watched more of the video here, this is just heartbreaking and makes me incredibly sad. the simple fix to all of this is to just slow down, give them the time to put out quality products instead of constantly pushing. it's sad and heartbreaking, good for no one
@@LizaPlz I’m extremely bummed about it as I’ve been playing for 30 years and I can remember when I loved the game so much that I thought I’d never quit. I was able to get paid to teach kids how to play through the ymca and also at comic con. Maybe it was always unhealthy consumerism idk, but I feel dirty supporting this game any longer.
@@drugsdelaney2907 RIGHT EXACTLY I've been playing since 2015 and I'm like man I will never stop playing this game there is just so much talent here and now I'm openly happy to bash the company on their decisions, both Hasbro and wotc
I've been playing since 2010 (Rise of the Eldrazi) and thought I'd never stop. Played almost all the formats: Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, EDH, Booster Draft, Sealed, Cube. Now I don't have fun in tournaments anymore, win or lose. Atlanta might've been my last tournament, although I can't say I've quit completely since I haven't sold my collection.
Fire Design; as in, you set the format on fire 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
I agree with most of your points. Here’s the thing. They no longer design for what we love. 1vs1, where resources matter, colors have limitations. They design for multiplayer, where there is no Aggro, everything draws a card, colors don’t matter they all do everything. Once you realize this is what they are doing, yea it still sucks. But it’s their plan, their aim. We just have to accept that.
A change in direction that inti demonstrates is putting payoffs directly onto the engine cards.
Whenever you discard exile and play this turn is a really exciting engine to build around.
But you dont even need to build around it for it to be good.
Old engines were much more about having to build a deck around them.
I think over time they changed this because too many engine cards werent good because they were too reliant on being turned on, so they started turning them on by default
In Drive to Work, Rosewater occassionally touches on "AB mechanics", meaning any mechanic which has a set up-pay off dynamic. Discard is an AB mechanic for instance, there are cards which discard cards, and cards which benefit from being discarded. Rosewater posited that AB mechanics were inherently bricky because you often simply drew only one half of the interaction, or you had a board state where the A half was more expensive than the B half and it ruined your curve to utilize them together. In the podcast he said the solution to AB mechanics was to either create modal cards that could be A or B, or a small selection of cards that were both A and B (and tuned down as a result of their flexibility).
In addition to the As and Bs of AB mechanics, there are also Cs. These are persistent engines which neither facilitate an action or benefit from the action being applied to them, but provide value as a third wheel whenever the mechanic is engaged with. Let's go back to discard as an example. The A is cards which discard cards. The B is cards that benefit from being discarded. Cs in this context are value engines which can neither discard cards nor do something when discarded, but accrue some sort of value when you discard another card. Aristocrats often have C cards too, cards which neither sacrifice things nor are sacrificed, but do something when another sacrifice happens. A common deckbuilding mistake among new players is to fill their deck with tons of C cards to extract hypothetical maximum value from playing A cards.
Sometimes they'll make A+C cards, but restrict the C bonuses to only cards affected by its own A function. A lot of planeswalkers were initially like this. A lot of play cards from exile engines are like this.
All of the problems with AB(C) mechanics are exacerbated by the commander format. Finding your As, your Bs, and your Cs in a timely fashion in a 100 card singleton format is a nightmare. So you're going to see a lot of A+B cards, B+C cards, and A+C cards. Maybe even some A+B+C cards. The other thing you're going to see is cards that are continuous engines which have ETBs attached to guarantee a minimum value threshold. "When you attack or ETB", "during your upkeep or ETB", "ETB or when something else ETBs".
"That's why Ragavan was printed, so they can sell sex."
Took me a minute to realize you said "sets"
And yet 60% of Dylan's Cube are cards from 2020-2023 sets.
I think that might be the wrong way to look at it, if 20% of cards in a set are broken thats definitely still bad design, even if the remaining 80 are perfectly fair.
I personally don't think the modern card designs is what ruined magic or currently killing it (though companion was probably the absolute worst idea in recent memory), no what's currently making MTG in such dire straits is how WotC is handling their product: - Giving us too much of it in so little time, with spoiler seasons being too frequent, and close to each other, having too many universes beyond crossovers products in one year, shilling out huge products with little actual card value in said products not making it worth buying, not reprinting valuable cards that desperately need reprints more consistently, over saturating the market with promo, gift and collector's product and having such extremely rushed and shitty storytelling that ultimately contribute to more shitty product (MOM: Aftermath). The cards within these sets aren't necessarily bad as a whole, but certain cards are hella pushed and will most likely become extremely expensive over time due to staplehood and possibly not seeing reprints due to being in a crossover product (hello one ring), though those are honestly outliers in generally fine card design. No I would say the way WotC is doleing out the product is doing far worse for the state of MtG's health. Especially since they have been focusing too much on Commander and not focusing on the health of their other formats due to the fact Commander makes them the most money as a format. Even though in business sense it makes sense why they are doing this, and considering how badly the rest of the company in Hasbro is doing, their forcibly pushing WotC to sell what makes them the most money, which further diludes and creates problems with the products they cater to those business sense mindsets. The only reason I am optimistic about the upcoming year is that I like the fact they are taking a risk with new planes that aren't simply revisits like yet another ravnica set like recently, although I will admit that one at least I feel was handled well. I really am curious about Outlaws of Thunder Juction and the redwall inspired set Bloomburrow, which has me the most excited.
