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Generally speaking, in today's game you slant towards using your mana as efficiently as possible in a turn. This is because the game has become more tempo and threat focused, and you may not have time to cast your removal spell, even if you hold onto it. This becomes more and more true, the...

So, some data. Vivid lands, confirmed OP. Easy first pick cards, absolutely absurd design. Will keep them in because they are only 5, but that is honestly probably a mistake. UG has taken some interesting twists and turns, and labman is becoming closer to a legitimate win condition...

I realize that there are some issues with the basic framing of the question, however, if the game is 1 vs 1 where the 6 drop infromation is unknown, or a known unknown, the question comes down to mana efficiency, and is quite easy. If the turn becomes more mana efficient if I fire off the...

Let me talk to a few of my guys, and I might be able to pull in a few more for this. I know its a giant pain hosting these. I'll review the procedure, but anything I can do to take some of the work off of your shoulders is fine by me.

Its also worth remembering that there is no test server or beta release that they can do with these sets (unlike say a computer game), where the game structure can be tested by a thousands of different people for flaws in its integrity. With a small group of testers, you're prone to run into bad...

Beh, can’t play things safe. Can’t be afraid of failure. Sometimes you break things, and have to learn from the mistakes, which is all that really matters. The last 3 years of cube design have made me very humble about game design. The cube community as a whole is very bad at it, has to be...

Was that really why they did that? Really interesting. I always thought their actual policy rational for the change was that it would be easier for their design time to focus on doing two sets well, rather than three, and that the third small sets had historically suffered qualitatively...

Yeah, and it looks like the approach they've settled on now is to ban cards when dominent decks start to present. Really tricky problem, and one I hope they find a solution for. All of this can be turned around very quickly though. RGD itself came off the back of one of the worst (worst?)...

Yeah, the goal with standard formats is to have them not grow stale before the end of the standard season, and thats subject to forces outside of pure design. And there were issues with specific decks being too good. I remember the dralnu deck basically taking over the format to the point people...

Yeah there was, but that wasn't until the rav-tsp era. My favorite deck of the era was UW triscuit tron, which took second at 2006 worlds, and no one remembers. The deck was really fun to play, but unfortunatly was obsolete a week after the event. The main problems throughout that era were...

There is almost nothing written about magic from a design standpoint unfortunatly. Almost of the material produced is by pros writing content for card seller websites, and it focuses on competitive meta min/maxing. Here and there might be sprinkled a pros opinions on design, but its usually very...

I don't understand how that card even works. Was it a mistake to have it be a sorcery rather than a creature?

I like the idea of near death experience, and want it to be good. I like those sort of achievement unlocked build arounds. A random smattering of cards that have popped up on my radar fallow earth painful memories sawback manticore mask of memory mind's eye The first one because its...

I'm not really sure how feasible it would be in practice, but I like the idea of it. One of the potential issues with the B/x lifepay deck, is that someone can misdraft it by picking up the lifepay cards, but missing out on the lifegain portion (or not drafting enough of those pieces). All in...

Form of the dragon ?

If you want to read that article you can find it in this thread ;)

I only have two cards I've personally vetted: buried ruin inventors' fair Hopefully I can add drownyard temple, hostile desert, or geier reach sanatrium to that list someday. Inventors' fair always makes me think of: Ones I dislike? Probably the cliche non-interactive ones...

For whatever its worth, I lost to a UG/b labman deck this weekened using oversold cemetary as a recurssive engine. Its primary axis was UG pressure, but if the opponent started answering the pressure plan effectively, it could shift into a labman win pretty naturally, as repeat moldervine cloak...

To their credit, both in Chapin's article and SCG article they seem conscious that these shouldn't be hard rules: Maybe they could come out and be more clear about this, but the issue is more when design enters a positive feedback loop, having to become more and more extreme until it hits a...

Yeah, I wasn't sure either. It seems like everyone is kind of dealing with this phenomenon for the first time, and some of their explanations are reaching. It seemed to me that he came to the conclusion that a very tight power band is bland (which is probably fair, though a more complicated...