Sets (LTR) The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth

[MilesOfficial]

Mark Rosewater:

In all honesty, as much as it peeves me, this is a good defense. And the follow up:

Mark Rosewater:

Look, there are few franchises I care about more than Magic. But the world of Middle Earth is one of them. And yet, I find myself agreeing with Mark.

I understand the need to compromise here - this is modern Magic, after all, with a design that's optimized for, in order: maintaining a growing audience of 30-40M active players, whale-bait, commander, Arena-friendliness, and FOMO. Note that none of those are about making the most interesting gameplay, or following previous design philosophies that were organized around constraints. The only constraints now are "fun" and "does this hit with lowest common denominator fans?"

Even Magic content creators get basic things about the game wrong all the time -- not rules, but things like "what expansion is this" and "what is the point of this mechanic" and "who is this character". The draft environments of yesteryore are dead (unless you make your own Cube ) but admittedly, many of the best limited sets are quite recent. I think I've already said that I agree with LSV that March of the Machine may be one of the all-time greats.

It's fine that the Ring tempts you purely in a positive way. I mean, hey, Bilbo lived to be quite old and happy, right?????

But I still absolutely detest that it's another Dungeon-esque mechanic. Honestly, it makes the below card quite good, which I like theoretically, but I'm going to be skipping any tempting in my cube.


He's pretty good though now that we know what tempting does, is he not???

 

[Seeker]

It's fine that the Ring tempts you purely in a positive way. I mean, hey, Bilbo lived to be quite old and happy, right?????

When Samwise the Stouthearted enters the battlefield, choose up to one target permanent card in your graveyard that was put there from the battlefield this turn. Return it to your hand. Then start to feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.

 

[landofMordor]

obligatory comment that outside-the-game mechanics are more palatable the more you include. Cubing a single card that didn't explain -- for example -- Foretell, Recover, Rampage, Banding, Conspiracy, DFCs, or even Flying would be onerous to any player who didn't already know Magic. Most mechanics in magic are better with repeated exposure, or with reminder text, or both. There's nothing about The Ring that's any more complex than a DFC card or a Lesson-board, once you discount the fact that it's new.

Also, The Ring isn't that bad as far as outside resources go (compare to Venture -- only 1 "path" to take), and you can even put the rules card beneath your Ringbearer to have a tangible way to track the Ring's state.

 

[Mown]

obligatory comment that outside-the-game mechanics are more palatable the more you include. Cubing a single card that didn't explain -- for example -- Foretell, Recover, Rampage, Banding, Conspiracy, DFCs, or even Flying would be onerous to any player who didn't already know Magic. Most mechanics in magic are better with repeated exposure, or with reminder text, or both. There's nothing about The Ring that's any more complex than a DFC card or a Lesson-board, once you discount the fact that it's new.

Knowing the core rules of the game is sufficient to understand what Learn does mechanically, you can look at the reminder text of any card that has it and know how to use it provided you have been given the sufficient building blocks. You might ask what a Lesson is, which is essential to evaluate the utility of the effect, but common templating does dictate that it's a card supertype.

If you give me a card with The Ring Tempts You, I wouldn't be able to even make an educated guess at what it does if I didn't obsessively follow Magic releases despite having an incredibly high rules-understanding. And even taking into consideration that I do, I can tell you what all of those mechanics do (I think I know Banding), but I still wouldn't be able to confidently say what this Ring thing is (ring bearer has skulk, then loot on attack, not sure what the third one is and I think the fourth one edicts anything that blocks the creature), because it's just incredibly complicated. Sure, you can just look at the card, but when the alternative is just playing cards that do what they say, why would I opt in on all this complexity overhead? Which really applies for all the keywords you listed, I shy away from all of them because the benefit generally doesn't outweigh the cost (except flying, which is simple, resonant, and a baseline assumption for playing the game at even a rudimentary level.)

Also, The Ring isn't that bad as far as outside resources go (compare to Venture -- only 1 "path" to take), and you can even put the rules card beneath your Ringbearer to have a tangible way to track the Ring's state.