Overall I think the health of the game and its deterioration is due to this overreliance of pushing out too much product, not giving much value in newer products to warrant the large price tags and too much focus on commander on the main format to be pushed.
Yeah, the stock market analysts agree with you!
1:37:25 in the hypergeometric calculator, it shows the probability is 0.06, but the graphic mistakenly states that as 0.06%, not 6%. A hypergeometric calculator is not actually necessary here since it’s only a sample of one, the probability is just 3/50 which gives you the 6%.
Coming from a primarily Yugioh background, most of this sounds like the problems Yugioh has been dealing with for nearly a decade. The person is chat is spot on. Yugioh's philosophy of bad untested design to sell sets that power creep everything else with the balancer of simply banning mistakes has made me become entirely disillusioned with Yugioh. I can see through this video that Magic did the same thing.
if mistakes would get banned in mtg noone would complain
Has been an issue since 1999, Yugioh has been a design mess since release (lots of old game cards are like that tbh), the powercreep everyone complains really just started in 2015-2016
STOP SAYING “LIKE” EVERY 3 SECONDS IM GONNA KMS
You shouldn't kiss your sister
The only genuinely bad take in here was that impulse draw is a bad thing.
I think the point was more that impulse draw is bad when it's stapled to a creature which would already be powerful without it.
The problem with power increases, especially of such recent drastic ones, is it isn't a problem you can reverse.
I remember when the base set of the game was ONLY reprints. So the main buyers were new player interested in standard long term and collectors that might be wanting the newest art versions of card they might already like.
Between the creation of the Mythic rarity and the decision to add new cards for standard in the yearly base set, the fix was in. This is not a game meant to be played. It's meant to be collected, and playing is a secondary goal.
Commander is both worse and tragic. A format meant for casuals to play all the cards that simply weren't good enough for constructed formats now is being overrun with staples being made every single product. It's absurd.
M12 and m13 taught me the game 😭😭
This presentation articulated a lot of things that I had felt, but hadnt sat down to really process properly. One of the biggest casulties of this power creeping, wall of texts is the flavor lore. The story in general is practically non existant at this point.
The issue of just adding more text, more lines pf abilities to each card. I miss when savanna lions was a pushed card.
I think it's more interesting to not have gameplay and power be a static still line for 30 years. Thoughts?
@@tobomy Power should wax and wane. In the past (Pre Hasbro getting their hands into things) Wizards would purposely print lower-powered sets to scale back on the power creep, increasing the overall longevity of the game. See: Invasion/Odyssey and the OG Kamigawa blocks. The problem now that Hasbro is constantly looking at quarterly gains, you can't scale back the power ever, because the lower powered sets aren't purchase incentives.
@@patterofheads256 MKM is selling poorly atm, because players don't like it, looks like everything is weak except a few utility cards... so expect higher powered sets in the near future to compensate for it.
@@patterofheads256 Kamigawa was a good slow-down after the power of Mirrodin, but Ravnica really pushing multi-color kinda killed it for me.
Love Dylan's thought that Limited (specifically on Arena) is only getting better. Unlike the rares and mythics that are being pushed to absurd limits to ensure people buy things, commons and uncommons are now being designed with limited in mind, meaning good play patterns and interesting limited formats are the goal. Nobody's buying new sets for the commons. But drafts are getting butts in seats, they're getting Arena players to spend their gems, they're increasing the EV of prerelease events. And it doesn't matter how complicated the mechanics get when you have arena doing all the legwork for you. I've recently switched to playing primarily digital limited and it's been tons of fun.
re: Inti.... remember what a big deal it was in Shadows over Innistrad when red got it's first vanilla bear? When people want to try to say the game hasn't been pushed, this is a good reference point.
When you point out the situation of "opponent has 4 mana so you have to guess if that means you'll run into Emperor, Deluge, or Absorb" it felt like a bit of a weak argument to me because the "healthy" RTR era list you show earlier has the potential to do the exact same stuff with 2 mana - you either attack and enable Azorius Charm, cast a spell and run into Syncopate, or do nothing and let them Think Twice.
Also, while I can understand the dislike for Teferi HoD, I think it's also worth keeping in mind that control usually doesn't want to have to rely on Aetherling style cards to close out games, and that's not a new thing at all. Like how Elixir of Immortality let players like Ivan Floch in that famous Pro Tour completely drop ways to close out games. It's always better for them if their win condition is incidental, either through lands (going all the way back to stuff like Kjeldoran Outpost, or more recently but still predating Aetherling, Celestial Colonnade) or through stuff that does other things in the meantime like planeswalkers ("planeswalker that draws cards, removes stuff, and wins the game" can describe JTMS just as much as it can Teferi). Also weird to point to Shark Typhoon when it's just a colourshifted (and a bit stronger to be fair) Decree of Justice. Making blockers at instant speed while drawing a card has been a thing for a long time.
