General Edict Effects in Cube

[MurphysHuman]

There certainly is a trend towards cards being more flexible, giving you more 'virtual' cards at the cost of a single card, leaving some additional resource behind etc - in total this means that it's really difficult to run out of stuff to do in games of Constructed these days. I think that's a great change on the whole but it does change the value of some staple effects and Edicts are hurt more by this than anything else. I miss playing Consuming Vapors a decade ago but even then it was a flawed concept.

Funnily enough, I cut Consuming Vapors in...2015? for being too devastating off of a mana rock. This was before I had a big token theme, and the 2-for-1 plus life gain was way too backbreaking for aggressive decks. Given the previous discussion, it's probably fine now!

 

[TrainmasterGT]

I think I have to disagree with the assertion that Standard was improved by War of the Spark and friends... but that might just be because I can't look at any of the top decks from ELD standard without vomiting in my mouth a little.

I didn't say Standard was improved by these sets, just that more people started playing when they came into being.

I live in Minnesota, and every spring set they do a big prerelease tournament in the Rotunda at the Mall of America. I've been to a few of these, they're very fun because you get to meet people from all over the state (and in some cases the country) who play Magic. The two most attended prereleases while I've been going there were War of the Spark and Dragons of Tarkir. I remember showing up to the War of the Spark prerelease to see almost the entire rotunda filled with people ready to play Magic. It was really heartening to see a high turnout because even just a couple of years earlier less than half the space was being used. Even Amonkhet, which was probably the best set released after Khans but before Guilds of Ravnica, barely managed to fill half the room.

Ever since Guilds of Ravnica (and especially War of the Spark), more people have been buying and playing Magic than they were in previous years. I'm not going to sit here and say standard was perfect during Okotober or the late Eldraine era, (although I think both of those formats were preferable to energy hell or copycat.format), but by that point standard was playing a diminished role in Magic's ecosystem as a whole so it's impact wasn't as important.

I also have the suspicion that a lot of the "popularity" of powerful sets is a result of Constructed players feeling the need to get their hands on cards from that set to compete in their format of choice, and not, say, because that set producing a good limited format (though it that could also be the case).

This isn't actually true. Kaldheim broke the sales record despite being one of the weakest sets in the past couple of years. Despite not having anything resembling a format staple (at least until Standard rotated), it ended up outselling Ikoria. I don't think an unremarkable competitive set would have managed to outsell one of the most broken sets ever if sales were being driven by constructed outliers. People just liked the Viking theme and the set had some fun cards and a unique limited environment. Simply put, people wanted to play with Kaldheim. Now, of course, having a set with constructed applications does help sales. Kamigawa, Neon Dynasty also took the sales record, unseating Kaldheim. While it didn't have many constructed staples for eternal formats (other than Boseiju), it did bring along a bunch of really cool cards that could fit into Modern or Legacy decks if one wanted. Likewise, the set was full of fun cards commander players wanted.

Now, we can argue about whether or not a set adding a ton of playable cards to an eternal format (instead of just adding one or two outliers, like Fatal Push and the like) is a good thing... but that's something that needs to be kept in mind when evaluating sets.

I don't think there's a clean answer to that question and that's not even point of this discussion tbh.

 

[Dom Harvey]

I really think you need to reassess recent sets. Kaldheim is a very strong set - even if you discount the Valki/Cascade interaction spawning the best Modern deck of all time or the Tibalt's Trickery nonsense that got banned in several formats, it was the set that defined Standard recently. Faceless Haven and Alrund's Epiphany were banned in Standard and nerfed in Alchemy, Esika's Chariot and Goldspan Dragon are two of the best cards in Standard now and both were nerfed in Alchemy too. The Runes deck that dominated Alchemy at first and is still a strong deck in Standard is basically a Kaldheim/Kamigawa Block Constructed deck. The Angels stuff has been successful and the other tribal stuff is always popular; single cards like Magda, Toski, Old-Growth Troll, Showdown etc. have made a big impact across formats.

Sealed product sales are generally decoupled from impact on Constructed - especially Standard, which hasn't been relevant in paper for years now - and sales figures in general are both untrustworthy and subject to influence by other factors (notably stimulus money, in the case of the US market)

 

[Chris Taylor]

Remember: they blamed time spiral for being too complex and weird during the 2008 recession.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I really think you need to reassess recent sets. Kaldheim is a very strong set - even if you discount the Valki/Cascade interaction spawning the best Modern deck of all time or the Tibalt's Trickery nonsense that got banned in several formats, it was the set that defined Standard recently. Faceless Haven and Alrund's Epiphany were banned in Standard and nerfed in Alchemy, Esika's Chariot and Goldspan Dragon are two of the best cards in Standard now and both were nerfed in Alchemy too. The Runes deck that dominated Alchemy at first and is still a strong deck in Standard is basically a Kaldheim/Kamigawa Block Constructed deck. The Angels stuff has been successful and the other tribal stuff is always popular; single cards like Magda, Toski, Old-Growth Troll, Showdown etc. have made a big impact across formats.

Sealed product sales are generally decoupled from impact on Constructed - especially Standard, which hasn't been relevant in paper for years now - and sales figures in general are both untrustworthy and subject to influence by other factors (notably stimulus money, in the case of the US market)

I love every post you make.