In all honesty, I don't really dislike venture that much as a mechanic, at least in the context of these emblem-like keywords. I think the actual dungeons are underwhelming and bring the mechanic down a lot, but it is at least conceptually quite solid. It promotes interesting decision making, and is rather thematic. You get something out of the buy-in.
I don't know what being tempted by the ring provides to the game. Mechanically, I'm not sure it offers anything you won't get from an equipment. Thematically, the first impression of most people (or at least enough people) seem to indicate that it's a flavor miss, which also makes the actual effect more difficult to remember. I feel like the only reason I'd want to add the mechanic is because it comes as extra baggage on cards I'd otherwise want to play.

 

[shamizy]

If you give me a card with The Ring Tempts You, I wouldn't be able to even make an educated guess at what it does if I didn't obsessively follow Magic releases despite having an incredibly high rules-understanding. And even taking into consideration that I do, I can tell you what all of those mechanics do (I think I know Banding), but I still wouldn't be able to confidently say what this Ring thing is (ring bearer has skulk, then loot on attack, not sure what the third one is and I think the fourth one edicts anything that blocks the creature), because it's just incredibly complicated. Sure, you can just look at the card, but when the alternative is just playing cards that do what they say, why would I opt in on all this complexity overhead? Which really applies for all the keywords you listed, I shy away from all of them because the benefit generally doesn't outweigh the cost (except flying, which is simple, resonant, and a baseline assumption for playing the game at even a rudimentary level.)

And that's the main issue for me with any of these emblem-lite mechanics. They punish players for NOT being up to date with everything MTG and they make the game excessively complex with very little payoff. The only reason I still follow Magic actively every set is due to r/magictcg being bundled alongside other hobbies on reddit where it's one click away. I'm not about to punish people who want to play my cube by having to wade through a bunch of extra references and track additional gameplay elements that are not part of the core game. New ways to interact and use +1/+1 counters on a newly named mechanic? Sure, we've had counters forever and it can synergize with other cards due to being open-ended and has been implemented many times in the past. That's familiar and not difficult to iterate on.

Dungeons? Day//Night? Stickers? Attractions? The Ring? These are wholly dependent on a particular subset of cards that will not matter unless I flood my cube with a bunch of them and all require additional references to understand. However, I don't want to have to provide these or an explanation for every mediocre new mechanic that they decide to showcase before shelving for years with zero support. Especially if the gameplay experience isn't particularly engaging or additive (Y'all ever play Day//Night in paper? Straight up terrible). And even then a lot of these cards just do not explain the mechanic outright which is a big issue. If reading the card doesn't explain everything relevant with how the card works then it's not worth inclusion; exploration of complexity should come from card interactions in gameplay and draft, not from trying to understand what a line of text means without references.

I use my complexity on a Duplicate Voucher system and the ULD because I feel they add enough positives in gameplay and draft to be worth the inclusion. I'll explain both to any players unfamiliar before the draft and these are easy to grasp because the implementations are simple and straightforward. Throwing more at my players to process with mediocre mechanics during the draft portion, having to field questions and explain every one-of, would be a disservice and more likely to discourage them from wanting to play again in the future. It's just not worth it for me and I'm sure it'll be the same case for many other designers when they pull up their list on CubeCobra a year or two from now.

As of right now I'll probably pick up a Reprieve and call it a set, all the while keeping an eye out for a reprint with superior art down the line.

 

[Velrun]

all the while keeping an eye out for a reprint with superior art down the line.

And frame

 

[MilesOfficial]

I really do see all sides of this, but my aversion here is not the complexity creep itself, but the relative value in exchange for complexity. At a cube of my size, what's the best-case scenario here? Maybe 20 cards that directly acknowledge the ring, if the set's power level does somehow end up being in the Modern Horizons lineage?

At 20 cards out of 720, I think it would just barely start to justify itself in terms of complexity, but I'd also literally start every draft with an explanation and give out the tokens to every drafter ahead of picking cards. It'd play fine with that level of prep, but as a result it'd suck up a disproportionate amount of attention, interest, and mindspace. Drafters would be compelled to draft it slightly higher and would associate the cube experience with it more strongly than the gameplay would dictate, all things being equal.

And it just doesn't seem fun or interesting enough for that. Like with Dungeons, I don't think I'll be proven wrong, even if I had a decent experience with them in Arena. Don't fault anyone who does it - goodness knows I love LotR and would be happy to stuff my cube full of it - but I don't think I'm being close-minded for planning to skip it in advance, just "selective". I call all of us cube "curators" for a reason - I'm curating!

I was one of the few of us to wholly embrace Day/Night. It ended up not being worth it and I returned to the old style werewolves, as much as it saddened me to lose a few legitimate gems.