It's the rate and power that's the problem. For example, Wandering Emperor is both removal AND a threat.
@@AmmiO2 I'd agree with Emperor since it's pretty unique in what it does, but not the rest. Absorb is not a new card. Deluge is very good but many 4 cost instant speed draw spell could be used in its place and do similar things. Would it be any different if it were Fact or Fiction instead? Teferi is analogous to JTMS. Shark Typhoon is better overall than Decree, but I think power creeping a card from 2003 isn't really a big deal. And I don't think the Ward on Hall of Storm Giants is problematic when activating it still trades down on mana with commonly played removal spells like Fatal Push or Get Lost.
I played in RTR standard and while you're correct in finding the similarity, it never felt as back breaking if you "guessed wrong". Now if you don't attack into emperor and they deluge, you likely put your opponent in a position where they can easily beat you. All of the examples you stated in RTR were one for ones. All of the 4 mana examples are 2 for 1 minimum
I think a big part of the complication of magic is the departure from the block structure, obv it wouldve happened anyways but the way sets are released, theres always one or two pushed cards for each mechanic so it sticks out, and each set needs a new mechanic
On the Collage segment:
-Atraxa isn't very fun, but Reanimator and Show & Tell need some good cards, and it's nowhere near as bad as Griselbrand
-Blood Moon is a fair card.
-Boseiju can die in hell forever
-Rhinos is too good, but if they did a trimming ban on something like Dead//Gone or some other part of it that only it runs, it'd be more reasonable
-Companions are annoying, because nobody is playing them in a fair way. They're basically all broken, or their restrictions aren't big enough and that's a design failure for sure
-DRC is insane, but without Murktide lurking 5 steps behind it in the alley it would only be half the threat it is now
-Some of the pitch elementals from MH2 are fine. It's just the red and black ones that ruin your gameplay experience lol
-Force of Negation is an important card for the safety of the format
-Force of Vigor should only break one thing, it's not reasonable to have it go card neutral with the opponent at zero mana
-Amulet is a fair deck without Urza's Saga. I know amulet players have it in their opener 101% of the time, but I promise it's not as bad as it seems XD
-Karn the Great Creator isn't the card I hate the most in Magic, but it's within the top 25. Designers need to think before they just print shit like this...
-Narset is anti-fun, but that's just how some cards are. She doesn't block, and if you're behind then she's almost always the last spell you cast before you pick up your cards lol
-Three-feri is some bullshit. I hate it more than Karn, but not quite as much as Ugin...
-Do you really hate the 1-mana cyclers from LotR? I'm surprised, I wasn't expecting that
-Murktide is the glue desperately holding Legacy Delver together. I could see it being banned in other formats, but not there
-Orcish Bowmasters is a massive feels-bad, but it's as fair as anything else. It's just there to beat the shit out of control and combo decks
-Mind Goblin (namesticker) is one of those things where I'm still sitting around waiting for Wizards to call it all a prank and ban all the cards from that set, taking off the silver border was PURE GREED on their part and nothing from it should exist in competitive (sorry comet, you're a good boy but we're putting you in the woodchipper)
-Five-feri is a reasonable card. Nothing more to add.
-The One Ring was pushed way too far. I don't have anything witty to say, it's just too much... Maybe if it was naturally restricted to one copy per deck?
-Thoughtseize is annoying, fair magic. You wouldn't complain about Counterspell, would you?
-Tibalt's Trickery is one of those cards we all know is fucking terrible in a fair sense, and only exists for degenerate reasons. Just... no.
-Underworld Breach is wacky, what with it granting everything Escape for the turn, but it's not THAT much more egregious than Past in Flames.
-Beanstalk is wild. I was tired of the green card advantage enchantments always costing 3, but this is too much... It should have only counted green spells, or it shouldn't have drawn a card on entry.
-Urza's Saga, much like its namesake, is way too broken. I enjoy the options it gives, but maybe flip abilities two and three? Ehhh... that looks broken as well, fuck
-Archon of Cruelty falls under the same umbrella as Atraxa; it's just another giant reanimator/S&T/Creativity body, and they're basically all the same - it kills the opponent, and the deck would have roughly the same winrate if it was substituted for anything else in the pool.
-Hammer is fun and dumb. Remember the argentum armour decks back in Zendikar? that's what this feels like, it feels like someone going all-in and praying, like any combo deck lol
-Creativity is an interesting design. It's inherently begging to be broken in bad and unfun ways, but it's so easy to interact with, it's about as close to fair as combo gets
-Transmogrify is an effect that's been around forever with polymorph, it's NOT a recent design problem at all.
-Ragavan is the monkey that haunts my nightmares, he makes me big sad.
-The TRON lands are fine, there are enough checks and balances in place that they can never get TOO out of hand
-Wren and Six should be illegal
-Yawgmoth is what happens when the intern forgets to include a (1) in the activation cost of an ability that DRAWS FUCKING CARDS WITHOUT TAPPING
-Silly Vampire is silly, moving on
-Curious Obsession ruined my arena experience for months, but that's because it's a cesspool of BO-1's and needs to be marched in front of a firing squad
-Fable is really good. I can see the arguments that it's too good, but it's a hard sell that any one part is too much.
