General CBS

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
3 people in a big tournament put in thier sb and didnt do well
yeah....no one played this bad card and wotc aren't half as clever as people give them credit for

I see these sorts of criticisms made every once in a while, and I don't think they are very fair to WOTC. You have to look at the entire history of the company, and not put undue emphasis on a design error made a decade ago. To get where we are today, it took a lot of trial and error, and to WOTC's credit they stuck with it, learned from their mistakes, and now we are at a pretty good point in the game's history.

Right now we have a great limited format and diverse standard. Is everything perfect? No. Does Maro sometimes say absurd things in defense of bad design choices? Sure, but who cares. As long as he dosen't actually believe it/refuse to listen to hires that keep him in check, it's fine.

While Maro isn't perfect, he isn't George Lucus crazy, and that's the important thing.
 
also for what it's worth, as someone who gets to see the whole cycle of feedback on a larger scale with the street fighter mod I worked on, and also saw feedback on the two game jam games I made, maro is far far more often right than he is wrong.

if you want to see what a real crazy person game design that people take seriously for some reason looks like, check this out
http://keithburgun.net/debunking_asymmetry/
 

VibeBox

Contributor
now we are at a pretty good point in the game's history.

i'd say it's incredibly narrow and dull since lorwyn and maro's regime basically hijacked magic to make a different more profitable game
that's why i generally stay out of these types of discussion, everyone is gonna have very subjective opinion based on what they want in the game
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
And thats fine. As long as we understand that the reason that magic is a more succesful game (regardless of how we view that success) is due to Maro's influence.
 

FlowerSunRain

Contributor
also for what it's worth, as someone who gets to see the whole cycle of feedback on a larger scale with the street fighter mod I worked on, and also saw feedback on the two game jam games I made, maro is far far more often right than he is wrong.

if you want to see what a real crazy person game design that people take seriously for some reason looks like, check this out
http://keithburgun.net/debunking_asymmetry/
While I loosely agree with the thought that symmetrical design is more elegant and should be used whenever appropriate, this guy has no idea what he's talking about. The world is a better place because we have different games that do different things in different ways. The Platonic ideal of game may be symmetrical, but in reality games appeal to moods, whims and tastes.
 
My partner and I have a cube that we're fairly happy with, most of the cards in it are Modern. We check modern first when we're looking for a kinda card that we need to fill a slot with. But when our search turns up too few, too boring, or otherwise too unsatisfying of results, we say "ah, looks like Modern is too Modern for its own good" and start pawing through Legacy cards to find the juicy, interesting stuff. (And then decide whether we're willing to deal with reading microtext on a washed-out, chewed-up card.)
 
I'm digging these Legacy Cube Drafts on CFB. No extra broken shit most of the time, pretty good games. Also, I like the makeup of this Cube better than the previous iterations. Lots of sweet cards that you see randomly from pack to pack that I completely forgot existed.
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Is there a corporate reason they want draft variance? Like maybe player psychology somehow causes people who open the mono-curse of oblivion sealed pool tend to sealed more often then the similar mono siege mastodon pool?


On a corporate level they'd seek to create a draft format that maximizes replayability. I'd imagine more variance correlates to more plays, so long as you don't exceed your player base's frustration tolerance.

I don't know.
 

Here's another Contract from Below for your Damia deck ;)

My Damia deck is a snake/gorgon tribal deck, but I think I need to start including discard effects as a cost as well...
i ran that for a little while too, it was actually worse
many random edh things kill an x/1, also people are willing to spend removal on damia more often when you have a putrid imp out. one with nothing comes out of nowhere
 
On a corporate level they'd seek to create a draft format that maximizes replayability. I'd imagine more variance correlates to more plays, so long as you don't exceed your player base's frustration tolerance.

I don't know.
there's a much simpler reason: for games to be fun, surprise has to occur while playing.
 
Guys don't you love it when know nothings like suttcliffe and maro go on and on about how awful it must have been playing against esoteric creatureless control or combo kill decks and conveniently avoid the last two end-format dominant control decks in recent memory killing with a life gain artifact and a land that mills? (yeah they may have had peers but thats not the point ya chin waggers)

Constructed of late has been a game of "go-under" decks fighting midranged haymaker decks that's most interesting deck construction element is balancing efficient answers for more aggressive strategies against the cumbersome answers necessary to take on the threats of their kin. Even the kawaii token strategies might play more spell velocity but are totally midranged 3-4 drop decks at their only tolerably less boring core. How many fucking elf cold wars and topdecked merchant / rhino wars do they think are fun? Yeah pack rat and vault is kinda neat and prowess triggers are vaguely fun but its all being forced to work at one of two speeds and playing magic feels a little like listening to music though a layer of Vaseline to me rn.

