General NWO

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Just a general question, do you guys feel that NWO is still working as advertised?

Maybe I am becoming an old fogey, and spent too much time on Hearthstone, but these days when I look through Magic spoilers all I can think is "so much text". It's possible that perception doesn't match reality though.

What do you guys think? If you think NWO is still great and kicking, what are some examples of cards that exemplify it?

Is this card okay existing because it's a red-rare enchantment and they've always been overly janky?
Image.ashx


Does WOTC think 'Menace' is an intuitive enough keyword to not need reminder text? People never know what it does.

Image.ashx
Image.ashx
Image.ashx
 
NWO only applies to rules text complexity of commons, and does nothing else (directly) to set structure, rares, mythics, worldbuilding, etc. Any other changes they've made are not via NWO. (I'm not saying that MTG complexity creep overall is or isn't a problem, it's just not because of a failure of NWO specifically, which has a very narrow and specific mission)

So yes, the janky red enchantment at rare is fine per NWO, because NWO doesn't apply to it. It is a little silly IMO, and I think they could have templated it much better:
"Whenever you cast a creature, if power is >3, deal 4 to target, if power >6, instead deal 4 to each thing" or something like that.

And in general I'd say that yes, NWO is working as advertised; commons are still relatively straightforward per it's core tenet.

Menace I've found to be very intuitive once explained once, maybe twice. They probably could have put reminder text on that common though. It's not like they had textbox space issues.
 
I keep hearing about NWO only affecting commons. I thought it had an effect on uncommons too?

Menace wasn't really an issue. I've found that people remember cards/abilities/keywords mostly on something innate. I've seen a guy riffle through my cube, asking about mechanics or whatnot since he hasn't played in a while. We explained to him the M10 changes, and the mechanics he didn't know, and he just destroyed our group (I was the only one to win a match against him). I've seen someone else play with my cube over 10 times, almost always picking WR, and she still reads every card, nor can she remember what any of them do, including her self-proclaimed favorite ones.

Guy knows what menace is, girl does not. Menace seems similar to Trample in terms of complexity.

As for the amount of text. Magic text feels heavy. There's a lot of text to say nothing. Hearthstone seems to have less of that issue.

See this:
Can't attack. At the end of your turn, deal 8 damage to a random enemy.
vs
Ragnaros the Firelord can't attack.
At the beginning of your end step choose a target at random among the creatures your opponents control, the planeswalkers your opponents control, or your opponents. Ragnaros deals 8 damage to the chosen permanent or opponent.

I don't know how Ragnaros interacts with Hearthstone's hexproof equivalent, so I used the word target. I also regret picking the first legendary that came to mind, since he ended up having issues when converted back.

let's do another since this is fun:

Battlecry: Draw 3 cards. Put any minions you drew directly into the battlefield.
vs
When Varian Wrynn enters the battlefield look at the top three cards of your library. You may reveal any number of creature cards from among them and put them onto the battlefield. Put the rest of the revealed cards into your hand.

I had to take a few liberties, cause hidden zones and stuff. I originally wanted to keep the draw in the case that drawing a card is different than putting it into your hand, but I gave up on that.

EDIT: Ragnaros felt unfair, since random is handled way better online. How about this:

Your Choose One cards and powers have both effects combined.
vs
Spells or abilities you control that have two or more options in a bulleted list preceded by instructions to choose a number of those options instead have you choose each of those actions.
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Magics rules are written by lawyers, and have thousands of different moving parts that need to be accounted for in text alone. Hearthstones exceptions are Inconsistent even though they're being handled by a centralized code block :p
 
Magics rules are written by lawyers, and have thousands of different moving parts that need to be accounted for in text alone. Hearthstones exceptions are Inconsistent even though they're being handled by a centralized code block :p


This makes sense and shows, but I wonder if that's what we want. I guess magic and Hearthstone don't want to be the same thing. I think one could argue that magic suffers because of it. There's weird and unintuitive behavior that creeps in (Squee on Ixalan for a recent example) that feels bad for the casual players, which reduces mass appeal. Hearthstone does manage to skip this, and is, therefore, easier to learn, but loses out a bit at the most competitive point. You'll see people blaming weird interactions on the spaghetti code. I think it might be possible to do both while losing only slightly of either side, but it also feels too late for both games. Magic wouldn't and shouldn't change its entire philosophy, and Hearthstone's issues would require mass rewriting.

I feel like my post adds nothing of value, lmao, but I'll leave it.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
To be fair, Hearthstone has less room for text, and has less need to be wordy because the computer will enforce correct interpretation of the rules. There's been plenty of cases where the Magic variant of a Hearthstone card would be clearer that the Hearthstone card actually is. For example, Yogg-Saron, Hope's End stops casting random spells as soon as he kills himself with one of his random spells. This isn't mentioned anywhere on the card, and it goes against the natural assumption of most players.

Hearthstone's wording is also inconsistent at times, like how Desert Camel says "Battlecry: Put a 1-Cost minion from each deck into the battlefield.", and Dirty Rat says "Battlecry: Your opponent summons a random minion from their hand.", or how Embrace the Shadow says "This turn, your healing effects deal damage instead.", whereas Auchenai Soulpriest reads "Your cards and powers that restore Health now deal damage instead."