-Greasefang into Parhelion is the kind of shit Timmy lives for, and while sometimes design goes too far, this is a safe thing to include in magic
-Inti is pretty good. Still don't think it's game-breaking, but it's a fine card.
-Lotus field should have had shroud, and there's nothing anyone can say to convince me otherwise
-Mayhem Devil should cost 4, the effect is a little too good on a fair body
-Quintorius fails basic design, including Discover (card advantage and/or mana cheating) PLUS a strong passive ability on a card type that should only be generating incremental value once per turn. Holy shit they need to stop printing planeswalkers with whole-ass enchantments baked in
-Smuggler's Copter was definitely pushed when it was printed, but that was in 2016, but that's 3 years before the estimated collapse of design so I'm giving it a pass (it's still really strong tho)
-Treasure Cruise is medium in a lot of formats, but damn does it shine in pioneer. I wouldn't call it bad design, unless we're going to lump together all Delve cards and put them in the "affronts against God" box
-All that Glitters is a blight on the land. I appreciate strong aggro cards that reward deckbuilding, like Tempered Steel where the card itself can't attack, and has both hefty colour and deckbuilding requirements. All that Glitters isn't it, chief.
-Tolarian Terror is pretty gross, definitely dislike the card because of the impact it has in Pauper. If it were an uncommon I doubt I'd care about it at all
-Entering the Dungeon is a fine mechanic. Well made, even if the cards that do so are a tad underpowered. The Initiative, however, is AWFUL. Why does it automatically proceed? Who decided this needed to be so goddamn oppressive
-The monarch rides the line between being too powerful and having enough counterplay to be reasonable. I think it's probably a little too strong, but I'm glad it exists.
-Sheoldred is turbo-fucked, and I'm not just saying that because I don't own any copies of her XD (I own a LOT of the cards on this list, and my opinion on Boseiju isn't strong enough for me to pass on running my playset XD)
-Thoughtseize has been a fair card from day one, and I've played against it in standard the entirety of each time it's been legal. It can be the difference between winning and losing, and can make you want to pick up your cards and leave the building before you've taken a goddamn turn, but Magic is just like that some nights
Regarding breaking the color pie, I'm fine with it if the effect comes with a downside that a correctly colored card would not have, reflecting the higher effort/cost you have to expend to do something that's not in your nature.
In the past (for like 20 years straight) the rule was black could never touch artifacts or enchantments except in extreme examples like Gate to Phyrexia. Red could never touch enchantments, which was a flavor choice AKA red deals with things by smashing them, you can smash lands, artifacts and sometimes creatures but never enchantments.
Magic was more interesting when the color pie truly mattered.
I think you make alot of really interesting points in this video and i agree on many of them, especially the increase in complexity.
However your comments on the competency of the designers was spoken like someone who has never had to work on a large project professionally. Some real backseat game design, and it comes across as super pompous and ignorant. I do think wizards is constantly struggling with the demand for product from hasbro (and us) versus the available labor and time. But You cannot possibly imagine the stress test a public release is versus playtesting. Ive literally spoken to a designer that helmed Eldraine and saw them reconsiling with where they felt they could do better in real time as they did back to back to back events at Magiccon Vegas. There needs to be some degree of expirimentation, risk taking, and trying to do better on old mechanics that didn't work. Thats literally how Devotion happened.
Also wizards prints cards to test in house what the fuck are you talking about that they dont play with the cards enough? Be more careful about making claims you cant or wont back up.
Again, I agree with plenty of your points but i think you are burning yourself out with these constant mtgo events and public online discourse. Go build your own cube and take it to a con, make a commander deck for a small discord that brews to be creative and fun, play more prereleases. Idk but i genuinely think you are putting some of this on yourself. Im really glad you enjoyed that pioneer cube and I hope you get to do more stuff like thay.
Bad designers are bad...
THIS. Also, not liking some aspects of a product is no reason to shittalk it, in general. For example: I had a chat with Gavin at a convention about Throne of Eldraine design, a few months after release: he was proud of it, and rightfully so. The worldbuilding was great, the art was great, the mechanics were great, the limited experience was quite good, many iconic cards are still used, and the set overall was so well received that we already had a revisit. Honestly, who the hell cares if some elitist grognards spent months complaining that too many cards were busted? I certainly don't. Actually, at that time I was happy that there were so many bans, it meant that the B&R mechanism was working, finally.
On that I agree totally, with even more layoffs but so much sets this year despite that, I just can't see how they will be able to design mostly balanced and fun cards with that much work. And I think that it is fine they taking risks that sometimes happens to make broken cards, the accidents can be funny to remember and makes that memorable, e.g.: tarmogoyf and Oko, for example, but another thing is trying to make intentionally pushed cards and doing nothing against it or reluctantly trying to stall as much as possible (e.g: Ragavan, Wren & Six, the evoke elementals, and so on)
and yet not a word of our savior format, pauper
One thing that made me quit MtG was when I realized that no matter what format you're playing, the best decks are STILL running the best cards from Standard.