I have some of the flip sagas, though admittedly fewer than I would if they were more immediately grokkable without removing from the sleeve.

I still run a shocking number of the MDFCs and am now adding a few of the flip Praetors even though elements of their design are abhorrent to me, because there's legitimately fun and interesting cards underneath all the baggage.

I'm even planning on running additional battles, since the gameplay they present has proven to be a delight, even as every concern I had with them during spoiler season became manifest in paper and digital games alike.

Not here trying to be a grouch, nor am I fundamentally opposed to cards that require an index / exterior elements to support it. I'd prefer WotC not pursue the direction of mechanics-that-will-be-fine-on-Arena-but-make-the-game-that-much-harder-to-take-camping quite as frequently as they do, but it's not the harbinger of the end. But even with the uncommon Samwise being a legitimately good card once tempted by the ring, I will not be tempted by the mechanic, personally.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

You get a like for the conclusion alone :')

Yeah, I do agree that the bar for including mechanics that require additional explanation at the start of a draft is higher than mechanics that just explain themselves on the card, and even for those I try to include at least a handful. I do support the learn/lesson mechanic (because I love the gameplay), which is somewhere in between of those two extremes, and I run 19 lessons and 11 learn spells.

 

[landofMordor]

I really do see all sides of this, but my aversion here is not the complexity creep itself, but the relative value in exchange for complexity. At a cube of my size, what's the best-case scenario here?

For sure. And that's really what I'm trying to engage with; just offering the other side. And ring-tempting definitely comes with costs. I wouldn't play exactly one Ring-tempt card in a cube, just like I wouldn't run exactly one Learn/Lesson pair, or one Banding card without reminder text, or one Venture card. And that phenomenon is itself a design cost of running cards from 30+ years of Magic's history in a cube (in other words, maybe it's not the Ring's fault per se, but the accumulated baggage of cubing roughly 1 of each named mechanic from the last 10 years of set releases).

But, like, that's just my unedited musing. Point is, I agree the Ring is not intuitive, relative to Magic's best mechanics (Flying, Deathtouch, Lifelink, Sagas, etc). But, just like you can build a cube that minimizes the complexity cost of Learn/Lesson or Morph or Saga DFCs by saturating the environment (and I assume you could even design a cube where there are so many Benalish Heroes that your players are forced to learn Banding) you could do so with Ring temptation.

Maybe there's little upside there for a cube that's already locked itself into the paradigm of "random sampling of mechanics that appear on powerful cards". But even though the question of "is The Ring fun enough to justify its complexity in extant cubes" is a valid and important question, for me it's more interesting to assess "what's the fun ceiling of a cube built around The Ring," relative to other mechanics:

For starters, "The Ring Cube" is probably more fun than a cube built around Banding, Echo, cumulative upkeep, or land destruction... that's a necessary-but-insufficient starting place, haha. I also think Temptation is better-balanced for 1v1 Magic than other outside-the-game resources like Conspiracies, Monarch, or Initiative, and less complex than Venture if you assume both mechanics saturate the environment enough that every game will involve the mechanic. I also like the fact that The Ring's bonuses mostly encourage/require combat, and Ringbearer status generates a protect-the-queen dynamic kinda like fixed Auras...

hmmm I might have just talked myself into building a LOTR cube. Or at least, a version on Arena (will this set be on Arena?).

 

[MilesOfficial]

hmmm I might have just talked myself into building a LOTR cube. Or at least, a version on Arena (will this set be on Arena?).

yes, incredibly. I can't wait to actually be able to grind this on arena

 

[Rusje]

For sure. And that's really what I'm trying to engage with; just offering the other side. And ring-tempting definitely comes with costs. I wouldn't play exactly one Ring-tempt card in a cube, just like I wouldn't run exactly one Learn/Lesson pair, or one Banding card without reminder text, or one Venture card. And that phenomenon is itself a design cost of running cards from 30+ years of Magic's history in a cube (in other words, maybe it's not the Ring's fault per se, but the accumulated baggage of cubing roughly 1 of each named mechanic from the last 10 years of set releases).

But, like, that's just my unedited musing. Point is, I agree the Ring is not intuitive, relative to Magic's best mechanics (Flying, Deathtouch, Lifelink, Sagas, etc). But, just like you can build a cube that minimizes the complexity cost of Learn/Lesson or Morph or Saga DFCs by saturating the environment (and I assume you could even design a cube where there are so many Benalish Heroes that your players are forced to learn Banding) you could do so with Ring temptation.

