Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Oh, I run Esper Triome and Naya Triome in my cube, so I knowmakeplayingcards.com never leaves a cycle unfinished
Sets Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty
- Thread starter Velrun
- Start date
I would like them to finish the cycle. Balance in all things, and all that
But there is also beauty in variety. And restrictions breed creativity.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
If they don't finish the cycle, I'll continue using my customs
I do believe MaRo said something a while ago about their intention to finish more land cycles.If they don't finish the cycle, I'll continue using my customs
He did. And they have completed many land cycles since. This one could be next. But not in Capenna, the Shard faction set.
I really wish I could've discovered this game a couple years ago, so I didn't have to second-guess myself and how much I am subject to nostalgia.
cw: big rant
Standard players have hated their format for the last several rotations, only recently did some pro player on the mtggoldfish podcast talk about how the last standard environment he enjoyed was during RtR, because current design trends have pushed snowballing card designs that just aren't fun to play against. A play pattern I intentionally try to omit from my own cube designs.
Modern is a meme, people constantly joke about how it's now a rotating format, dominated by incredibly expensive MH2 cards. 7 out of the top 10 creatures were printed in MH2, and all 10 of them were printed since Eldraine.
Commander constantly has conversations about how the format was better when wotc didn't explicitly focus on it (that I agree with), and while I think that some of the issues commonly brought up in those conversations are an inevitability of online resources, it's also true that wotc have very much warped the format with the egregious staples they have printed into it, and a lot of the explicit made-for-commander cards very much do take away from the charm of the format. They didn't want to put too many valuable cards in the precons so the dirty tournament players snatched them up for reprints, but making new singular chase cards like Forced Guardianship and Dockside Extortionist, that's all fine and dandy. And god forbid putting the designed for multiplayer dual lands into your precons. Why I just love how this game keeps putting out "extremely affordable" cards they give artificial scarcity, so that they can use them to sell booster packs with upscaled prices and downscaled production costs. If I wasn't a magic player I might even suspect I'm being exploited.
I'm not even going to go into more artsy topics such as visual consistency, storytelling, artwork and atmosphere, but pretty much the only area of Magic I would say is in a better place is limited, and as a consequence, cube construction and the greater freedom of ability to execute different themes. Oh, and proxy services and acceptance have also gotten better I guess, if that counts for anything.
cw: big rant
in what timeline
Standard players have hated their format for the last several rotations, only recently did some pro player on the mtggoldfish podcast talk about how the last standard environment he enjoyed was during RtR, because current design trends have pushed snowballing card designs that just aren't fun to play against. A play pattern I intentionally try to omit from my own cube designs.
Modern is a meme, people constantly joke about how it's now a rotating format, dominated by incredibly expensive MH2 cards. 7 out of the top 10 creatures were printed in MH2, and all 10 of them were printed since Eldraine.
Commander constantly has conversations about how the format was better when wotc didn't explicitly focus on it (that I agree with), and while I think that some of the issues commonly brought up in those conversations are an inevitability of online resources, it's also true that wotc have very much warped the format with the egregious staples they have printed into it, and a lot of the explicit made-for-commander cards very much do take away from the charm of the format. They didn't want to put too many valuable cards in the precons so the dirty tournament players snatched them up for reprints, but making new singular chase cards like Forced Guardianship and Dockside Extortionist, that's all fine and dandy. And god forbid putting the designed for multiplayer dual lands into your precons. Why I just love how this game keeps putting out "extremely affordable" cards they give artificial scarcity, so that they can use them to sell booster packs with upscaled prices and downscaled production costs. If I wasn't a magic player I might even suspect I'm being exploited.
I'm not even going to go into more artsy topics such as visual consistency, storytelling, artwork and atmosphere, but pretty much the only area of Magic I would say is in a better place is limited, and as a consequence, cube construction and the greater freedom of ability to execute different themes. Oh, and proxy services and acceptance have also gotten better I guess, if that counts for anything.
MaRo might as well be Marie Antoinette asking me why I'm not eating cake by this point. I cherish Kamigawa and everything that is both captivating and awkward about it in stark contrast to everything I don't like about modern card design, the chance that neo kamigawa is suddenly going to deliver on these things despite all that has so far been revealed about it I'd have to be delusional to buy into.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Hey yeah! That is bullshit!
