MTG thread

Can ya'll kindly fuck off to the SJW thread with this crap? I don't care if the latest chapter in that saga is set in MTG, none of this has anything to do with the game itself.

Thanks.

Energy is a dangerous mechanic. Aside from Marvel I think they did a mostly good job of making it good without being absurd for Standard, but as a mechanic it can cause problems. Imagine a couple of years from now they revisit the mechanic and then there's something real dumb happening in modern. Delve, Phyrexian Mana, just about anything that bypasses normal mana costs can potentially be busted/retarded. And yeah Emrakul was real dumb, particularly with Marvel.

Indeed. I'm not even sure what you're trying to accomplish with this statement.
Trying to guilt me into spending money on something that I don't like? Not going to happen.

> 'Alienating' you by making a couple of their fictional characters on cards female/gay instead of straight males?

Yes, yes it is. This is a problem.
I am the core audience for magic. I don't like the direction they are going. Magic adapts to my tastes or it goes away in my life. People can't seem to figure this out.
Figure I dumped 5k in magic for 20 years(more like 8k). Wizards just told me and my tastes to take a hike. Hope they enjoy my $0 now.

Come back in a year and check how many people are playing magic. Currently 12 million or so and dropping.

>By telling people to just NOT be assholes to women?
If you don't want to be treated like a sex object, don't dress up as a cartoon character and shake your ass in front of a camera. Check the cosplayer's twitter feed if you don't believe me.

>Magic is more then just the interactions in a game, or the competitive side.
That's actually what MTG is about. Your core audience plays to play the game. Putting in mindless sideshows doesn't improve your core product or appeal to me.

>A VERY small percentage of magic players are any good at the game and a very small percentage of them will ever win a tournament bigger then FNM. Acting like a woman has to play the game at a high level to be contributing to the community is so clueless i struggle to comprehend how you even came up with that.

Watch any sportsball game. After the game, they don't interview the mascots or the cheerleaders, nor do the cheerleaders do commentary.
Beer league hockey players and their comments on professional hockey do not interest me.
When you broadcast your game, you put on your best faces. Showcasing people playing professional dress-up is mindless filler.
Any broadcast showcasing amateur players is more painful than watching sealed deck matches.

>Saying women arent capable of playing it at a high level when melissa del toro, jadine klomparens and emma handy are all better then every single one of the posters in this thread. Compare that with the number of female players 10 years ago.

You listed 3 women. One of them is a woman in name only. The other 2 should actually kinda bitch about this, takes away from their accomplishments.
Plus you are missing out on about 6-10 people who have been there since the beginning, the core dev team, the original artists, and some of the higher level TO's.

>Obviously things are improving and continuing to improve.
Going from 20 million players to 12 million is an improvement. Indeed.
When did math get so hard....


> Big Snip.
Sorry, I didn't want to respond to all the rambling, I got tired.

Instead...
I have a secret for you.

I'm going to explain something to you really slowly.
Are you ready?
Ok.

I know why women don't play magic.

I do. I've been married to one for many years. Her ex played magic. I play magic. A lot. She doesn't play magic. So I asked her why women don't play magic. Are you ready? Here it is.
Here's the secret.





Ready?



Ok.



Most women don't play magic...because....they don't like playing magic.

Nothing WotC will do, ever, at all, will change this. Absolutely nothing you, Rosewater, God, Allah, whoever is going to change this.

You could purge every man off the planet and it wouldn't change.

Now guess what?
I actually know how to get more women to play the game too.
But that is a secret that Wizards would have to pay me for. If you know anybody at Wizards HQ, i'll be happy to tell them for a modest fee.

You are painfully fucking stupid.

Tinger said:

Yes, yes it is. This is a problem.
I am the core audience for magic. I don't like the direction they are going. Magic adapts to my tastes or it goes away in my life. People can't seem to figure this out.
Figure I dumped 5k in magic for 20 years(more like 8k). Wizards just told me and my tastes to take a hike. Hope they enjoy my $0 now.

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So, going from 100% to 95% of the fictional characters being straight males causes you to hate the entire game? ok then. You have some misplaced anger if that is THAT upsetting to you.

Come back in a year and check how many people are playing magic. Currently 12 million or so and dropping.

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Wrong. Don't get your data from Rudy. That info was taken out of context from a Maro tweet. He was referring to an estimate of active players, not total players. The previous 20 million figure was total players, of which, it seems 12 million are the highly active players. I don't know their exact definition of active, but probably something like 'weekly FNM attendance' or 'buys packs every set'. When you add in kitchen table players, or those who buy packs once or twice a year, it's upwards of 20 million.
Actual player numbers are very hard to find, but the 'feeling' in the mtgfinance community has been the player base has stagnated for the last 5 years or so. Ever since RTR, basically. It's not increasing or decreasing significantly.

If you don't want to be treated like a sex object, don't dress up as a cartoon character and shake your ass in front of a camera. Check the cosplayer's twitter feed if you don't believe me.