Maybe there's little upside there for a cube that's already locked itself into the paradigm of "random sampling of mechanics that appear on powerful cards". But even though the question of "is The Ring fun enough to justify its complexity in extant cubes" is a valid and important question, for me it's more interesting to assess "what's the fun ceiling of a cube built around The Ring," relative to other mechanics:

For starters, "The Ring Cube" is probably more fun than a cube built around Banding, Echo, cumulative upkeep, or land destruction... that's a necessary-but-insufficient starting place, haha. I also think Temptation is better-balanced for 1v1 Magic than other outside-the-game resources like Conspiracies, Monarch, or Initiative, and less complex than Venture if you assume both mechanics saturate the environment enough that every game will involve the mechanic. I also like the fact that The Ring's bonuses mostly encourage/require combat, and Ringbearer status generates a protect-the-queen dynamic kinda like fixed Auras...

hmmm I might have just talked myself into building a LOTR cube. Or at least, a version on Arena (will this set be on Arena?).

What’s wrong with echo? The same thing that is wrong with all upkeep triggers?

 

[landofMordor]

Echo basically replicates the experience of buying a piece of furniture on an installment plan. Paying bills under threat of repossession is a weird experience to recreate intentionally in a leisure activity.

Contrast to the best Evoke designs -- you get pretty similar modality, but it's not framed as paying twice for the same game object. A cube built around Evoke will have a subjective experience of "pay more to get more," while I suspect Echo leads to the experience of "you've got mail (surprise -- it's a bill!)".

 

[Rusje]

Echo basically replicates the experience of buying a piece of furniture on an installment plan. It's a weird experience to recreate intentionally in a leisure activity. "Remember to pay your bill on time, or we'll repossess your property!"

Contrast to the best Evoke designs -- you get pretty similar modality, but the subjective experience feels more like "pay more to get more" and less like "you've got mail (surprise -- it's a bill!)".

Hmm, I always liked the modality:

One gets played optimally, the other often not.


The titan is often sandbagged to be able to kicker it while the best play would be to bear it. The champion was quite a good creature were one could abuse the echo to sacrifice it and return it, or when one could not do anything better by paying the echo.
Echo gives you a choice on the second turn. The sad part of echo is that there is no full-pay cost so yes, you always get the repo treatment. Echo also made the permanents get into the field earlier.

In the old days most good kitchen table creatures had some repo. Echo or something else.

 

[Velrun]

I have shipped out a lot of likes lately in this thread. Awesome conversation.

 

[Velrun]

What’s wrong with echo? The same thing that is wrong with all upkeep triggers?

The sentence was “A cube built around banding, echo, comulative upkeep, or land destruction.”

A cube built around echo sounds not fun.

 

[landofMordor]

Hmm, I always liked the modality:

One gets played optimally, the other often not.


The titan is often sandbagged to be able to kicker it while the best play would be to bear it. The champion was quite a good creature were one could abuse the echo to sacrifice it and return it, or when one could not do anything better by paying the echo.
Echo gives you a choice on the second turn. The sad part of echo is that there is no full-pay cost so yes, you always get the repo treatment. Echo also made the permanents get into the field earlier.

In the old days most good kitchen table creatures had some repo. Echo or something else.

For sure! I'm not saying the fun quotient of Echo is zero, and I'm not saying downside mechanics are purely negative either. I'm just saying that for all its mechanical affordances, Echo indulges the Spikey vision of Magic as a dry analysis of resource exchange. You could easily frame Echo's "pay more to get more" as upside, but instead it reads as unappealingly as possible. It's used mostly as a balancing knob and often resists heuristic (ie, I want to keep my creature because creatures are good, but that's often-but-not-always incorrect), all of which further reward the kind of Spike who wouldn't care if Magic cards were blank pieces of cardboard with numbers instead of names.

FWIW, I cube Rakdos Headliner and love it. I only brought up Echo to say that a cube saturated with that mechanic probably feels more like filing a tax return than the average cube gameplay experience.

 

[Rusje]

hmm, I own an urza’s block cube. There echo gives a lot of nice tension and is quite fun. The only thing is in the beginning to remember the triggered ability.