I'm 100% with you on this. Magic is nowhere near as compelling as it was for me or my long standing playgroup compared to 2013-2018 and a lot of that is due to rapid shifts in their design philosophy and how they've treated their players as a whole. I used to be someone that was very engaged with the game because I enjoyed the experience and had a ton of fun engaging in all forms and facets. It's the complete opposite now to the point where I wouldn't recommend huge portions of the game for someone new to it because it's just not worth it. Hell, I'll take weeks and sometimes months off from even touching a Magic card.
Standard? Mostly a shitshow with pushed cards and warped metagames where players get a big fuck you with bans instead of balanced card design from the get go. I don't even think Standard fires off at any of the card shops I've frequented any longer. Modern? Right now you need a given module of MH2 cards setting you back $100+ in most cases just to stay competitive. Don't even get me started on the whole Lurrus sub-game due to one of the worst mechanics they've ever designed. Commander? Made for format staples and new cards that have led to many long time staples and favorite just getting power-crept right out of the format. And if you missed the boat on the more powerful cards then good luck picking them up down the road when they're out of your price range. Hell, a lot of legendary designs nowaday are just value on a stick ala Korvold or just the best possible option for a given archetype (like Edgar Markov, Golos, etc.).
Unless you're wearing rose-colored glass the entire time, I don't know how you miss so many red flags. It's at complete odds with many of their philosophies they've had developing the game for the previous 25+ years. All this rapid churn is not sustainable long term. The only reason I still dabble in Modern and play Commander is due to having already been invested in those formats and having many of the cards. If I didn't then I wouldn't have kept up with either format. Aside from Limited and whatever personal choices you make with Cube design, Magic as a whole is MUCH less attractive a hobby than it was for many long time players a few years ago. There have been just so many blunders and bad decisions, ranging from bans to pushed cards designs, that are ultimately very unfriendly to player engagement and just completely kill ongoing interest.
Cube design is in its own unaffected bubble, but it doesn't jive with the reality for the rest of the game.
In this one. I don't know if you were around for 2016-18 magic, but it was bad.
I think this is mostly due to the fact that so much more standard is played now than in the pre-arena era. The average player usually didn't have access to high-tier standard on a daily basis unless they were actively sinking money into MTGO queues. Most people only experienced Standard through FNM. These days, people are playing more Standard within the first month after rotation than they would during the entire year back in the day. Of course they're going to have more issues with it, they're getting in more repetitions. I don't think anyone would have called for a card like Liminarch Aspirant or Goldspan Dragon to be banned back during the Theros-Khans days, that's for sure.
I think it's interesting you bring up RtR standard as a format of high quality, because I think it's actually quite similar to the current standard, at least from a deck diversity perspective. Back in RtR-Theros, you had maybe 5 tier one decks: Mono-Black, Esper Control, Gruul Monsters, Mono-Blue, and Boros Burn. These days, you also have roughly 5 tier one decks: Mono-Green, Mono-White, Izzet Epiphany, Mono-Black, and Orzhov Midrange. The current standard, despite people disliking it, actually would have been considered a healthy and diverse meta at one point.
But do you know what wasn't healthy or diverse? The Kaladesh era. Pretty much that entire season you had low-power cards still needing to be banned because the format had as few as two viable decks (at any tier) at any given time. Remember the Temur Energy VS Mono-Red mirrors of 2017-18? That was totally awful. The problem wasn't even that individual cards were too good- the energy deck was almost entirely comprised of Draft Chaff. Attune with Aether, a card that would be awful in most contexts, had to be banned. The problem was the format as a whole was fundamentally rotten. Almost all of the cards were bad and there almost no reasonable answers to anything. When you compare this to more recent issues (primarily some threats are too good), then you can really start to see the difference. If you have to ban a card that is too good like Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath from your format, that does not necessarily mean the structure of your format is rotten. If you have to ban a lay of the land with minor upside, that's indicative of an issue with your entire design strategy. Ideally magic wouldn't be in a position where Standard bans are necessary at all (and I think as of right now they're not), but I hope you can appreciate the difference between cards that are too good needing to be banned and bad cards needing a ban. If you're having to ban bad cards, you've fundamentally failed on every level of game design. If you're having to ban good cards, while you may have failed final development, there still might be something fun underneath.