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Being a model does not give people a right to harass you. Is it common sense that some people will objectify you if you are a model? Yes, but that doesn't excuse or justify that behavior. She didn't quit because a couple guys wrote 'nice ass, cum ride my dick' on her twitter feed or instagram, ffs. This was an ongoing campaign of harassment and bullying over months and years by an individual and his followers. She just finally had enough.

Watch any sportsball game. After the game, they don't interview the mascots or the cheerleaders, nor do the cheerleaders do commentary.

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LOL! But they all DO have mascots and cheerleaders, don't they?? Every single team, in fact! Why not get ride of all those if they aren't adding to the experience for some portion of the fan base?
The game existed before the invention of the Pro Tour or any kind of professional tournament. The Pro Tour serves as a marketing tool, that's it. The game would still exist without it, they'd just sell less. Anything that increases visibility of the game is helpful to WotC. Having someone with tens of thousands of social media followers constantly advertising your game increases their sales. It's another kind of marketing tool.
I'm having a hard understanding what point you think you were making there. You say the competitive game play itself is the only thing that matters, and then point out that we have commentators and professional production budgets to showcase that competition. Why doesn't WotC just put a single camera on the games and live stream it with no commentary if the game play is the ONLY thing that matters?

fanaskin said:

This entire thesis seems to have been disproven by Sweden far as i'm aware, the more equality in society the more gender differences express themselves, which is literally the opposite of what you think "societal conditioning" does, if you think about it for 2 seconds it makes perfect sense.

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What the hell are you talking about? By what metric has gender differences expressed themselves more in Sweden? By their workforce being more equally split then almost any other country? By more fathers taking parental leave to care for their children? By the pay gap being smaller?
They have the highest gender equality index of any European country, but are they 100% equal, 50/50, in every single facet of society? No, of course not. Even in Sweden, there's still a large amount of society's gender conditioning left over from previous generations and international influence. Plus, and most importantly, many of their efforts and laws towards fostering equality have only come into effect in the last decade or so. If the conditioning starts when we are children, it will take generations to ever fully undo. But, they are basically a proof of concept that society won't implode if we strive for equality the way some of you act.

WTF is happening here...!?

The alt-right dipshits are leaking.

Mist said:

Actually, I think Ixalan and Kaladesh were pretty good expansions for Standard. Kaladesh probably deserved a third set, or at least a third set with Energy and maybe a different set of mechanics.

Emrakul, The Promised End was a HUGE mistake and has a lot to do with why Standard is still doing so poorly. What should have been a relatively fun format with BFZ and Innistrad ended up being a complete loss for the game. Losing to that card felt awful on every level, it gave people a very bad impression of the game.

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Kaladesh and Aether are going to remain the core power in standard until they rotate out though. Every other set until the end of 2018 is just going to be fluff cards because the sets won't have the power level that Kala/AR have.

All of the big Eldrazi were boring to watch in games, or absolutely irritating to play against since they could all be cheated out by Marvel. I've only got a set of them for my EDH decks because one variant of Kozilek and Ulamog are graveyard shufflers. They're brutal if they make it on the board.

Leadsalad said:

Every other set until the end of 2018 is just going to be fluff cards because the sets won't have the power level that Kala/AR have.

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I dunno about that, Richard Garfield on Dominaria design, and Garfield sets are not particularly low power level since they let him kind of roam afield.

They'd have to print some truly bonkers shit to replace the energy core as the objective best strategy. Unless the sets are just insane ala OG Zendikar or something you'll just see energy adjust slightly to pick up whatever the 1-3 new best cards are and go right back to business.

Richard Garfield has to save MTG at this point with some powerful mechanics. There's nothing wrong with power in the game, the problem is when you try and make everything weak but one powerful thing slips through so everyone ends up playing Energy decks. You need a variety of powerful strategies which counter each other.


I asked my girlfriend why she wasn't interested in playing MTG and she said that it looked boring and she's more into instant gratification. She had a go at Catan and Carcasonne but she just doesn't have any transferable skills at this point to be good at anything like this at the age of 30. She always comes last or next to last which I guess further dents her interest, she gets more competetive after a few games but we hardly ever have the time to play. Meanwhile I've got 13 years of experience with various types of strategy games starting with Populous on the Sega Master System. We have both played exactly one game of GO in our whole lives (against each other) and she gave up half way through the game. I also play chess about once every 5 years and utterly annihilated my ex the one time we played a few games while waiting for a coach at a hotel.


I don't know if it's women being genetically less likely to be good at strategy or just not socialised to play them and so lack the knowledge base to strategise. I would assume it's more a social thing, but then again there are seperate mens and womens chess tornaments... either way it's shitty to put the burden of the gender disparity on people at tournament or even FNM level, you need to get little girls playing. Women I've actually played against at FNM have been fine, not noticably better or worse at the game. Only one of the three I remember was a hambeast.

fanaskin said:

and yet you don't mind the sjw sperg out? bias.

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Cause there was over a dozen posts from your side before i said a god damned thing, and ive not made even a 3rd as many posts.

