Community

In before: THAT'S IT I'M QUITTING MAGIC FOR EVER MARO YOU HAVE LIED FOR THE LAST TIME!

*drops 3 paychecks on cards, melts them down, injects straight into tear ducts*

Serious note, what exactly did they do that made Branding so happy? Any speculation?

*30 replies of "MYTHIC UTILITY CARDS"*

Personally I'm hoping for alternate art, but you'd think the ever popular big art basic lands would be enough.

Maybie, seeing as they've highlighted a few overlaps in theme between Zen and D&D, we'll see Players Guide and Campaign Guide to Zendakr, even if it's DDI or simply published via Magicthegathering.com.

That would so make up for the lack of an artbook.

It's pretty clear to me from this article that the Brand team is responsible for Magic's dumbing down.  They're Hasbro's bean-counter drones, putting pressure on the designers to make Magic more saleable, no matter what the cost to the game's design integrity.  Killing those awesome spell-lands because they made stupid players feel bad is almost certainly the result of Brand's interference.

And isn't it interesting how Magic is hiring more Brand people, with two openings in the past month, but hasn't hired a new designer since the GDS?  Obviously the only employees Hasbro wants to spend money on are the ones who will tell MaRo to stop designing clever sets that small numbers of smart people will enjoy, and start designing another Pokemon to put cash in Hasbro's coffers.

I think we can safely assume that Mark and the other designers will continue keeping Magic alive for as long as possible; Brand is choking the life out of it, but it isn't dead yet.  That said, we can expect to keep seeing more and more evidence of design quality being sacrificed for marketing flash.  Mythic utility today, ultra-chase double mythic utility tomorrow.  The end is coming, folks, we just don't know how fast.  Let us put our trust in MaRo and company to keep the game fun for as long as they can manage, before the Vampires of Brand finish their grisly work once and for all.

Aren't the spell lands basically exactly the same thing as kicker?  Do people also get unhappy when they can't play their kicker spells because they can't afford the kicker costs yet?  Or are they smart enough to play the cheap versions of those cards, but not to play the lands without the extra costs?

Sep 20, 2009 -- 11:13PM, fractal wrote:

Aren't the spell lands basically exactly the same thing as kicker?  Do people also get unhappy when they can't play their kicker spells because they can't afford the kicker costs yet?  Or are they smart enough to play the cheap versions of those cards, but not to play the lands without the extra costs?

Yep. Or "mega"-cycling, or entwine, or landcycling, or splice, or hellbent, or any of the many, many other mechanics which can be played early on as a lesser effect or later on for a more impressive effect.

In fact, I *really* don't see how the proposed lands were any different from landcycling. In any way at all.

I am, in fact, baffled at their reasoning here.

Mark, you *CANNOT* design Magic by appealing to the lowest common denominator of your market research groups. If that had been Garfield and Atkinson's strategy, Magic would never have been made.

I suppose it's inevitable that Magic has to get dumber if it must continually grow unsustainably.

Which was, of course, inevitable the moment it was sold to a publicly traded corporation.