In short, more Standard is being played than ever, so even when we have a fairly non-offensive standard like we do right now, people are still going to have more problems with it than in the past because they're dealing with the same annoying stuff every day instead of every once in a while.
Modern has been a meme since the enemy fetchlands first crossed $50 and WOTC refused to reprint them. That was 8 years ago. The problems with Modern have been ongoing and persistent for almost a decade at this point. A new batch of overpriced cards have just moved in to replace the old ones. Realistically speaking, we would not have ever needed something like Modern Horizons as an attempt to "reinvigorate" Modern if WOTC had just decided to improve their reprint policy half a decade ago. Even though the problematic cards are new, they are the direct result of an issue years in the making.
What, you expect Commander to become the most popular format and WOTC not to try and capitalize on it? The fact is, Commander games function on an entirely different axis than normal 40 or 60 card games of Magic, and they deal with an entirely new set of mechanics no other format has. Why does White need card draw when it has never been an issue in almost 30 years? Because without it, the color is bad in Commander. There is so much potential space when designing cards specifically for Commander, that it makes sense to explore it. I do think they have overshot the ideal power level for some of these cards in the past, but that's really a minority of cards.
I get that some of these new cards are better than previous options, and that annoys some people. However, Commander is the only explicitly casual-first format other than "magic with cards I own." Unless you're playing CEDH, you don't need to use the new cards. Most people don't power optomize their commander decks anyhow, so it's not like you're being put at any sort of competetive disadvantage for not having them. A large part of the reason why Commander became so popular during the mid 2010s in the first place was because you were not overly punished for having an unoptomized mana base like you would for any other constructed format. You and your friends can choose to not play with cards if they ruin the "charm of the format" for you.
So two things:
-First, when I said "extremely affordable," I was talking about specifically the cards in Standard-legal boosters. The vast majority of new standard cards stay under $10 these days, making them very easy to get for people who want them. I was just looking at my CubeCobra statistics for sets since 2020, and the only sets where I spent more than $10 total on new cards (at time of purchase) were ones where I bought part of the land cycle. When I compare this to sets like Magic Origins or Fate Reforged, I spent well over $50 on cards when those were new just to get the things I wanted for my Cube (some of the prices have come down since then given the pass of time, but still). It's just easier to get the new standard cards than it used to be. Period.
-Second, my analysis did not include supplemental sets. MH2 has some outrageously expensive cards in no small part because of their high desirability and the increased price point of boosters. I don't necessarily agree with the price increase for those sets, although it also hasn't been particulalry difficult to get any of the cards I wanted with the exception of the monke.
-Third, the multiplayer dual lands from battlebond are from before WOTC changed the booster structure. All of the ones from Commander Legends cost less than $8 each.
I agree that cards like the multiplayer dual lands should be printed in places where they make sense, but also, the new ones are still easier to get than, say, a shockland. But also, I think you're very much misrepresenting what I was saying when talking about the affordability of new Magic cards. If it's in a standard legal set, chances are it's not expensive, even if it sees a ton of play.
That's just capitalism in general dude.
You know, I never understand why people act like MaRo doesn't care about Magic or the people who play it. Whenever I hear an interview with someone who works in Magic R&D, it's clear to me that they just want to make the best game possible. Although corportate definitely gets in there and ruins the pricing structure and hires the worlds worst PR people, that doesn't make the actual game bad. If Mark says this set has design elements to make fans of the original Kamigawa happy, I have no reason to beleive he is lying.
I understand why you're upset, but I think you're missing the forest for the Trees. More people are playing Magic than ever, which isn't something that could have been said in 2016-18. Magic actively declined during that era due to one of the worst standard formats ever (yes, even worse than last year) and a complete absence of needed reprints. It's very clear that WOTC has been adjusting their game design strategy in the past couple years to our feedback, and I firmly beleive that they will come to an actionable solution in the near future.
2016-2018 wasn’t an extra expensive or bad/good Standard compared to many previous metas. It was just regular. Magic has ups and downs in Standard and not everyone agrees on a conclusion.