In the end though, I think it mostly comes down to Hearthstone having less complex cards on average. For one it's a strictly sorcery speed game, which already eliminates a lot of complexity. It also has only one zone you can freely interact with, the battlefield, lacking direct guided interaction with other zones like the graveyard. Sure, there's cards like Resurrect, but the targets are random. A fairly simple card like Reassembling Skeleton doesn't work in Hearthstone, because you can't actively look at the graveyard and activate abilities from cards there. I feel it leans a bit heavier on keywords than Magic to create unique cards as well (Houndmaster Shaw would never be a mythic in Magic). Hearthstone does make deft use of the fact that it's digital only to craft cards that wouldn't be possible in a paper tcg, like with Toki, Time-Tinker. Her ability is short to write out, even in Magic ("Add a random legendary minion that isn't from a Standard-legal set to your hand"), but the effect is completely impracticable in the paper world. Magic, on the other hand, uses its room for text to the full extent. Complex cards like planeswalkers, that offer multiple effects simultaneously, are neigh impossible to make in Hearthstone.

And I could go on and on. In the end, Hearthstone restricts itself heavily in multiple aspects of the game when compared to Magic to keep its card text short and sweet. Magic, through its lengthier, meticulous wording, offers the ability for far more complexity, offering a deeper gameplay then Hearthstone at the cost of accessibility.

PS. "Ragnaros, the Firelord can't attack.
At the beginning of your end step, Ragnaros deals 8 damage to a random opponent or creature or planeswalker an opponent controls."

PPS. "Whenever a spell or ability you control lets you choose one, choose all instead." (Entwine is a thing. I don't see why this couldn't be worded this way.)
 
i actually really appreciate magic's clarity and wordiness

like whenever ive played hearthstone or eternal ccg or whatever i keep running into those weird corner cases that aren't made explicit in the same way as magic and it's really frustrating
 
I remember from back in the days when we used to play Yugioh (before MtG took over) and I always hated the weird wording, that was inconsistent and sounded like they put the japanese straight into Google translator.

Magic is great.
 
i actually really appreciate magic's clarity and wordiness

like whenever ive played hearthstone or eternal ccg or whatever i keep running into those weird corner cases that aren't made explicit in the same way as magic and it's really frustrating

I really appreciate the magic wording over hearthstone, since I can actually get a feel for how the card works in different situations without getting a terms worth of statistics and probability.
 
I remember from back in the days when we used to play Yugioh (before MtG took over) and I always hated the weird wording, that was inconsistent and sounded like they put the japanese straight into Google translator.

Magic is great.

There was never a time where Yugioh was bigger than Magic and thus there was never a time where ‘MtG took over.’ :p Same logic goes to Pokemon, Digimon and all the other copycats.
 
i actually really appreciate magic's clarity and wordiness


I agree! In fact, magic wording has a cadence to it that I actually find pleasing. There's enough of an art to templating a magic card that it ends up being aesthetically satisfying when it's done well (Sarkhan's Unsealing is not a good example of this!)
 
There was never a time where Yugioh was bigger than Magic and thus there was never a time where ‘MtG took over.’ :p Same logic goes to Pokemon, Digimon and all the other copycats.


Yeah, I know, but there was a time when I was in fourth grade and everyone was playing yugioh. Then, in middle school, kids started playing MtG, so it took over then :p
 
The thing I hate most about Hearthstone cards is that I can't always look and the card and know what it does. Like Dr. Boom (Bots), or Sindagrosa (Frozen Chapions). How is one supposed to know what they do, unless they've played against them before? And they could somewhat fix that by having their in-game on-hover tooltip explain what the tokens are, but they don't.
 
Oh and Brann pissed me off too. When you played a card with battlecry that had a target, you couldn't choose new targets for the second ability. Which is unintuitive and isn't how the card text reads. There's tons of examples of cards not behaving how they read, and a player is forced to memorize them all. If they chose more specific (and thus complex) language, they would have less ambiguity and a cleaner, clearer, simpler game overall.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Hearthstone clearly chose form over function in this regard. I think that's fine for what the game is, honestly. Because it's digital only, at least a given card will play consistently for every player, despite a player's interpretation of the rules text. For Magic that just isn't feasible, because it isn't online only, so the text needs to be as clear and concise as possible, to avoid confusion and errors during tournament play.
 
having a player expect one thing and having a card work another way is just as disastrous in a rules enforced environment as in paper
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
The thing I hate most about Hearthstone cards is that I can't always look and the card and know what it does. Like Dr. Boom (Bots), or Sindagrosa (Frozen Chapions). How is one supposed to know what they do, unless they've played against them before? And they could somewhat fix that by having their in-game on-hover tooltip explain what the tokens are, but they don't.

My favorite for this was always ETC. "Power Chord" gives next to no indication as to even what card type it is :p
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
having a player expect one thing and having a card work another way is just as disastrous in a rules enforced environment as in paper
Disastrous is a big word. Hearthstone's tournament structure is set up in such a way that it is very, very unlikely that a mistake due to unclear wording will ever occur in a match of any importance. Normally you come across the weird corner cases during countless hours of grinding. If not, people like DisguisedToast who specifically go after these kinds of interactions might have enlightened you, or failing that, Blizzard's release notes might have.

For the common Hearthstone player it sometimes sucks, but meh, that's life in Hearthstone. I have been on the receiving end of Blizzard's fondness for hidden rules text in the past. I once crafted two Sideshow Spelleaters (epics) for use in the Adventures, only to find out that the card does, in fact, not copy the hero power of adventure bosses. Sweet! 600 dust down the drain! It stung, and I was definitely disgruntled, because per the wording this should have worked, but in the end it was "just" some dust I lost.
 
Speaking of Wotc assuming people understand keywords intuitively, I wish these forums didn't have such a hard on for threads with acronyms for titles! At the moment theres NWO, CBS, GRBS and sometimes it's a pain as an outsider to these forums to figure out what everyone is talking about.

I agree! I honestly don't have a clue what "CBS" is supposed to be. "Cube Bull Shit"?
 
Top