@TrainmasterGT
I don’t understand your “Design team tried a bunch of novel things all at once” with Brazen Borrower
I don’t understand your “Design team tried a bunch of novel things all at once” with Brazen Borrower
General (MAT) March of the Machine Aftermath Previews
- Thread starter MilesOfficial
- Start date
Like @LadyMapi said, each word in "a bunch of novel things all at once" was hyperlinked to a different card. Specifically:
Basically I was saying that the last time they really overstretched play design's resources by doing a bunch of things that required intensive balancing back to back to back, they let some major balance issues slip through the crakcs. Brazen Borrower specifically was picked as an example because it's the adventure card with the most long-term relevance in constructed, and it's representative of why the mechanic was hard to balance.
Yeah turns out making Mutate work took a lot of time away from playtesting the Companions. I believe Mark Rosewater's #1 takeaway from designing Ikoria is that the design team shouldn't put two mechanics that are incredibly difficult to balance in the same set.
Which is both sensible and, well...
The problem is that Companion and Mutate are both hard to balance for very different reasons. Mutate's hard to balance because it's kinda weird and complicated, with a ton of little quirky rules to worry about. Companion is tough to balance because it allows you to do something really powerful even before you get to the cards themselves ("you start with 8 cards in your hand at the start of every game, but in exchange you only get 14 sideboard slots" is a great trade.
The problem is that Companion and Mutate are both hard to balance for very different reasons. Mutate's hard to balance because it's kinda weird and complicated, with a ton of little quirky rules to worry about. Companion is tough to balance because it allows you to do something really powerful even before you get to the cards themselves ("you start with 8 cards in your hand at the start of every game, but in exchange you only get 14 sideboard slots" is a great trade.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
They way overvalued how much of a handicap the deckbuilding restrictions were. As it turned out, they weren't even restrictions at all in some cases!
Laughs in Gyruda Combo, Yorion Piles, and literally every deck with Lurrus.
I don't know, the set just looks like a bunch of commanders to me, so it seems like a case of "this product is not for you" to me. I don't really know if I had any expectations for the set, but I think there are a few neat cards here, probably proportionally about as much as any other set.
I don't know if I can agree with this. I feel like the expected performance of adventure cards had a pretty high degree of accuracy relatively speaking, and I don't see the mechanic as uniquely difficult to balance. It's not like Delve, Cascade or Companion (lol) where even the most unassuming cards can end up being format-defining, between power, toughness and two casting costs you have a lot of numbers to tweak.
For what it’s worth, WOTC basically got the adventure cards right on the first try. They were a little problematic in standard (thanks overtuned limited support cards!), but as a whole they aren’t broken. It just takes a long time to get the balance on Adventures correct because there are so many knobs to play with on both the Spell side and the Creature side. I think trying to get these cards correct definitely contributed to some of the other balance missteps during this time period.
Yeah adventures were awesome. And they didn’t become a problem in Standard before many many other cards had been banned first.
Eldraine actually had a quite funny story when it comes to how well it was received from the fans over the timeline of its Standard legal period.
1. During spoilers it was called a very weak set. I objected on MTG Salvation but the broad consensus was that Eldraine was weak.
2. After release everyone was happy about it. I even made a post about it here in this site where everyone agreed. I said we should all applaud Wizards for this gem of a set.
3. Then after tons of bans to other cards like Field of the Dead, Veil of Summer, Oko, Thief of Crowns, Once Upon a Time, Agent of Treachery and Teferi, Time Raveler + all 10 Companions had been drastically nerfed we started seeing Eldraine as the problem as a whole set and not Oko alone. Suddenly Eldraine had 15 of the 20 best cards in Standard or something. Pretty drastic. Numbers might be a bit off here but I am simplifying. But it was reasonable and fair if you ask me because they had to ban the 7 best decks in Standard before Eldraine as a set took over Standard.
All in all a huge failure of a way to handle a format
But I don’t think it was Eldraine as a set that was the problem.
I am not trying to tell anyone they are wrong. Just wanted to expand on the conversation.
Thank you for explaining @TrainmasterGT It makes much better sense to me now.
Eldraine actually had a quite funny story when it comes to how well it was received from the fans over the timeline of its Standard legal period.
1. During spoilers it was called a very weak set. I objected on MTG Salvation but the broad consensus was that Eldraine was weak.
2. After release everyone was happy about it. I even made a post about it here in this site where everyone agreed. I said we should all applaud Wizards for this gem of a set.
