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.
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