Before Fable was banned in Standard, the modern and pioneer Rakdos lists were just the core Standard list with slightly improved supporting cards. Sheoldred, Bloodtithe Harvester, Graveyard Trespasser and Fable were often still the main threats in the format. And NONE of them were fun to play against.
Power creep has always existed, but nowadays it feels very, very intentional. It makes the whole game feel stale when all you ever see is the same 4-5 cards in each color.
I think one of the problems that I don’t think you mentioned is that modern WOTC designers don’t know how to balance deck color consistently with deck multi-color power. Let me explain.
Traditionally in magic, there is an inherent deck building tension where you want to play the most powerful cards in a format but those cards are hopefully spread out across multiple colors. If you went too far into the multi-color power end of the spectrum, your deck would be more powerful but your mana base becomes too inconsistent and you would inherently lose games due to variance. If you went too far into the single-color consistency end of the spectrum, your deck was far more consistent but you lost out on powerful cards. This creates interesting deck building decisions.
Previously, you would have to choose what you wanted to do with your deck and stick to that plan. Boomer Jund didn’t also get to play counterspells. Burn didn’t have good card draw options. Azorius Control didn’t get to play busted early threats. You had to choose and that made games of magic more varied and interesting.
Now, with the creation of fetchlands, triomes, and other color fixing options, there is almost no meaningful incentive to build a mono-color, two-color, or even three-color deck. In fact, it feels like a liability. Screw it. Just play Ragavan because it’s the best one-mana threat and it creates you treasures. Screw it. Just play Wrenn & Six because it’s the best two mana planeswalker and it let’s you reuse your ideal fetchland forever. Screw it. Just play Teferi, Time Raveler because it draws you a card and invalidates control and certain combo decks. The list goes on and on. The fact that decks can consistently hit RG on turn two, UW on turn three, and have B for Leyline Binding is insane. This makes decks homogenous and boring to play against.
As previously stated, the most problematic cards become more frustrating to deal with because you see them all the time. As a control player, Teferi, Time Raveler was less of a pain in the past because you really only saw him in control mirrors. Now he’s in control decks, midrange decks, etc. It makes the card way more frustrating than he otherwise would be.
This wouldn’t be the end of the world if there was decent hate against soup decks. The only semi-viable options in Modern being Blood Moon and Spreading Seas. The problem with them is that they’re too slow and easy to counter. My opponent is casting Blood Moon? Float a generic and green and cycle Boseiju (which is an already main deckable card). Fetch a plains and wait to cast Leyline Binding or Prismatic Ending in a turn cycle (again, main deckable cards). Nice job wasting your turn for nothing. nerd. Now let me overwhelm you with my superior card quality.
WOTC could address these issues by printing more hate pieces for non-soup decks to use against the money pile ones. The problem with this idea is that casuals hate land hate and WOTC has already said they don’t like this design space. Folks, you registered the soup deck. You should know it’s inherently more vulnerable to Blood Moon. This is a competitive game. Stop whining that you don’t get to play solitaire.
This is one of the major reasons why my favorite formats are currently pauper and legacy. The dual lands suck and fetching costs mana in pauper. Legacy has wasteland and effective, early Bloodmoons. This is why decks are far more and varied and interesting in these formats than in modern.
Again, I don’t expect WOTC to address this issue and that’s why I’ve lost interest in the format. Oh well.
Fetches are just way too crazy - and ironically, they probably weren't when they were first printed, since they could only really go bonkers in eternal formats with dual lands... But then came more and more graveyard interaction, then Zendikar printed the rest of the cycle in modern alongside starting the rise of Landfall and with the shocklands already there, then Tarkir reprinted the old ones into modern, and then in the last few years triomes appeared... they were alright pieces of fixing in standard, probably a bit stronger in Zendikar but still only giving access to the two colors they were supposed to, but crazy as soon as they got in modern and only got better from there as engines or two very common archetypes - lands and graveyard matters... They're almost definitively the biggest thing to ban from modern (honestly, at this point I'm not sure banning every non-basic land with basic land types would be enough to make them bad, just worse than Prismatic Vista - which is still a $25 card - since landfall and graveyard got so strong), though a number of other things are close behind...
The problem is, soup monkeys that have all 5 colors in their cost are pretty and marketable money bait, so it's in Hasbro's best interest to make every Deck a soup Deck and every boss a soup monkey that they can. Exhibit A: Their dragon mother goddess turned cash cow mascot Tiamat. In the actual D&D source material, she's the 5 elements of chromatic dragons combined into the literal mother of all chromatic dragons, but those elements are fire, ice, electric, acid, and poison, and in Magic, dragon, fire, ice, and electric are all red while barf and burps are green, so realistically Tiamat should have been a R/G Dragon support boss, or at most R/G/B because she also has evil and darkness that led to her moving into Hell and making connections with Devils, but instead *"ZOMG she's the 5 colors of color dragons and they happen to have the same 5 colors as MtG mana, and she's our big "flaunt we own both Magic and D&D" mascot, so slap all 5 colors on her and make her the biggest, shiniest, most impressive Soup Commander possible to grab those nostalgia bux and soup bux!!1!1!!* We want everyone to know we're the Disney of high fantasy, we will assimilate everything and resistance is futile, ha ha!"
