MTG thread

Lol standard, what a joke.

Gotta prop up their shitty tribal block somehow I guess?

We made it a long time without Standard bans and now in the span of 12ish months we've had three separate bannings totaling eight cards.

That's a lot of cards to ban.

It's the magic the gathering circle of life. Whenever Design gets cocky, they produce an artifact set, and then follow it with a year of bans. It's not always the artifacts themselves, just the general "WE GOT DIS" mentality going into those blocks.

Antiquities: Creation of Restricted.
Urza's Saga: Academy shit, Bargain Shit, Memory Jar Emergency Ban
Mirrodin 1: Skullclamp, Affinity
Mirrodin 2: Cawblade, Phyrexian mana bollocks
Kaladesh: The last year or so.

Which then leads to lower powered follow up sets (Ixalan) as they go "oh shit what did we do." Then a 4-5 year slow ramping up of power/zanyness as they become overconfident again. Then another artifact block. Doesn't help that they keep trying to introduce new/stronger artifact sub-types in these sets.

I guarantee you they'll be banning shit again when we Return to New Phyrexia.

They tend to have fewer issues when they enforce color requirements on artifacts. The problem is when you make something universally splashable and also a little overpowered (Copter, Marvel, energy in general), people optimize to include it in strategies which are 95% playable already and it bumps them to the top.

Phyrexian mana was the worst offender. That shit needs to die in a fire.

Energy is inherently a dangerous mechanic. I've mentioned it before, but anything that circumvents normal mana costs can be dangerous. Energy might not exactly be Delve or Phyrexian Mana but it is an alternate resource from mana. If they go back to Kaladesh in a future expansion you could end up with some retarded Modern Energy deck when you combine it with the old Kaladesh!

Bannings should help RIX value a bit as people flee to vampire/merfolk tribal decks, but yea overall the block is mostly poop. Feels way more like a commander set than it does a regular set.

Sterling said:

Energy is inherently a dangerous mechanic. I've mentioned it before, but anything that circumvents normal mana costs can be dangerous. Energy might not exactly be Delve or Phyrexian Mana but it is an alternate resource from mana. If they go back to Kaladesh in a future expansion you could end up with some retarded Modern Energy deck when you combine it with the old Kaladesh!

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I agree that it's dangerous, though i don't think it's as inherently broken as the self-fueling mana reductions from phyrexian mana or delve, nor does it stack with them to become even worse like those two mechanics do.

The problem with energy is that it's basically a mana pool that doesn't empty. There is no way to interact with it, which breaks the whole resource economy of Magic. It's just a Street Fighter style super meter. They needed to include cards which interacted with energy somehow. It wouldn't have been difficult at all to staple energy drain or theft to some basic templates just like they did with Lay of the Land / Attune with Aether, or Elvish Visionary / Rogue Refiner. They came fairly close with Solemnity, but it should have cost W if they wanted it to have any effect.

A Raven's Crime that had "lose 2 energy" stapled to it would probably have been a reasonable T1 play. So would a Mana Short that stole energy from another player, except that WotC was ignorant of stack speeds when they created most of the payoff cards. Imagine how much more reasonable Longtusk Cub or Whirler Virtuoso would be if they worked at sorcery speed and you couldn't just cash in your built up energy the moment your opponent found a removal spell. Instead, the fuel cards are too efficient (not even Electrolyze trades evenly with Refiner) and the payoff cards are too fast.

None of these are issues with energy itself. It's all the cards around the mechanic that totally missed the mark. It's probably the largest mechanical error they have printed since Dredge.

I take it you didn't play during Urza block or original Mirrodin.

Their problem is that by powering down everything to try and tackle power creep, it's easier to accidentally let a regular powered card or mechanic slip through which curbstomps all the weak ass shit. This wouldn't be happening if there were decent wrath of gods, lightning bolts and counterspells.

a_skeleton_03 said:

Yeah I know there has been. There should not be because they know what cards are coming out for the entire block and should be play testing everything as they build it.

I totally understand years and years of cards needing a ban here and there. Not in the timeframe of a standard block though. That is just piss poor planning.

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This is largely true, but even with a bunch of former professional players testing, stuff gets missed sometimes. I'd rather that something has to get banned once in awhile than everything be safe and bland though. That being said, I don't necessarily think they needed to ban 4 cards, when banning 1 card from each archetype likely would have sufficed.

Amusingly, when they revealed their testing decklists, they were basically just testing Block Constructed Theme Decks, not actually trying to break things. They wanted to make sure "mechanic X" worked in "its deck", not check to see whether mechanic x might be a horrific malignant tumor.

The best part is, basically testing block constructed... after removing block constructed as a supported format.

Yeah, they try to push themes to their logical extreme without ever taking time to optimize. It's dumb.

Felidar Sovereign is embarrassing templating. No one bothered to look at the stupid draft chaff and notice if it's missing an important word. Same thing happened with Hostage Taker, but at least they caught it before release thanks to reddit.

Punko said:

the testing is shit, if you can't catch saheeli + felidar guardian, you aren't catching anything and might as well not bother

then again this wasn't a testing issue, this is a strategic banning to push new card sales over established decks

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How obvious do you need to be? Everything WotC does is to increase sales. It's sort of the point of a business enterprise.

Punko said:

I don't have a problem with them wanting to increase sales, I have a problem with them doing it in absolutely retarded ways, which damage both customer confidence and the game itself.

MTG did not become great by printing loads of shit product, or pringle-foil quality cards. It did not become great by catering to transgenders or fat feminists. Nor did it become great by banning strong cards, or through printing and banning selective cards to push other decks.

All that stuff is new, and its all terrible.

This is great artwork:

Unfortunately:

Makes me sad. Now we'll never know if Garruk went overhand or underhand on Lili.

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Feminists are retarded, it was in a cycle with this card and Liliana won the fucking fight didn't she?