3. Then after tons of bans to other cards like Field of the Dead, Veil of Summer, Oko, Thief of Crowns, Once Upon a Time, Agent of Treachery and Teferi, Time Raveler + all 10 Companions had been drastically nerfed we started seeing Eldraine as the problem as a whole set and not Oko alone. Suddenly Eldraine had 15 of the 20 best cards in Standard or something. Pretty drastic. Numbers might be a bit off here but I am simplifying. But it was reasonable and fair if you ask me because they had to ban the 7 best decks in Standard before Eldraine as a set took over Standard.
All in all a huge failure of a way to handle a format
But I don’t think it was Eldraine as a set that was the problem.I am not trying to tell anyone they are wrong. Just wanted to expand on the conversation.
Thank you for explaining @TrainmasterGT It makes much better sense to me now.
Mutation is just overdesigned. They wanted player to put several cards into one creatyre. However, Magic punishes that kind of play extremely harshly because you can just blow up the creature. Hence. they tried to add all sorts of wonky exceptions to make it work despite the whole game telling them not to.
I still don't understand how it really works, either.
I still don't understand how it really works, either.
Hey look! A sweet golem, and a pretty good artifact payoff. Getting 5/5, and mana to play bigger artifacts that will also grow Karn. Neat!
The funny thing is that those exceptions aren't really exceptions?
As far as Magic is concerned, there's a distinction between cards and permanents.
Before Ikoria, permanents could consist of 0 cards (AKA a token), 1 card, or 2 specific cards (melded permanents). When Ikoria came out, the concept of "merged" permanents was added, which was a way to make a permanent with 2+ arbitrary cards in it. Broadly speaking, this meant three things:
1. When you merge a card into an existing permanent, nothing new entered the battlefield, so ETB triggers don't trigger.
2. A merged permanent is just the top card in the pile, unless the effect that merged it says otherwise.
3. If a merged permanent leaves the battlefield, do any appropriate actions to each component individually.
Then Mutate is just "when you cast this creature for its mutate cost, try to merge it with target creature. If you can't, it ETBs normally instead. A mutated creature has all abilities of cards merged with it", and "when this mutates, do X" triggers are just a fancy way of saying "when something merges with this permanent, do X".
...
This would be it, except there are four weird kinds of permanents to worry about:
1. Tokens (treat a token as if it were a card while it's in a merged permanent — if it's on top, the whole thing's a token).
2. Flip cards/double-face cards (a merged permanent isn't either of these types of permanents. If you would flip or transform it, just flip/transform the relevant components).
3. Face-down permanents (ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE).
To be fair, though, face-down permanents are actually hilariously gnarly from a rules perspective.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Mapi, I hear you and I want you to know you're valid, but like
Ain't no way someone who doesn't think mutate is intuitive reads that, sees the bit in the end of "oh hey everything fucks up when you add this to magic as a whole" and then changes their mind
Ain't no way someone who doesn't think mutate is intuitive reads that, sees the bit in the end of "oh hey everything fucks up when you add this to magic as a whole" and then changes their mind
Ain't no way someone who doesn't think mutate is intuitive reads that, sees the bit in the end of "oh hey everything fucks up when you add this to magic as a whole" and then changes their mind
If you're going to blame something, blame face-down cards! Stupid manifest/morph, creating absurd numbers of edge-case rules just by existing...
Give me back Bestow. I liked that mechanic, but there's so few cards with Bestow that are worth running.
Yes yes yes
Only the Standard legal sets feel creative and interesting. They rest are just stats and strictly auto-includes in a certain Commander deck.
The good version of Mutate
Wow, I don't remember this at all. Granted, I think I was mostly just paying attention to this area of the Cube community at the time, and I don't think we thought the set was weak!
I agree. Like I said, I think a lot of the problems from this time period were a function of a new play design team being overstretched with too much stuff to do all at once.3. Then after tons of bans to other cards like Field of the Dead, Veil of Summer, Oko, Thief of Crowns, Once Upon a Time, Agent of Treachery and Teferi, Time Raveler + all 10 Companions had been drastically nerfed we started seeing Eldraine as the problem as a whole set and not Oko alone. Suddenly Eldraine had 15 of the 20 best cards in Standard or something. Pretty drastic. Numbers might be a bit off here but I am simplifying. But it was reasonable and fair if you ask me because they had to ban the 7 best decks in Standard before Eldraine as a set took over Standard.
All in all a huge failure of a way to handle a format
I am not trying to tell anyone they are wrong. Just wanted to expand on the conversation.
Thank you for explaining @TrainmasterGT It makes much better sense to me now.