Im 100% sure people would have complained if tiamat wasnt 5c. The whole point of the design is to be a fancy commander for casuals coming from DnD. These people would have been confused why the mother of dragons is actually just the mother of a tiny fraction of dragons xD
Not to mention the fact they print cards like Smothering Tithe; presumably to fix the issue of white "not having ramp," but by not costing it appropriately to restrict it to mono white, they've effectively made one of the most powerful ramp cards in the format into a staple card for any deck with even a little bit of white.
Been falling to sleep to this for days now. And that's a compliment.
Commander is much more a victim of the legacy card pool than it is of modern card design. You don't need modern cards to fast combo. If wizards had never printed a card for commander, cEDH would still have labman and foodchain combos.The "golden age" of commander was just a an unsolved format.
Yes and no, while yes, a lot of old cards from legacy card pool are as problematic as new ones, but you will have a large disadvantage playing without thoracle, dockside extortionist, orcish bowmaster, the one ring, and so on. Although I would argue that he was speaking mainly about the casual commander and forcing staples into there, which is still problematic, and I think suffers way more with new cards than old ones, by making linear commanders, and cards that scream goodsutff/generic value engine (like the one thousand boring effects that doubles triggers, boring because they copied literally the same effect) and so on
@@xaropevic7918Boomer cEDH lists (Pre flash hulk dominating literally everything, despite flash hulk theoretically existing) like Zur Doomsday still play plenty of broken cards. I've played a fair bit of preDH as someone who just likes old cards and there's still a substantial pregame required to verify we're not going to see someone's pile of french vanilla creatures versus someone playing the most broken noncreature spells printed in the era.
Really needed this video. Keep up the good work
Have you considered making a cube to illustrate what kind of balanced magic you would want to play? Especially after this talk and your Legacy Cube sessions.
Edit : And could we have access to the list for Dylan's Pioneer cube? I'm periodically interested in building one
cubecobra.com/cube/list/b2fe2bea-a7d3-44d3-bb6d-708258ca162a
@@AmmiO2Darn, only $660!
I’m currently working on a “premodern/middleschool“ cube for this reason. Just as an idea 🤓
ooh boy, this looks fun. really appreciate the editing
On the U/W control discussions:
I'm going to assume we're looking at the Innistrad/RTR standard since you said 2013, and only one Theros set was out in that window. I remember a LOT of people playing Thragtusk around then, as well as U/B control lists with forbidden alchemy and Nephalia Drownyard. It was a glorious time to be playing Magic, for sure, since the options available in standard were a gold mine. Personally I was on a U/B list featuring Duskmantle Seer and the aforementioned Drownyard as the main ways to close out a game, but the choices were outrageous. Some weeks you'd see people bring in U/W/R Boros Reckoner lists with the paired charms to gain infinite life, and all sorts of other shennanigans. A+ environment design, even if we had to play through Abrupt Decay and Counterflux.
Aetherling was a nightmare to play against, but as a 6-mana creature that required mana to protect itself, it was completely fair.
I'm a firm believer in the Bosh&Roll school of thought in regards to Shark Typhoon - if you cast it, you've wasted your time, mana, and card. It's 100% a card you should be cycling, and goddamn is it strong. It's not a problem in a vacuum, but it's one of the building blocks that slowly squeezes the life out of people. Pairing it with The Wandering Emperor and Supreme Verdict is a blight on pioneer, no doubt about it.
-I played in a large Pioneer tournament last November (Face to Face games hosted it in Toronto) and my rounds one and two opponents were running that shell. I easily disassembled them both, since I chose to field U/B ninjas, and having threats on turns 1-3 with the option for spell pierce and negate backup is something they can't handle. Turns out the secret sauce is, as always, playing a tempo list that doesn't let the control deck see hall of storm giants mana
Me, after losing one match to an infect player: *The Dream Is Dead - How Bad Card Designs Ruined Magic*
Well, at least they fixed poison mechanic, so it doesn't work with pump spells in its last iteration (toxic)
Thank you for talking about EDH because the state of that format frustrates me to no end. I wish it wasn't the format pushed the most by wotc, the effect on 60 card formats is disastrous, and I think the general culture of playing commander has gotten pretty bad. People don't really wanna play the game, they just wanna sit and watch their value engine go off with no interaction and it makes for really boring play patterns.
I once played with an EDH player who ran the Locust God, who would combo with a bunch of wheels. He got mad when anyone interacted with his spells and he refused to play _any_ counterspells despite being in UR.
@@AmmiO2 I had somebody running a deck that just wanted to lattice karn lock everyone and he got very very vocally angry when anything happened to him. another player had a combo that basically couldn't be interacted with because of how sacrificing works. The Karn player kept trying to say he could interact when three other people the table knew he couldn't. he did it so much that he made another guy leave the table. eventually he locked us with karn and lattice and kept playing. me and the remaining player had to physically stop him and tell him the game is over and then he got mad.
