Sets (ONE) Phyrexia: All Will Be One Previews

[Onderzeeboot]

I think the ability is aptly named and am not planning on running it Also, I don't think I want an 8-line Mother of Runes in my cube regardless.

 

[Rusje]

May I present: the world's cutest Mother of Runes!

I wonder how many good cards need to have toxic before there's enough that people feel comfortable giving the mechanic a try. I think toxic is gravy on most cards with the mechanic– I definitely don't think these cards need a poison archetype to be good. Having said that, I know some people see "poison" and think "trapping drafters" (as the original Infect mechanic often did), so they want there to be a critical mass of Toxic cards so that the counters actually matter.

Personally, I'm kind of close to wanting to try some of these– I think if I had a stronger artifact theme Skrelv's Hive would have been enough to push me over. As is, there are some really nice G/W toxic cards. I could definitely see trying some of these out on quality alone.

Hmm. Part of the power of mom is that it can stonewall. This one cannot block and is lacking the prevent damage part to be able to make another one a wall. This could be a good thing, but it is definitely weaker.

 

[Velrun]

You know its a cube forum and not a constructed one when you see modern horizon and nicely designed cards in the same sentence.

Edit : I posted at the same time with Velrun, but i disagree with him. While in constructed you play with the pool available, Wotc giving us tons of toys to build around is great for cube ! If you don't like new toys, don't include them.

Funny how you disagree with me but I also agree with you at the same time

I like cube because we can ignore cards for our cubes.

For the game in general I wish they would focus more on Standard and less on Masters, Horizons, Legends and Commander products. And Secret Lairs.

 

[Nemo]

Funny how you disagree with me but I also agree with you at the same time

I like cube because we can ignore cards for our cubes.

For the game in general I wish they would focus more on Standard and less on Masters, Horizons, Legends and Commander products. And Secret Lairs.

I just wish every product didn't have to be a commander product, and I wish every standard set didn't have to invent three new mechanics. Those two factors give us a lot of crap text on cards that soil the designs of otherwise nice cards.

 

[landofMordor]

Standard is deader than a doornail and has been since like 2019. To me this explains why cards look the way they do, post-M21 or so. Listen to Maro’s drive to work on “design for an eternal world” for more.

im not saying it’s a good thing. Just saying that one obvious response to Standard being an unappealing format is to shift design focus away. They tried like 6 different ways to reinvigorate standard post-Energy, and none of them worked.

 

[Velrun]

Yeah they have almost completely neglected Standard in favor of Commander for years. This is the long-term problem I was addressing. The ‘gathering’ has been removed from Standard format.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

im not saying it’s a good thing. Just saying that one obvious response to Standard being an unappealing format is to shift design focus away. They tried like 6 different ways to reinvigorate standard post-Energy, and none of them worked.

To be fair, a virus was conspiring against them!

 

[ravnic]

Hot take: Magic would be a better game if they would primarily design for limited.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

would never touch poison unless I go all in.

What constitutes as "all in?" Would you need a full-blown Poison Cube, or just a Poison component in something like a Proliferate Cube? Could it just be a large archetype or would it need to be foundational to the Cube?

 

[TrainmasterGT]

I just wish every product didn't have to be a commander product, and I wish every standard set didn't have to invent three new mechanics. Those two factors give us a lot of crap text on cards that soil the designs of otherwise nice cards.

To be fair, many of these changes come back to the end of blocks. It used to be that the Mechanics in the fall set would carry all the way to the spring set, with between 4 and 6 more mechanics being layered over the fall mechanics in the subsequent sets. Now, the new mechanics in the fall sets aren't being carried through the entire year, with each set being mechanically isolated from the others. Even though we aren't seeing that many more mechanics than we did previously, the switch between sets feels more jarring because each set has its own unique identity rather than being an extension of something else.

An additional consequence of the switch to standalone sets instead of blocks, it also means we're seeing a world's worth of Legendary characters in one set instead of three. For example, the three sets of the original Theros block had 26 legendary creatures, the same number as just Theros: Beyond Death.

 

[Mown]

I can't even imagine what it would take for me to want to include poison counters, the cube would probably have to almost look like a ONE/NPH set-cube. Otherwise they would too often end up as this one thing you have to track just in case it becomes relevant, even though it probably won't. And the payoff just isn't there, there's nothing about poison that is particularly exciting to me.