 

[Velrun]

hmm, I own an urza’s block cube. There echo gives a lot of nice tension and is quite fun. The only thing is in the beginning to remember the triggered ability.

Maybe I am reading the sentence too literal. I put a lot of value in the ‘built around’.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Say what you will about Sagas, you don't miss out on the effect if you draw your card for the turn.

 

[landofMordor]

hmm, I own an urza’s block cube. There echo gives a lot of nice tension and is quite fun. The only thing is in the beginning to remember the triggered ability.

I checked out this cube and agree that this is pretty much as fun as Echo gets. I lowkey enjoy Echo on the Pouncing Jaguars, because it's more clear that the installment plan is actually upside there. (But I still think Avalanche Riders would be more obviously fun and intuitively powerful if you tweaked the numbers until it was an Evoke card at the same power level.)

Again, I'm not arguing that Echo is unfun, only that Echo's worst designs offer a dry Spikey kind of fun that can be off-putting and unintuitive. As such, I think it's a worse bet to build a cube around than the average Magic mechanic. (And I mean all the words in that sentence very literally: a ceiling of 1% below average is pretty generous to The Echo Cube, and I don't care enough about my throwaway illustration ten messages ago to be any more precise than that .)

 

[Rusje]

Say what you will about Sagas, you don't miss out on the effect if you draw your card for the turn.

And after combat? Do you lose it then or is it mandatory and you back up the truck?

Playing where one cannot forget a trigger and go back is a tad nasty when playing for fun.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

And after combat? Do you lose it then or is it mandatory and you back up the truck?

Playing where one cannot forget a trigger and go back is a tad nasty when playing for fun.

Luckily people don't tend to miss their Saga triggers, so this is almost never an issue. Sagas are so fun people always keep their chapter triggers at the top of their mind!

As of right now I'll probably pick up a Reprieve and call it a set, all the while keeping an eye out for a reprint with superior art down the line.

I think there are a few other interesting good cards in this set you may want to give a look:

Plus, these all have nice borderless art, so the ugly UB frame isn't present.

 

[blacksmithy]

reprieve and wizrockets are no brainers for me

 

[japahn]

I don't follow Magic as closely anymore, especially since latest card/set designs don't appeal to me for the reasons others have articulated so well in this thread.

But I still gotta say: the ring tempting you having no downside breaks a strong expectation that there would be a downside. That is not a detail, that's the whole point of the LotR story: resisting the temptation to use a power that corrupts. A set that doesn't convey the fact that getting corrupted by the One Ring is bad is just not capturing the essence of LotR.

This is a clear instance of breaking MaRo's points on resonance and piggybacking:

Could they really not design something with a drawback that would be get played? I doubt it. It's more likely that WotC is so squeezed to output more and more sets that they don't have time to design the sets properly, which takes time, effort, and really, passion. The result just seems like the result of a rushed process and just bad game design.

The rest of the set might still be good, we'll see.

 

[landofMordor]

i'm not a real lotr fan so i looked at the wiki:

"When a typical person put on the Ring, they would be partly "shifted" out of the physical realm into an unseen realm, walking its threshold. A side-effect (though usually the first effect noticed) was invisibility to physical beings like living Men, but this brought high visibility to other unseen beings, such as Ringwraiths"

ok, so that makes Skulk make sense. We haven't seen ringwraiths yet -- maybe they've got "pro Ringbearer" or something

"For mortals, the Ring had several side-effects, most of them negative. Perhaps the first was that the bearer soon developed a strong attachment to it, becoming increasingly reluctant to relinquish it."

Touche -- maybe we should be sacrificing the ringbearer if we switch ringbearers.

"One potentially positive effect was that the Ring may have granted the wearer some understanding of the speech of evil creatures"

hm ok

"The Ring, being essentially an extension of Sauron himself, was evil in nature. It seemed to possess at least a limited will of its own, and could "call out" subliminally to other people, in an attempt to get them to pick it up or possibly kill the current holder."

this goes with what Maro said about how the ringbearer would be a lightning rod for removal. maybe the forces of Sauron will also be stronger vs ringbearers? who knows

"the Ring was capable of augmenting the abilities and powers of whatever being held it."

hm this makes the positive fx seem reasonable

even if i'm completely wrong about all of this... don't @ me i'm not a vorthos for Universes Beyond until they do a Star Wars set, and that's the day I quit Magic haha