I really only play Commander with friends who I know well. and we usually play it only when we're waiting to play cube. I really do not like playing with random people because the rule zero doesn't work and you don't know what to expect
@@AmmiO2 it's absolutely wild. you hate to see it. I am literally SO motivated by hate for most commander deck archetypes that I have built mono black "interaction: the deck" just out of spite for people who rely WAY too hard on their commander and make games take 3 hours.
I quite enjoy Rielle's value dynamic, capitalizing on discard spells/effects. Turned Nahiri's Wrath into a powerful removal spell with low commitment, I use counter spells that have solid synergy with Rielle in one form or another.
i do something similar and start most of my commander decks with imprison in the moon, kenrith's transformation, or dark steel mutation.
also delay has become my favorite counterspell in commander@@mikusheep
I really appreciate the Bed Of Chaos analogy. Really sums it up nicely
ammino: uw is impossible to play around
other guy: uw is pretty bad if you can’t play around it you’re a scrub
To be clear, the point was that _you can_ play around it but it requires you to be an expert in the matchup and it's frustrating if you _guess_ wrong.
@@AmmiO2 yeah no hate at all i was just shitposting
remember when burn, merfolk, 8 rack, pod, slivers, jund & whatnot were all viable modern decks?
The best analysis of what the fuck is going on in Magic the Gathering that I've seen in ages. Good thinkers, too, who discard many sacred cows and nostrums. Excellent, excellent!
good lord i think this is the best magic conversation i have ever listened to
Honestly it’s a fuckin miracle it’s lasted this long.
Every single card now-a-days being some flip, transform, or modal bullshit with enough text to be a novella is so god damn annoying.
Not how I planned to spend my Sunday morning but here I am
I think treasure tokens feel in flavor for red as a temporary ramp to put you ahead of curve a little. i like it more on cards like the big score though more than ragavan or a shaman token.
The only issue is they've made Treasures too abundant and too easy to make. They, for sure, should have been Red exclusive or perhaps just Red and White as white collects taxes, red likes the shinies. But every color gets them and it's just too easy to churn out a fuck ton of them. Then they become value engines when you no longer need the extra mana.
@TaskMaster5 Blue also likes shinies and Black is greedy, but Green? _Green!?_ The reject modernity, return to munky, mud hut Communist color that hates all civilization, artifice, and possessions in exchange for access to pure nature's full power over all mana? I call lore failure.
Yeah I really don't understand why blue or green should get them in particular.
@@luker.6967 green is known for mana ramp so it does make some sense and in new capenna gruul did seem to favor treasure
Treasure's other problem is it makes mana bases incredibly splashable, especially in limited formats where a pushed common can set you up to also ramp into a splashed bomb, this also derails drafts as people force 5 colour good stuff.
I feel the outlook on EDH is too grim. cEDH might be like that, but casual EDH is still thriving. I play regularly at a pub in my city and I encounter all level of decks and a big variety of stuff. I'm currently planning on building a Breena deck because I think it can be a lot of fun at a casual table. I do however agree on everything else. I had started streaming mtga last year but I quit because I cannot stand it anymore. In 1vs1 (any format) games are completely one sided, you either manage to get out an unmanageable threat first or your opponent does and you just loose.
Every competitive card is so insane that it being around a few turns simply snowballs into so much advantage that your opponent is very unlikely to recover... it's just frustrating and even worse when ti comes to formats like Historic Brawl, where people are playing absolutely broken stuff like Golos or Atraxa... so stupid. Casual multiplayer EDH is really the only format that is still playable. Outside of stuff like cube of course, which however is quite a different way of playing
This is what happens when super nerds play a childrens card game for decades.
Thank you, for addressing modern cards just do too much all the time at a ridiculous rate that also require very little thought into deck construction and play patterns. My go to examples are
Dockside and Deflecting Swat. Cards that are very aggressively costed, which also have very high power ceilings making them great at all stages of the game and are hard to prepare for and combat. Oh let's not forget that because cards do so much there's also so much text to remember and you can't rely on art either because there's 10 different card frames for each new card.
Dockside Extortionist:
- Can do all the things a creature can do
- Provide the undisputed best legal ritual (that's not really a ritual) in the game.
- Provides an insurmountable advantage to one player
- Forces you to play dead sideboard cards unless a dockside hits
- Very powerful in both casual and competitive settings
Deflecting Swat:
- In many game winning board states it's a straight up counter spell
- It's always a 2/1 (which is the one downside of a counter spell)
- In most scenarios it power creeps fork.
- It forces what/if decisions by making commanders a must remove for certain decks (else i could die to my own spell/ability)
- Forces you to play dead sideboard cards unless someone plays many free spells
- Very powerful in both casual and competitive settings
My commander group actively bans cards that require too much account keeping. However there are still some like the two above that I would be very happy to also see banned
I really enjoyed this discussion. I will say I don't agree with every point, but I understand how you got there. I'm glad this was a presentation with evidence as I feel like I understand your perspectives so much better and I can be a better magic player because of it.