The root of most of the problems is Magic Arena. Because of Arena, Magic players play more Magic than before. A loooooot more. And they do it with half a brain turned on because it’s just digital and there is almost nothing on the line. You cue up for free. FNM tournaments are tournaments with a few rounds and then you're either done or you're in top 8 so you have to pay attention and you will only play a few matches. Standard today is 'Play as much as you want. There is nothing to win or lose.' So people play a ton and do not really have the same kind of fun sadly. This causes fatigue which is objectively a bad thing. For this reason players crave new things more often than before and Wizards give us this. This also means that in 5 years, most cards we use will be obsolete because Wizards has given us sooo many new toys in 5 years. I wish Arena was more interesting.
However Magic Arena is also good. It is a way to play Magic super, super cheap! You can play it 24/7/365. You can meet better and better players if you keep winning. Something that was almost impossible on normal paper Magic because when you showed up, it would once again be a random mix of people + some regulars. Only if you became a top 2 % player could you really meet incredible players. On Arena there is a ladder. However it can also be a bad thing to climb the ladder if we only think about the fun players are having. If you learnt a new maneuvre or got some better cards, you could yield better results and feel a meaningful difference. On Arena your opponents are almost always as good/bad as you = games are very 50/50.
I personally like that Wizards prints new cards faster. I dislike many of their designs the last 5 years and I didn’t dislike them for the 20 years before this. I dislike they print cards directly for a format like Modern and Commander. It feels non-organic. Back when the format had charm, it stole cards from Standard. Now Wizards are handling out cards to fill holes and warp the meta on purpose. I truly dislike it when Wizards say “And we finally made a Werewolf Commander for you to play.”
My personal conclusion: Magic is better than it ever was. They are just going down a path that I cannot see them thrive in if they continue for long. Whenever I show someone Magic Arena, they lose interest very soon after. The paper community is thinning out for online games because even though Magic is a game that people don't quit very often, the game needs new players to sustain. If they just stopped with all the Modern and Commander products and put more effort into the Standard products, they could truly thrive in the long run. Maybe there would even be time to create a creative product once a year like Planechase, Archenemy, Conspiracy or Unstable (the one that introduced contraptions, augments and hosts)
The root of most of the problems is Magic Arena. Because of Arena, Magic players play more Magic than before. A loooooot more. And they do it with half a brain turned on because it’s just digital and there is almost nothing on the line. You cue up for free. FNM tournaments are tournaments with a few rounds and then you're either done or you're in top 8 so you have to pay attention and you will only play a few matches. Standard today is 'Play as much as you want. There is nothing to win or lose.' So people play a ton and do not really have the same kind of fun sadly. This causes fatigue which is objectively a bad thing. For this reason players crave new things more often than before and Wizards give us this. This also means that in 5 years, most cards we use will be obsolete because Wizards has given us sooo many new toys in 5 years. I wish Arena was more interesting.
However Magic Arena is also good. It is a way to play Magic super, super cheap! You can play it 24/7/365. You can meet better and better players if you keep winning. Something that was almost impossible on normal paper Magic because when you showed up, it would once again be a random mix of people + some regulars. Only if you became a top 2 % player could you really meet incredible players. On Arena there is a ladder. However it can also be a bad thing to climb the ladder if we only think about the fun players are having. If you learnt a new maneuvre or got some better cards, you could yield better results and feel a meaningful difference. On Arena your opponents are almost always as good/bad as you = games are very 50/50.
I personally like that Wizards prints new cards faster. I dislike many of their designs the last 5 years and I didn’t dislike them for the 20 years before this. I dislike they print cards directly for a format like Modern and Commander. It feels non-organic. Back when the format had charm, it stole cards from Standard. Now Wizards are handling out cards to fill holes and warp the meta on purpose. I truly dislike it when Wizards say “And we finally made a Werewolf Commander for you to play.”
My personal conclusion: Magic is better than it ever was. They are just going down a path that I cannot see them thrive in if they continue for long. Whenever I show someone Magic Arena, they lose interest very soon after. The paper community is thinning out for online games because even though Magic is a game that people don't quit very often, the game needs new players to sustain. If they just stopped with all the Modern and Commander products and put more effort into the Standard products, they could truly thrive in the long run. Maybe there would even be time to create a creative product once a year like Planechase, Archenemy, Conspiracy or Unstable (the one that introduced contraptions, augments and hosts)
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I could quibble with some of your specific arguments here, but I think this is right.
