Lucky Paper released their
Community Set Review Episode and
Set Prospective Results! I have a couple of thoughts...
1) The Community is Underrating Battles
Obviously battles have been very contentious, but I think they're being ranked a little lower than other cards. For example, Invasion of Innistrad, a certified Bomb and fantastic card, was tested by only 5.3% of survey respondents with an average rating of 4.8. By contrast,
Beamtown Beatstick, an aggressively mediocre common, was tested by 6.1% of survey respondents with an average rating of 5.3. While this is only one example, I think it's representative of the larger trend.
To be fair, battles are new and weird, so it's not surprising that people aren't rating them "correctly" yet. I only had
Invasion of Mercadia ranked at 4.8 when I filled out my survey even though I think it's probably more like a 7 or 8 for me now after having actually played with it in the wild. Additionally, I think battles are not going to ever reach the same highs as cards like
Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer and
Usher of the Fallen, which were tested by a huge portion of the community. The fact that battles are so novel also seems to work against their favor. Having said all of this, I do still think this survey is representative of early opinions not fully backed by gameplay data.
2) Double-Faced Hate may be Dissipating
Double-faced cards represent logistics and comprehension issues that many designers like to avoid. However, I think part of the reason DFCs have always ranked so poorly with Cube designers is because almost all of them have been needlessly complex. The DFC mechanic was originally invented to service
Werewolves, which aren't well balanced and constantly flip back and forth. Outside of the few unique werewolves that have
different abilities on
both sides, most werewolves are
just inconsistent, which often leads to mediocre gameplay. The next implementation of DFCs were
wordy legendary creatures that transformed into Planeswalkers. While some of these cards are good, they are still difficult to parse. In the years sense, double-faced complexity has gotten even worse, with cards like the
MDFCs being incredibly wordy on both sides for little gain. Even the best previous implementation of DFCs, the
Double-Faced Sagas, were still extremely wordy, which still turned off a lot of Cube designers.
I'm saying all of this because March of the Machine has finally provided us with a clean implementation of DFCs: the
Double-Faced Phyrexians. These cards have
generally simple fronts and transform once into cards with
more sophisticated but still easy to understand backs. These cards are fantastic, using Phyrexian mana and the double-faced nature of the cards to show Phyresis as a game mechanic in a fun and interesting way. The number one most tested card in the set,
Khenra Spellspear, is one of these DFCs. Although it is only being tested by 33% of respondents, it is the First DFC ever to hold top spot in one of these surveys, and only the second ever to hold a testing rate above 30%. Additionally, it is the first
unique DFC to have a ranking this high, as the previous most tested DFC,
Suspicious Stowaway, was just a side grade to known card
Looter il-kor.
Hopefully
Khenra Spellspear and it's friends represent a new era of thoughtful DFC design that more Cube designers can get behind.
3) Low Consensus
This set is kind of weird, so there really isn't a "popular consensus" on the cards in this set. For example, the most tested Mythic Rare in the set is Wrenn and Realmbreaker, with only 16% of respondents, and the highest rated Mythic Rare is
Zurgo and Ojutai, with a rating of 6.7 (although only a testing rate of roughly 3%). In fact, the highest rated card in the entire set is a common:
Timberland Ancient. As a whole, people are just excited for different things here, which is kind of cool. Part of this paradigm may be the fact that the Battles are some of the most powerful cards in the set, but are not being well-represented in the survey. However, I think it's just as likely that people are getting excited over specific cards for
their Cube due to the lack of "staple" cards such as new cantrips and cheap burn that were not printed here.
Thanks for reading!
–GT