Its all fine when youve got 5 mouth breathing alt-right shitheads all sucking each other off with how 'real' you all are, but one person disagrees and im 'sperging out'.

And go fuck yourself in the other thread. I see you quoted me there, im not gonna join your alt-right circle jerk. You brought the shit to this thread first. I responded. Thats it.

Sterling said:

Energy is a dangerous mechanic. Aside from Marvel I think they did a mostly good job of making it good without being absurd for Standard, but as a mechanic it can cause problems. Imagine a couple of years from now they revisit the mechanic and then there's something real dumb happening in modern. Delve, Phyrexian Mana, just about anything that bypasses normal mana costs can potentially be busted/retarded. And yeah Emrakul was real dumb, particularly with Marvel.

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Phyrexian Mana is quite honestly the most broken mechanic they've ever made. It's ridiculous and needs to die in a fire. Delve is next. Storm is third.

Energy needed ways to interact with it. Effects that reduce or steal it from your opponent, things like that. Then it would have been fine. The problem is that it's easy to acquire and basically a one way street before you do something insane with it. Makes it feel like a super meter.

Emrakul would have been balanced by a card as simple as Tormod's Crypt. It's a bomb, but a relatively fair one when there's a way of switching off delirium.

Enzee said:

Cause there was over a dozen posts from your side before i said a god damned thing, and ive not made even a 3rd as many posts.

Its all fine when youve got 5 mouth breathing alt-right shitheads all sucking each other off with how 'real' you all are, but one person disagrees and im 'sperging out'.

And go fuck yourself in the other thread. I see you quoted me there, im not gonna join your alt-right circle jerk. You brought the shit to this thread first. I responded. Thats it.

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One question,
how would you bring me back into the game and make me start spending money again?
I'm expecting a sarcastic, meaningless reply full of swearing. Try to think a little bit and surprise me.

Chris said:

Richard Garfield has to save MTG at this point with some powerful mechanics. There's nothing wrong with power in the game, the problem is when you try and make everything weak but one powerful thing slips through so everyone ends up playing Energy decks. You need a variety of powerful strategies which counter each other.


I asked my girlfriend why she wasn't interested in playing MTG and she said that it looked boring and she's more into instant gratification. She had a go at Catan and Carcasonne but she just doesn't have any transferable skills at this point to be good at anything like this at the age of 30. She always comes last or next to last which I guess further dents her interest, she gets more competetive after a few games but we hardly ever have the time to play. Meanwhile I've got 13 years of experience with various types of strategy games starting with Populous on the Sega Master System. We have both played exactly one game of GO in our whole lives (against each other) and she gave up half way through the game. I also play chess about once every 5 years and utterly annihilated my ex the one time we played a few games while waiting for a coach at a hotel.

I don't know if it's women being genetically less likely to be good at strategy or just not socialised to play them and so lack the knowledge base to strategise. I would assume it's more a social thing, but then again there are seperate mens and womens chess tornaments... either way it's shitty to put the burden of the gender disparity on people at tournament or even FNM level, you need to get little girls playing. Women I've actually played against at FNM have been fine, not noticably better or worse at the game. Only one of the three I remember was a hambeast.

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You can actually see this in effect when you are teaching new magic players. Guys will frequently play fairly enthusiastically with the cards and will typically ask questions about rules questions or awkward board states. If it's 2 guys playing, they will happily break the rules if they are both fine with it. Rarely do they ask about play styles or strategic decisions, most of the time they will just play a card for good or ill and see what happens.

Women I've taught will have a major freeze up whenever presented with more than one decision tree. "Should I play this one?" / "What card should I play here?" is the question I get an order of magnitude higher than the second one, which is "When (card) says (x), what does that mean?".

Heylel said:

Phyrexian Mana is quite honestly the most broken mechanic they've ever made. It's ridiculous and needs to die in a fire. Delve is next. Storm is third.

Energy needed ways to interact with it. Effects that reduce or steal it from your opponent, things like that. Then it would have been fine. The problem is that it's easy to acquire and basically a one way street before you do something insane with it. Makes it feel like a super meter.

Emrakul would have been balanced by a card as simple as Tormod's Crypt. It's a bomb, but a relatively fair one when there's a way of switching off delirium.

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Exactly. Where is the Rogue Refiner-ish guy who has a playable body and drains 2 or 3 energy from your opponent?

Siggy's article about energy from a few weeks back:

"Once you’ve reached the midgame and you’ve cast an Attune with Aether, a Rogue Refiner, and a Whirler Virtuoso, and connected just once with your Longtusk Cub, you’ve already produced 9 energy. Let’s say that you managed to not use any of that energy and all of your creatures died to 1-for-1 removal. At any point in the game, if you draw a Whirler Virtuoso, you drew a card that essentially reads:

1UR

Make four 1/1 Thopters when this comes into play.

2/3

When your opponent draws their 3-drop, it likely doesn’t scale as well as this. So having this ability to play with an extra resource over your opponent is a big reason for the overwhelming popularity of the deck."