General What are the failings of the MTG cardpool?

[Jason Waddell]

This is kind of vague, and I don't have any good answers in mind, but does anybody have any concrete ideas about ways our cubes are held back by the limitations of the printed Magic cardpool?

The first one that comes to mind for me is that the strength of black has been too heavily placed into cards with heavy black mana requirements. Usually these cards don't even have any comparable less restrictive alternatives.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Green doesn't have any way of interacting on the board unless it's already winning (Prey Upon)
Fucking every black creature ever can't block OR loses you life or both
Everything white does other than creatures/removal/walkers is HORRIBLE (Slight exception a few combat tricks, but a narrow set at best)
The only blue things that cost 1 either durdle, delay badly or suck
Red....red I'm actually pretty happy with

Be back later for more ranting, sienfield style (Aaaaand whaaaats the deaaaal with moat?)

 

[anotak]

why are all the fun cards 4 mana

 

[Dom Harvey]

if you play Signets, 4-drops magically become 3-drops!

 

[Chris Taylor]

why are all the fun cards 4 mana

It's the perfect storm of constructed playable, big enough to be interesting and small enough to be realistic.

No seriously, that's the answer.
1 and 2 drops don't really have enough to spread around, so you don't get much variance in the possibilities, especially since we discount anything that doesn't have 2 power (correctly) effectively slicing that possibility space in half.
3 drops are still catching up to the modern design paradigm (with a few notable exceptions)
5 drops are in the weird space between an aggro and a control deck, which usually relegates them to just being noticable on raw power (Thundermaw, Baneslayer) or just being slightly bigger versions of likely 4 drops (Cloudgoat Ranger)
6 drops suffer from many of the same problems as 3 drops do, and 7+ usually fits into the "unrealistic" camp.

 

[CML]

there are at once too many and not enough

 

[FlowerSunRain]

Well, I think 1 and 2 mana blue creatures that can attack well is an obvious enough one considering a certain thread. Apparently I'm not allowed to talk about Welkin Tern anymore, but, yeah, that's sort of the high water mark.

I think white has a lot of empty design space based around its "protection" schtick.

 

[Changling Bob]

One problem for us as cube designers (sort of) is the constant retreading of the same ground, due to how magic as an actual product has to be designed. Each set white, say, will get some dinky creatures that have some sort of synergy, some boosters for their army, and some hook into the then-current theme. Meanwhile we want something good that isn't a hatebear or reliant on some specific theme. Space is explored very slowly so as to conserve future themes and keep each colour on message, but we would prefer a bit of a wider thrown net so we can start doing things.

Another complaint I have is that magic is designed with two masters in mind; limited and constructed. Stuff that's good in limited is so much garbage in constructed, and stuff designed for constructed is often actually useless in limited due to being combo oriented, or completely gamebreaking in the as-designed limited environment due to being a top-end dragon/demon/dumb legend/whatever. This one impacts us less compared to real sets, although probably hurts cubes in general as people try and fit the sweet top-end stuff in and it ends up being GRBS with the sweet limited commons/uncommons they're running.

(I think my prefered cube power level is lower than average here fwiw)

 

[James Stevenson]

So I asked my sister - who is really hot by the way (she said as I typed this) - "So, Ev, what are the failings of the mtg cardpool?"
"Well, first of all it sounds like carpool," She said
"Exactly," I said
"And secondly, G is like.... uh.. 'Gee, I dunno'"
So there you go guys, food for thought.

What I actually think is that the green legends are all either too powerful for my cube or not good enough. That's the problem I have right now. And 187's are all really clunky. I want one that costs 3.

 

[ahadabans]

It's somewhat been touched upon already, but I think that we are limited in what we can do with each color. There are simply some things (like green aggro) that suck compared to versions in other colors and there aren't enough cards printed that allow you a way to fix it. So colors are invariably type cast (like green being primarily ramp - pretty much because doing anything else with it will lead to subpar decks). In addition, some arch types are simply unsupportable unless you run multiple copies of the same card (like land destruction themes - since so little quality LD actually exists).

That's changing slowly though as more and more cards are printed (well, LD will never get better I don't think).

 

[Laz]

And 187's are all really clunky. I want one that costs 3.

Bone Shredder?

I feel the best way to enamor myself to the forums is to start with a complaint-oriented rant, so here are my thoughts.

Lack of Scry in Green. This one is pretty specific, but I have gone for a soft 'Green can manipulate the top of the library' theme in my Cube (since I have absolutely no idea how to make Green interesting). Early Green had a few cool deck manipulation tricks, with Sylvan Library and Mirri's Guile headlining them. Oracle of Mul Daya, Gamekeeper and the like can leverage this. Man it would be nice to have incidental Scry on green cards to help this theme along. I hope the rest of Theros block might help me here.

Cycling is an area with a lot of design space. The 'When you cycle... ' mechanic is very good, and the variants on cycling (land cycling, wizard cycling) clearly could be used to do very neat things. Even just cycling on otherwise well costed cards to make them slightly more modal would be nice, something like Naturalize with Cycling (What do you know? I just discovered Break Asunder...) would make starting something like that main far more palatable.

 

[Jonas]

Go for this easy to assemble combo:

+

 

[Jason Waddell]

I love Oracle of Mul Daya but wish it were pushed just a weeee bit further. Cost 3? Some real P/T? The effect is neat, but oh so flimsy at 4 mana.

 

[ahadabans]

I agree. Oracle is a really cool card. Exploration and a light version of Future Sight all rolled up into one. But it's pretty fragile. A 3 mana version would have been an auto include for me though. I like this effect a lot for green.

 

[Lucre]

I feel like they need to employ more designers like me or specifically me to design weird cards.

I also like the idea of more niche product with new designs like commander to change the design community from one of historical standards for abilities to environmental standards for abilities. When someone tells me my card is unprintable because it obsoletes Unmake and that unmake is a perfectly fine card, I can't help but wonder what format they think my card will impact the rich appreciation for unmake in and whether they think my dumb BW hybrid removal will ruin some format out there. Like no one is playing unmake right? It's been obsolete for a while, the standards for costing of things should be done on an environment to environment basis, not to uphold the dignity of old unique effect-mana cost pairings.

 

[Chris Taylor]

I love Oracle of Mul Daya but wish it were pushed just a weeee bit further. Cost 3? Some real P/T? The effect is neat, but oh so flimsy at 4 mana.

Would you play an enchatnment that does what it does at ?

 

[James Stevenson]

Would you play an enchatnment that does what it does at ?

Yeah it would be nuts!

 

[Chris Taylor]

Clearly I gotta post more of my ideas then