Community

This thread is for discussion of this week's Latest Developments, which goes live Friday morning on magicthegathering.com.

I voted "A cycle of cards that players have been begging us to print for years" and I expect it to be the most popular option by a wide margin. The only cycle I know players have been begging to be printed are the ennemy-colored fetchlands, so it looks like more and more plausible to me, despite the fact that I've laughed countless times at the people who expected them every single set. This time, I must admit that the conditions for them to play a major role seem well in place :

• No ennemy-colored duals left in Standard post-rotation;
• Onslaught fetchlands are leaving Extended;
• The Landfall mechanic rewards land-fetching;
• M10 duals want you to play lands with basic land types (or lands that fetch lands with basic land types) as the rest of your mana base in a 3+ color deck;

I had "A card with the reminder text 'The land continues to burn ....' " as a close second, as this looks like the reminder text of a very original, offbeat mechanic.

The rest of the choices are the kind of teasers that make players imagine powerful exciting cards, while they actually usually end up being cards that are overcosted and/or have huge drawbacks and are too hard to use to be worthwile on a competitive level. But we'll have to wait and see.

In the case of Divination, it makes no sense to me that a divination spell would allow someone other than its caster to gain knowledge. He might choose to share the knowledge that he gained from the spell with another wizard, but the knowledge goes to him first. "Target player draws two cards" moves the card away from this concept, and that hurts the flavor too much for me to think that adding a little bit of multiplayer potential is worth it.

then rename the card.

i agree with maro here, it should all be targeted. the original card draw targetted in the original "flavor" set.  if new players have trouble with targetting they're going to have a hard time with lightning bolt and doom blade, and they have to learn targetting eventually. it's kind of important.

I have been reading Latest Developments since Randy Buehler was at the helm (boy do  I miss him) and somewhere along the line the kind of responses the polls got made me think a huge amount, if not most, of the readers were causal players.

This one pretty much seals it, at least for now. I'm glad it's mostly not more than 50%.

Sorry for the off-topic but I outgrew multiplayer a long time ago xD.

I voted for "the cycle" if only to get the enemy fetchlands theory out of the way already. WoTC has been making many moneygrabs lately, but enemy fetchlands? Man, what a beating that would be.