Maybe if I made an entirely custom cube I could find some play patterns that would make it exciting to me.

 

[Velrun]

What constitutes as "all in?" Would you need a full-blown Poison Cube, or just a Poison component in something like a Proliferate Cube? Could it just be a large archetype or would it need to be foundational to the Cube?

Good questions! You put my words to shame. I should not have said ‘all in’.

I think poison could be an interesting mechanic to include in a cube if I was decently devoted to it and had some supplimentary mechanics to go along with it like proliferate.

However as it stands there is nothing in my cube that would work together with poison. I could maybe find room for a single Blightsteel Colossus because it isn’t parasitic at all in my opinion.

 

[LadyMapi]

Hot take: Magic would be a better game if they would primarily design for limited.

Honestly, it'd be fine if they just picked one format and did all of their design targeting that format in particular.

Most of the design issues come from the fact that WotC is trying to design for "40 cards from a randomized pool", "60 cards with up to 4 copies of each", and "100 card singleton with double the life and double the players" simultaneously, and that just doesn't work.

Commander is honestly the most egregious one here — it's effectively a completely different game that happens to be built on the same card pool, with very different incentives. One of the clearest examples of this recently is this little mechanic:



Initiative is absolutely fine in Commander — your opponents have three turns to steal it from you between each of your turns, and going "I slap two +1/+1 counters on a guy and then make you lose 5 life" is aggressive but not that powerful. It's actually roughly equivalent to going "I slap a +1/+1 counter on a creature and make you lose 1 life" in other formats.

In Pauper (initially) and Legacy (currently), the Initiative is an absolute monster. It's the Monarch but more so.

To be fair, many of these changes come back to the end of blocks. It used to be that the Mechanics in the fall set would carry all the way to the spring set, with between 4 and 6 more mechanics being layered over the fall mechanics in the subsequent sets. Now, the new mechanics in the fall sets aren't being carried through the entire year, with each set being mechanically isolated from the others. Even though we aren't seeing that many more mechanics than we did previously, the switch between sets feels more jarring because each set has its own unique identity rather than being an extension of something else.

An additional consequence of the switch to standalone sets instead of blocks, it also means we're seeing a world's worth of Legendary characters in one set instead of three. For example, the three sets of the original Theros block had 26 legendary creatures, the same number as just Theros: Beyond Death.

I miss blocks so much. They also lead to way better stories (on the cards, at least) — blocks let you have time to set up the world and conflicts in said world before you resolved them in later sets. They could theoretically still do that with the current model, but it kinda feels like they don't want to?

Like, take Kaldheim — in older Magic, it would be something like...

Set One: We're introduced to the Plane of Kaldheim and its gods. This is where you do the whole "oh snap, Tibalt is here and usurped one of the gods — what's that little shit planning?"
Set Two: Set up the whole "Kaya hunting Vorinclex" thing, set up for the Doomskar happening. Generate hype.
Set Three: We let the tower topple down and resolve all the plots. Boom, we're done!

Even though the overall narrative is still as annoyingly Planeswalker-heavy, everything has a chance to breathe.

Heck, even when we do get "pseudo-blocks", they still feel a bit weird:

• DOM →DMU kinda worked, but that's only because I'm cheating super hard by counting it. DOM was also pretty unusual because it was really focused on Dominaria itself (especially since Dominaria is one of those planes that we already knew a lot about).
• GRM →RNA →WAR was awkward, because GRM and RNA were more or less how you'd start a Ravnica block (you've got to set up all of the Guilds with big sets!), but then WAR basically went "lol fuck Ravnica" and had no real mechanical continuity with the sets that came before. It's like Avacyn Restored or Battle for Zendikar but moreso.
• MID →VOW fell over and shat itself, and I don't just say this because I'm very annoyed that Double Feature was ugly as sin. No, the problem here is that they essentially slammed two revisits worth of plot into one revisit, and everything just felt rushed.

I think a large part of the weirdness is that the focus of Magic's narrative has really gone from "here's a cool new world to explore" to "here's a cool new world for your favorite characters to visit" to "here's what your favorite characters are doing (feat. some cool new world, I guess?)"

