General CBS

Chris Taylor

Contributor
It was part of a custom card contest we did back in the day. I remember liking it, no idea who won though.

We lost the video of me and Jason going through the entrants, makes me sad
 
My suggestion would be to have some kind of constraints if we run another contest, so it’s easier to compare apples to apples with rating the designs.
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I am, of course totally down to judge again. I've learned a lot these last few years, actually studying what was probably intuition before.

I remember being rather harsh on our ninja friend, even though I run goblin bombardment, and Jason pointed this out to me and I think I just ignored him :p
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I wasn’t expecting much, for a couple reasons. I’ve only done a couple drafts of previous Masters sets, and I absolutely hated them. Your first couple picks locked you into one of eight to ten archetypes, then you picked every card from your next packs that matched that archetype. There was no strategy, no creativity; you weren’t creating your own art, you were following paint-by-numbers instructions.
OMG I felt like such a crazy person when I hated Modern Masters for this reason and the whole MTG interwebs was circle-jerking about what a great set it was.
 
So if I sharpie my Ion Storm so that it removes any counter, it's insane with sagas, right?

I guess it depends on your power level in the cube :p But yes there is a reason why Ion Storm is so specific in what it can remove; So they don't have to worry every expansion to print a card that would be broken with Ion Storm.
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Who is this guy? Why hasn't he come to riptide lab? Sounds like he appreciates our kind of magic.
Jesse is good people, but he's only recently come back to magic, and it seems like (from his previous writing) that while cube was good and fun, rather than put in the time to make his own cube he had more of a heart for constructed.

Go read his shit though, excellent writing. He reviewed every magic block, and stopped around theros from just general fatigue, and only recently came back to it
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
http://blog.killgold.fish/2018/04/magical-capitalism.html

this article covers many of the reasons i quit playing

I’ve never really cared for his work, and this has got to be one of the worst pieces he’s written. He’s taking extreme postmodern ideology, and than just crudely forced the magic player base to confirm to it. If he had stuck with some of the more basic points (pay to win game design is bad), that were true, he would have been fine. However, he goes off the deep end in a need to prententiously entwine two things he dislikes: magic and capitalism. I suppose if you’re naive enough to think that capitalism created inequality, you hated economic inequality in magic, and really wanted to write a forced hate scred about economic models under the guise of game commentary, writing a weird piece like this would make sense.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I’ve never really cared for his work, and this has got to be one of the worst pieces he’s written. He’s taking extreme postmodern ideology, and than just crudely forced the magic player base to confirm to it. If he had stuck with some of the more basic points (pay to win game design is bad), that were true, he would have been fine. However, he goes off the deep end in a need to prententiously entwine two things he dislikes: magic and capitalism. I suppose if you’re naive enough to think that capitalism created inequality, you hated economic inequality in magic, and really wanted to write a forced hate scred about economic models under the guise of game commentary, writing a weird piece like this would make sense.

Does this mean I can skip the 7500+ word angry rant?
 

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
Does this mean I can skip the 7500+ word angry rant?


Well, I wouldn't want to censor his work, so by all means read it if you wish. Certainly, if it fits your political leanings it will probably be pretty enjoyable in an echo chamber sort of sense. Its just pretty predictable and dull stuff if you've been following postmodern or neo-marxist ideology for the past decade, and this is just more of the usual sophomoric application of it by people that learned it in an echo chamber university. It starts out with the perfectly reasonable (though perhaps insufferably moralizing) kernal of truth, critiquing magic consumer culture, and that inequality generally is not desirable, than goes off the ideologically deep end in its rush to connect everything wrong with magic today to capitalism (aka the great satan). The usual elements are present:

1. Economic inequality is evidence of a crime
2. Economic inequality did not exist prior to the invention of capitalism.
3. Ergo, if we just eliminate capitalism, the world will be wonderful!

Than the weirdness starts:

4. Magic is a great game; but!
5. Economic inequality exists in magic
6. Economic inequality in magic is evidence of a crime!
7. If only we could take the capitalism out of magic, magic would be a great game!

And of course, wizards is reduced to the caricature of the monopoly millionare, taking rent money from poor starving EDH players that just want to bling out their decks. It says something about the strength of his argumet, when he has to resort to distortions and strawmanning to get it across. It would be more fair to point out that by monitizing a child's card game, WOTC is also able to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in payroll to staff every month so they can put food on the table and send their kids off to school.

The really weird thing, is that if we're going to go full marxist, a big part of marx's thinking was that bourgeois culture itself was more or less evidence of a crime. An authentic anti-capitalist would view the mere existance of a bourgeois-centric game like magic as a reflection of a deeper cultural problem to be corrected. The problem isn't so much magic, as it would be someone in a society having the disposable income to spend 5k on foiling out an EDH deck, and the solution would be a more economically accessable, or proliterate friendly game--say chess, checkers, or spades!

And that is probably why he shys away from making any sort of substantive recommendations or solutions in the piece. The ideological solution would be to just destory magic itself, or change it so fundimentally as to have effectively made the game that everyone loves unrecognizable, and probably worse. Note that he completely ignores not only specific recomendations, but whether those recomendations would make the actually game better or worse. And why should that be a surprise? If we're an ideologue--and I think its fair to say he is--all that matters is addressing the existance of economic inequality at the expense of all other factors. The ideology assumes that the mere act of addressing it must make the game better, which naturally chills any sort of nuanced thought on the issue, and certainly much meaningful thought concerning actual game design.
 
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