Anyway I have high hopes for delve and prowess going into the next set. I like that they are showing they are more willing to make mistakes again. The Charm cycles also make decisions more interesting but somehow it's still not the sort of decisions or games I'm excited about. Kudos to RnD on nyxthos, it's a cute idea on making the lamest decks around more interesting but sadly it really just meant there was one more lame ass midranged deck to play. I remember when I would get excited because midranged looked like an option in an environment, now it looks like it's always THE option. /endrant
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I admit there's a lot of midrange in the current meta as far as I can tell, but come on, Ivan Floch won a Pro Tour last August with a pure control deck. I remember William Jensen finishing in the top 8 with Elixir Immortality as the main win condition somewhen last year as well. It's not as if control is dead in the current era of Magic, the pendulum just swung back to a (relatively rare) time where midrange is king. I can totally understand why that would not be your thing though :)
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Guys don't you love it when know nothings like suttcliffe and maro go on and on about how awful it must have been playing against esoteric creatureless control or combo kill decks and conveniently avoid the last two end-format dominant control decks in recent memory killing with a life gain artifact and a land that mills? (yeah they may have had peers but thats not the point ya chin waggers)

Thats sort of the thing though, these kinds of arguments come off as unfairly critical.

The old chestnut argument is that magic was better back in the day when it leaned towards the non-interactive: esoteric control or combo decks.

Well, it turns out non-interactive formats are bad formats. None of us design our cubes towards non-interactivity and we make fun of cube formats that do, e.g. the various versions of the MODO cube/power max environments. No one likes feeling shut out of a game because of a certain draw sequence or haymaker undoing turns of skillful play.

Yet, when WOTC goes and shifts hard against non-interactivity in Lorwyn, they're "dumbing down magic." When they shift back somewhat and try to accommodate people that want to play hard control, they're "know nothings." Or when they make a format that has two different combo build arounds, including one that is very non-interactive, it somehow dosen't count and magic is still "terrible." Does the current standard lean midrange? Sure. However we've also had several flavors of aggro decks, combo decks, and control decks. Yet that somehow gets trumped because last season was not diverse enough. WOTC ends up damned no matter what they do.

And all of WOTC's mistakes from the "good old days" somehow get forgotten. When the meta consisted of just psychatog and wild mongrel, it dosen't count. When affinity almost ruined the game, it dosen't count. Or formats warped by tolarian academy, tinker or worse--dosen't count. The miserableness of playing against any of the old prison decks: winter orb, static orb, owling mine--again, dosen't count.

Thats whats so frustrating about these discussions: the sheer amount of cherry picking that goes on. And that would be fine, accept we go from one moment condemning WOTC for their ignorance of magic, and then building all of our cubes around NWO design tenets.

Now, I don't want to say that WOTC is perfect. Their are things that various people at WOTC say that are just corporate nonsense. I think my favorite example is when we had the theros block pro tour, and Randy Buehler is sitting their pretending that the courser of kruphix dominated meta wasn't horribly boring. Is he being dishonest because he's being paid by a corporation? Sure, but who cares really. When you look at magic as a whole, WOTC has gotten much better at making the game fun and interactive, despite occasional setbecks, and seems to know when not to believe their own corporate marketing.
 

FlowerSunRain

Contributor
I don't know or care about constructed, but WotC lately has been hitting it out of the park as far as limited and casual format appeal as far as its designs are concerned.
 
All I have to contribute is I watched a pro tour top 8 consisting largely of tanglewire / phyrexian processor decks and decided I wanted nothing to do with "old magic" that the people around me reminisce on so often. I have plenty of gripes about some decisions they make / cards they design but it seems better overall than it used to be.
 

FlowerSunRain

Contributor
Urza/Masques was basically the worst of the as far as boring constructed formats go. The double whammy here is that Masques limited was also one of the worst of all time.
 
I keep hearing good things about Invasion. My partner was tricked into trading away all her good Invasion cards for cards with nice art, sadly. Ah, youth, and the scummy rat-bastards who play FNM.
 

CML

Contributor
IPA is a sweet format and the only one* where everyone agrees (with me) that "there should be more fixing."

*current format notwithstanding?!
 
IPA is a sweet format and the only one* where everyone agrees (with me) that "there should be more fixing."

*current format notwithstanding?!
All three sets, really? Usually there's a weak set... you wouldn't prefer, say, IIP or IIA?

Incidentally, for my cube I was searching up "cards that are color A but have abilities that require color B", and... most of em seem unusable. Jilt is good though.
http://magiccards.info/query?q=(e:ap/en+or+e:ps/en+or+e:in/en)+ci:wubrgm&v=card&s=color
 
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