I'd still rather this path than the one from 2017 when development made even more mistakes, sets were generally less compelling, they were already deconstructing the competitive circuit, and there weren't enough products to hit different audiences so standard sets were stuffed full of random cards that were half-hearted attempts to support other formats/types of players.
On that last point of mine, I'd rather they make mistakes going too hard to support Commander/Modern in specified sets for them than to try to make a compromise of a compromise that doesn't actually satisfy anyone. I don't really think they'd be able/willing to put an ounce of additional development time in standard sets for not doing these secondary products -- they'd sooner lay off folks, considering corporate culture. So to me, this exposition in new products is essentially all-upside.
@MilesOfficial
I agree
I even won’t mind a faster Standard with products coming out even more often than we see today. If the total amount of products doesn’t exceed what we have today.
For me:
Standard > Strange original creative products > supplement products with a specific target like Commander, Pioneer, Modern etc.
I agree
I even won’t mind a faster Standard with products coming out even more often than we see today. If the total amount of products doesn’t exceed what we have today.
For me:
Standard > Strange original creative products > supplement products with a specific target like Commander, Pioneer, Modern etc.
New Kamigawa art shows off the style of the world pretty well. Man, imagine how bummed WotC was that Cyberpunk 2077 didn't become the biggest game of 2021! My biggest "conspiracy" is that WotC tries somewhat to tie in their world schedule with other "nerd" culture things, like Kaldheim releasing the same time as Assassin's Creed: Valhalla was probably not a complete accident.
Attachments
And this is what the "classic" side of Kamigawa is going to look like:
Love the top art, can't stand the middle one, and I prefer the art of the bottom one to the more cyberpunk-is elements I've seen elsewhere, it incorporates the "neon" thing in a compelling way. That said, it looks like they're embracing the "kami" aesthetic once more that they said they wouldn't "if we ever returned to Kamigawa". I guess there's more awareness/knowledge of Japanese folk culture in the last 15 years, but it's a bold move. I'm happy about it overall though, and it seems they know that they need to hit all their bases/expectations with the other parts of "cool Japan" that larger portions of the audience demand.
If you ARE going to go the cyberpunk route, this is 100% the way to do it:
Love the top art, can't stand the middle one, and I prefer the art of the bottom one to the more cyberpunk-is elements I've seen elsewhere, it incorporates the "neon" thing in a compelling way. That said, it looks like they're embracing the "kami" aesthetic once more that they said they wouldn't "if we ever returned to Kamigawa". I guess there's more awareness/knowledge of Japanese folk culture in the last 15 years, but it's a bold move. I'm happy about it overall though, and it seems they know that they need to hit all their bases/expectations with the other parts of "cool Japan" that larger portions of the audience demand.
If you ARE going to go the cyberpunk route, this is 100% the way to do it:
landofMordor
Administrator
ok this might be one of those sets where you make a set cube just for the art
They’ve been doing that since forever. The first time I read MARO mention this was doing the Twilight Saga and Innistrad and Conspiracy with Game of Thrones. But he also mentioned they’ve been doing it for 10+ years before that.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Yes, the classic side exclusively reuses pokémon art.
Pokemon's art has gotten way weirder since I was a kid.
As for it being a "conspiracy" that WotC tries to time their releases... I'd honestly be surprised if someone told me that they didn't do that. That's just common sense for media properties, with the hope being that people who like a thing will also be on the look-out for similar things.
As for it being a "conspiracy" that WotC tries to time their releases... I'd honestly be surprised if someone told me that they didn't do that. That's just common sense for media properties, with the hope being that people who like a thing will also be on the look-out for similar things.
Wow I love this art. Feels straight out of the original!
New Kamigawa Best Plane Confirmed
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
A second set with trains!New Kamigawa Best Plane Confirmed
Man, I loved the flavor of Kaladesh. I'm pretty certain I am going to love this set! Unless they don't bring back ninjutsu, then I won't love it!
okay I guess I'm doing this
wotc sometimes bans outliers to get rid of cards that warp the format, and sometimes they ban roleplayers to nerf a deck without eliminating it from the metagame.