I think the greatest evidence for the present state of 60 card magic is the number of alternatives popping up to fill the vacuum wotc is leaving.
One Piece, Digimon, Lorcana, FaB, even the new Star Wars tcg and Sorcery each are at least in part around because 1v1 magic is no longer the face of tcgs
I am so lucky to have 3 local game stores that have commander multiple times a week, but it's also free entry. One store does 8 hours on Sunday, free commander open play.
No prizes. All promo packs are raffled. So we all get to play what we want and the sweaty pods can be sweaty and the battle cruisers can cruise.
I've met some of the best people in my life at these stores. I would have never gone if they charged me to play and made me have to win to feel included in the fun.
This has been my experience as well with all my local gamestores. They just let people free play and form their own pods, and have random raffle prizes. It's not THAT hard to find a good game because people are mostly honest about their power level, cEDH over there, precons here, etc. I couldn't imagine playing at a store that does commander night like a standard FNM, where you're playing for prizes and matches are randomly assigned.
That 2013 list brought me back 🥺 I remember going against these with Mistcutter Hydra when Theros dropped.
I cant listen to anyone thats committed to saying "mahna" when everyone says man-ah
It’s difficult
Pronouncing it mah-na is so fucking pretentious.
My biggest problem with modern commander is not even the power creep. Sure, it sucks when I want to sit down at a TCG and play casually with some strangers, but most of my time is spent playing with my friends. My friend group can collectively decide what power-level we want to play at, and can rule out specific cards that are too strong. Something that's much harder to collectively rule out is complexity creep.
Complexity creep has made every EDH game, even with my close friends, feel exhausting. I feel like you have to have super-computer brain to evaluate the board states and make threat assessments these days. There's so many mechanics like Daybound, Initiative, and Monarch that affect everyone at the table and add so many layers of complexity that it's easy to overlook them. Then there's cards that have entire essays of text on them and fry your brain just trying to comprehend what they do. It gets maddening in long games where no one has swept the board in a while, and everyone has to slow their turns to a crawl because they have to reread all the permanents across the board. It's become so much of a problem that I lack the motivation to sit down and play with my friends anymore.
As a Magic refugee who went to Flesh and Blood, I encourage anyone finding themselves irritated by current MtG design to try out FaB. It really scratches that competitive card game itch, and the creator is adamant to keep it that way.
Just started playing recently its been rad.
Sounds like massive copium
I’ve been skimming through a lot of low effort rant videos, so it’s refreshing to find a well informed critique with a lot of pictures explaining the problems! Awesome video! It seems like a lot of these problems come from WOTC's desire to make cards which look splashier on Arena, but lead to a poor paper experience.
I don't know anything about Magic, I don't know why I keep getting recommended Magic videos, I just want you to know I feel your pain
Agree with a lot, but do disagree with a good amount too personally but I appreciate you two making this in-depth video and expressing yourself.
Is Dylan's Pioneer cube list up anywhere?
Also, one distinction you're missing on Japanese gambling laws: one of the loopholes that qualifies pachinko as legal is that you don't win money directly. You win balls which can be traded in for material prizes, and those prizes can be exchanged for money at businesses often set up immediately next to pachinko parlors as long as they can prove they are distinct business entities. (The most popular prize for those wanting to get cash is tiny gold slabs, as they have the best exchange rate.) If you've ever been confused by the Game Center in early Pokémon games having the prize exchange set up in a separate building, that's what it's a reference to.
YGO giving their players Nintendo Switches at competitive events is essentially them just applying the prizing structure that circumvents Japanese gambling law internationally, whereas Pokémon chooses to break that out per region.
cubecobra.com/cube/list/b2fe2bea-a7d3-44d3-bb6d-708258ca162a
Really interesting discussion. I agree with the final point that all formats have decreased in fun level EXCEPT draft and maybe Cube? (Shoutout to my vintage cube enjoyers)
I'm just gonna say it and be brutally honest: Magic just isn't a fun game with all of these problems outlined in the video. It's why I've walked away from playing the game, and why I'll probably never re-engage outside of watching a few videos here and there.
This video just reaffirms how... pushed everything is, and how so many people who just want the game to go fast, fast, fast don't want to hear any criticism from people who have legitimate concerns about the longevity of how fun the play patterns are. Yes, power creep happens in every game ever. It's a normal process that keeps games interesting and progressing. But, given how insane a lot of card designs have been over the past seven years since I started playing, I legitimately hate almost every single play pattern in any format. Yes, that includes Commander, and it ESPECIALLY includes Commander given how so any card designs are just to appeal to EDH players... all because we're a whiny bunch that wants all of the toys without sacrificing anything for it.
I just... Kinda hate Magic now.
Yep. I have no plans to play any more aside from meeting up with Dylan to Cube.
That is legit part of the reason why magic in my area died completely. I owned every dual land and many many high rare modern and commander decks. But wizards legit killed the game with Design, Set structure, commanderization and general unfun game development.