 

[Rusje]

To be fair, many of these changes come back to the end of blocks. It used to be that the Mechanics in the fall set would carry all the way to the spring set, with between 4 and 6 more mechanics being layered over the fall mechanics in the subsequent sets. Now, the new mechanics in the fall sets aren't being carried through the entire year, with each set being mechanically isolated from the others. Even though we aren't seeing that many more mechanics than we did previously, the switch between sets feels more jarring because each set has its own unique identity rather than being an extension of something else.

An additional consequence of the switch to standalone sets instead of blocks, it also means we're seeing a world's worth of Legendary characters in one set instead of three. For example, the three sets of the original Theros block had 26 legendary creatures, the same number as just Theros: Beyond Death.

Well, actually we are seeing much more new mechanics/keywords than before. We have to go a while back but look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_(Magic:_The_Gathering) and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravnica.
Somewhere along the path they made the mistake of making many different keywords each set. This was partly mitigated by creating sets to have better limited play at the same time. Not carrying over the keywords and so on also does not help.

 

[shamizy]

Standard is deader than a doornail and has been since like 2019. To me this explains why cards look the way they do, post-M21 or so. Listen to Maro’s drive to work on “design for an eternal world” for more.

im not saying it’s a good thing. Just saying that one obvious response to Standard being an unappealing format is to shift design focus away. They tried like 6 different ways to reinvigorate standard post-Energy, and none of them worked.

Just adding onto this, but I think it's more the accumulation of very aggressive banning strategy over the previous 2 years that was the precursor to them destroying that format as a whole.

If you were active with an LGS you could see the degradation happen in real-time ever pre-pandemic. I think that should have been pretty obvious from the get-go, but WoTC has never been particularly forward thinking when trying to aggressively implement new strategies and they have often backfired in the last 8-9 years. Like just look at the frequency of bans in Standard beginning from 2017:

January 2017: Emrakul, the Promised End, Reflector Mage, Smuggler's Copter
April 2017: Felidar Guardian (big LOL where they emergency banned a few days after initial announcement)
June 2017: Aetherworks Marvel

January 2018: Attune with Aether, Rogue Refiner, Ramunap Ruins, Rampaging Ferocidon

October 2019: Field of the Dead
November 2019: Oko, Thief of Crowns, Once Upon a Time, Veil of Summer

That's how you erode consumer confidence. Why would I ever play a format if you're just going to take away stuff I've spent money on to build a tier 1 deck? Especially when you would NEED them to be able to compete at a higher level? You've already had rotation giving cards a set shelf life and now you've since made it clear that you're willing to print stuff WAY above curve, force people to buy in to play at that high level, and will not hesitate to remove it if it proves problematic. I played Standard on and off in my college years due to having a playgroup 8-10 players deep that was active with Magic as a whole where we could pool resources and lend cards to have 3-4 of us play anything we wanted on a given week. Fill in gaps with actually buying cards, but a lot of us would draft a ton and ended up accumulating a lot of cards for Constructed and were very active for that 3-4 years stretch. However, for an individual, it's a lot more to invest and keep up with and you'll feel every hit to the wallet that much more.

The more you tell people no you can't use X and no you can't use Y and by the way Z is probably off the table, the more I lean towards well fuck you then I'll find other ways to play (which ended up being Cube and EDH in the long run). And that's exactly what happened to various LGS in my area. There is still one dedicated store where are the more competitive players have since congregated to over the last two years and have somehow kept, but bannings and rapid format shifts in Modern have led to Standard and Modern pretty much wiped off the map in paper at every other location. But higher-ups are clearly are oblivious to all this with Forsythe posting that wHaT hApPeNeD to STANDARD query a month back and Maro just spinning and blabbing his way through any legit queries on his personal blog. It's not coming back anytime soon and they've destroyed the competitive ecosystem that they had somehow accumulated over the decade previous despite real shitty support.

Rather than double down on EDH design (which has been pretty trash for that format as a whole since they shifted gears), they probably should have course corrected Standard more effectively by identifying where they were going wrong and done more to restore confidence instead of doubling down on really bad decisions all throughout. You can't just nuke a core part of your business like that and just trudge along patching it up with wow secret lairs sell so gooooooood like they've been doing anytime the topic is brought up.