And realistically speaking we never needed something like Modern Horizons, Modern players were pretty happy about their format up until MH1 and it's accompanying standard sets arrived, Splinter Twin debacle aside. MH is even explicitly not a product to reprint modern staples in, so it was never designed to be a solution to bring down the cost of fetchlands. It is a direct result of nothing more than itself.
And while I do like my group quite well, whenever I go to an LGS I do generally feel like I will be punished for having an unoptimized mana-base and not running a bunch of mana-acceleration, but I don't think that is because of wotc as much as proliferation of information and online resources/podcasts who are overwhelmingly concerned about gameplay optimization instead of game-experience optimization.
I actually misspoke, I meant to say ravnica 3, which was available to play on Arena. And his point was that even when current standard formats are diverse they still suffer from unfun play patterns.
Actually no idea what you are trying to say here. I have no reason to assume that banning less powerful cards is indicative of a problem with the format, I don't buy into the idea that the energy decks played bad cards, power is relative so I don't even understand how you're able to frame this as a thing, and if you call Attune a Lay with minor upside, you might as well say that Preordain is a Reach Through Mists with minor upside. Which I guess is indicative of how rotten of a format Modern is. Just look at all the draft chaff that Dredge plays.
wotc sometimes bans outliers to get rid of cards that warp the format, and sometimes they ban roleplayers to nerf a deck without eliminating it from the metagame.
So modern used to be expensive and stable, and now it's expensive and unstable, ergo it's worse.
And realistically speaking we never needed something like Modern Horizons, Modern players were pretty happy about their format up until MH1 and it's accompanying standard sets arrived, Splinter Twin debacle aside. MH is even explicitly not a product to reprint modern staples in, so it was never designed to be a solution to bring down the cost of fetchlands. It is a direct result of nothing more than itself.
What I expect isn't really relevant to whether or not the format has become worse as a consequence of what wotc has done. For what it's worth, a lot of damage was already done some years ago with eminence and derevi-esque cards, but we certainly didn't need the brawl and other extreme value commanders or the expensive format-staples. I'm lucky I actually like Partners unlike a lot of other people with my disposition, although I certainly think it's a broken mechanic. also white doesn't need card draw but that's a playerbase issue not a wotc issue
Planeschase, Star, Archenemy and 2HG are also casual-first formats, but that's pedantry. Regardless, the cards wotc prints in their commander products is a form of endorsement to the players, so when they go ahead and put Hullbreacher into commander legends that encoourages its rather unpleasant play patterns. And precon commanders are generally overwhelmingly popular, so when you put Korvold and Chulaine front and center on your brawl precons, players will have to experience do-thing-draw-card a disproportionate amount of the time, especially when they are also really good.
And while I do like my group quite well, whenever I go to an LGS I do generally feel like I will be punished for having an unoptimized mana-base and not running a bunch of mana-acceleration, but I don't think that is because of wotc as much as proliferation of information and online resources/podcasts who are overwhelmingly concerned about gameplay optimization instead of game-experience optimization.
I mean, that's nice I guess, if the cards you want are in a Standard-legal booster. But considering a lot of new cards are printed in between precons, supplemental boosters, secret lairs, set boosters, products like jump-start, and who knows what else, it doesn't feel all that relevant unless you're one of those people who play paper Standard.
save it for twitter
I don't claim that MaRo doesn't care about the game. I'm pretty sure he enjoys his job. I somewhat respect him on some points, like color pie philosophy. Not so much on others, like him using his platform to berate people who care about men's issues. However, when he has repeatedly downplayed fans of Kamigawa (and Lorwyn) as a vocal minority and made very little effort that I have seen to show that he appreciates anything about either set, I very firmly believe that he is largely ignorant about a certain boomer population in his consumer base. I have absolutely no faith in MaRo's ability to make assumptions about what I want out of a return to Kamigawa.
I believe it's more "your" feedback, and not so much "our" feedback. I haven't been part of a collective that wotc has cared about for a solid decade probably. Well, Crimson Vow had good experimental art, so I guess I got one thing I've wanted.