So many missteps, leadership at WoTC is straight up garbage with long term planning. Turning a blind eye to everything that allowed you to thrive for 25 years is just so painfully stupid and shortsighted. So I think personally think its more just a core leadership problem than dedicated design shift that will only be exacerbated with Cocks having been promoted to CEO of Hasbro. He'll fly off on his golden parachute in a few years after gutting the game, but I'm not sure if they'll ever be able to recover to where they were once at in terms of a Magic ecosystem supporting multiple formats and ways to approach the game.

The core game is still great and cube lets us pick and choose how we engage in a microcosm, but I would never recommend the game to new players nowadays due to how much worse the leadership behind the game has become since I got back into it a decade ago.

 

[Humpty_Dumpty]

Somewhere along the path they made the mistake of making many different keywords each set.

That point on the path was here.

 

[Chris Taylor]

That point on the path was here.

I maintain that keywords that are only on one card are not that different from the flavor words we enjoy


Like I get that the cost of the italics here is not zero, but it's not fuckin 200 either

 

[PyreDream]

I miss blocks so much. They also lead to way better stories (on the cards, at least) — blocks let you have time to set up the world and conflicts in said world before you resolved them in later sets. They could theoretically still do that with the current model, but it kinda feels like they don't want to?

Like, take Kaldheim — in older Magic, it would be something like...

Set One: We're introduced to the Plane of Kaldheim and its gods. This is where you do the whole "oh snap, Tibalt is here and usurped one of the gods — what's that little shit planning?"
Set Two: Set up the whole "Kaya hunting Vorinclex" thing, set up for the Doomskar happening. Generate hype.
Set Three: We let the tower topple down and resolve all the plots. Boom, we're done!

Even though the overall narrative is still as annoyingly Planeswalker-heavy, everything has a chance to breathe.

The two-set paradigm would also be fine. The formula of setup + punchline is an easy one to grok and does mostly the same job as the three-set paradigm, minus forcing designers to add a bunch of chaff to make their quota (and those sets do have a lot of chaff). In Kaldheim, for example, I find it hard to imagine how you could fill an entire middle set with something that's essentially trying to bridge the gap towards the finale, when you could just jump straight to the finale. I could certainly see designers adding subplots here to thicken the sauce.

Set One: Introduction to Kaldheim. Tibalt's Shenanigans.
Set Two: Kaya hunts down Vorinclex. The Doomskar happens.

I think the two-set blocks worked amazing. I can't for the life of me understand why they would abandon them in favor of such an accelerated pace of blocks (aside from the cynical answer).

That being said, I greatly appreciate that three sets allows narrative and mechanics to grow and intertwine in beautiful ways. Apocalypse capped off Invasion block by introducing double kickers and enemy guild cards. Almost every third set does something unusual and complicated with its mechanics and themes, using the first two sets as stepping stones in gameplay complexity.

 

[Rusje]

That point on the path was here.

No. That wasn’t. It was way before. Somewhere around original kamigawa.
Time spiral/future sight are different. There were not many new keywords but many old ones and it was specifically made to be a blast from the past.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Are there really too many new mechanics each set, though? Like, The Brother's War had only four if you count Meld (on three cards) and Powerstones (not really a mechanic, but does feel like one). I think it's not so much that individual sets have too many keywords (though some certainly could do with one or two less), it's more that a) WotC makes sure to keyword everything nowadays (compare e.g. Wandering Stream to Aven Trailblazer), and b) due to stand-alone blocks, keywords get less time to marinate and evolve, so it all feels a bit cramped.

 

[Rusje]

Are there really too many new mechanics each set, though? Like, The Brother's War had only four if you count Meld (on three cards) and Powerstones (not really a mechanic, but does feel like one). I think it's not so much that individual sets have too many keywords (though some certainly could do with one or two less), it's more that a) WotC makes sure to keyword everything nowadays (compare e.g. Wandering Stream to Aven Trailblazer), and b) due to stand-alone blocks, keywords get less time to marinate and evolve, so it all feels a bit cramped.

It is not about keywords only. It is about new mechanics. And yes 4 is a lot in one set but it is maybe more that each set has 3 or 4. This has nothing to do with blocks since it started around original kamigawa. Before that there were 2 to 3 mechanics in the first set, maybe one new in the second, and maybe one new in the last. Most of the time the new set had a different interpretation of the original mechanic. Eg. Two types of kicker instead of one.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

It is not about keywords only. It is about new mechanics. And yes 4 is a lot in one set but it is maybe more that each set has 3 or 4. This has nothing to do with blocks since it started around original kamigawa. Before that there were 2 to 3 mechanics in the first set, maybe one new in the second, and maybe one new in the last. Most of the time the new set had a different interpretation of the original mechanic. Eg. Two types of kicker instead of one.

I mean, Mirrodin before it had affinity, imprint, entwine, and equipment as new mechanics, which is more new mechanics than The Brother's War had. Then Darksteel added indestructible and modular, and Fifth Dawn had five of those six (with imprint and modular appearing only once) and added sunburst and scry, both making them more mechanically dense than many contemporary sets. I think Onslaught was the last "simple" set, with really only morph and cycling (though fear was finally keyworded in this set). Legions added amplify, double strike, and provoke, making it a lot more complex, and Scourge added landcycling and storm instead.

Also, one of the greatest limited environments in recent memory was Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, even though it had ninjutsu, sagas with transform, channel, modified, and reconfigure. Oh, and compleated as a one-off for poor Tamiyo. And that's not even mentioning things like vehicles, colored artifact creatures, enchantment creatures, and shrines. Plus, our cubes are chock full of different mechanics as well, and are still fun to draft, presumably.

 

[Rusje]

I mean, Mirrodin before it had affinity, imprint, entwine, and equipment as new mechanics, which is more new mechanics than The Brother's War had. Then Darksteel added indestructible and modular, and Fifth Dawn had five of those six (with imprint and modular appearing only once) and added sunburst and scry, both making them more mechanically dense than many contemporary sets. I think Onslaught was the last "simple" set, with really only morph and cycling (though fear was finally keyworded in this set). Legions added amplify, double strike, and provoke, making it a lot more complex, and Scourge added landcycling and storm instead.

Also, one of the greatest limited environments in recent memory was Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, even though it had ninjutsu, sagas with transform, channel, modified, and reconfigure. Oh, and compleated as a one-off for poor Tamiyo. And that's not even mentioning things like vehicles, colored artifact creatures, enchantment creatures, and shrines. Plus, our cubes are chock full of different mechanics as well, and are still fun to draft, presumably.

So it started in onslaught block. Still, yes it is too much. It often feels like most cards have to do something with one of the new abilities and I like it when the next set expands upon an ability. I do not miss the chaff that was around but I do miss the geeky/fun cards that they made without the abilities.

Many abilities often makes for a draft on rails because most are stronger when you just use one or two. Although it is fun once in a while I feel that the focus on new keywords is actually restricting what they can do.

And yes, having many wordy/different keywords in cube is not Beginner/casual/non-often players friendly. Can be fun, but so can a cube with let’s say 4 core mechanics

 

[Seeker]

No. That wasn’t. It was way before. Somewhere around original kamigawa.

Before that. Specifically, Onslaught.

also wish I could find the time MaRo wrote that people complained that Masques "didn't have any keywords" because rebels/mercenaries/spellshapers (and I guess also mongers/flailing) weren't keyworded

 

[Rusje]

Before that. Specifically, Onslaught.

also wish I could find the time MaRo wrote that people complained that Masques "didn't have any keywords" because rebels/mercenaries/spellshapers (and I guess also mongers/flailing) weren't keyworded

I think it is correct to not keyword those mechanics. Flailing could be keyworded but why. Pumping was around for a long time keywording it is unnecessary. A good keyword is when you know without further reading what the card does. Kicker is an example of not a good keyword, it only tells you that you can pay additional but what it does is unknown. Scy is a good keyword, it tells you immediately what it does.

And sorry, but I do not give a shit about what Maro says. He just sells and uses stuff when it is convenient to him (even when it is incorrect). A couple years later he says the opposite. Yes you can learn from mistakes but you could also do some play testing and learn from it.