Community

Divination is a bad example for the targeting thing because card draw is one of the effects you're less likely to want to share.  When you spend a card to draw two cards, you're essentially drawing one card for free; when you target someone else this way, you're sacrificing one card yourself to give them two completely free cards.  It's a major difference, and you'd have to be really good friends with the other person.

I want Apply Knowledge to be a real card.  Not the multiplayer version, since that's too similar to the Storm mechanic, but the purely one-sided and cheap version.  It would make for some neat "big turns" of casting nothing but small, wimpy spells and harvesting a huge payoff - this would feel very "wizardly" and make a nice change from the usual conservation of resources.

I wonder if Maro realizes that "multiplayer Mind Rot" already exists as Unnerve .  And it costs more than Mind Rot because of the extra power of emptying all your opponents' hands.  Granted it makes you a lot of enemies, but it also means they have less to hit you with, so it's definitely still potent.  Especially with Liliana's Caress x2 on the table.

The multiplayer Congregate is hackily templated; it should say "Target player gains 2 life for each creature another target player controls".  "On the battlefield" is not necessary once you're checking controllers.

Neither version of Blow 'em Up has the word "target" on it; I wonder if that was intentional.

The non-multiplayer Rot Away being green kind of gave away that its multiplayer version was an adjusted version of Crumble .  Green doesn't spend life for power (and black doesn't get to blow up artifacts).  Also the difference between Rot Away and Crumble is more than just about whether you're in multiplayer; it's MUCH safer to give the opponent extra life than to spend your own.  Lowering your life means risking a lethal burn spell to the face, while giving the opponent extra life makes little difference if your creatures are of the huge and unstoppable variety.  If I give you 8 life and then attack twice with a 14/14 unblockable, your 28 life is no better than 20.

MaRo's math sucks.  In a multiplayer game with six opponents, dealing 120 damage results in a tie (if it's divided evenly).  You need to deal 100, and not kill yourself.  But the point still stands that big dudes are better in multiplayer.  In particular, burn and suicide aggro strategies work poorly, unless you're very good at identifying threats that are worth nearly killing yourself to get rid of, hoping that everyone else will stall long enough you can recover.

And MaRo's grammar also needs work.  "Multiplay" isn't good even for a pun.

As a final note, why did they pick the stupidest-looking card in all Archenemy as the symbol for multiplayer week?  I'd much rather have seen Mortal Flesh is Weak as the little icon in the article corner, if they were absolutely determined to have something that shows "the party".  Failing that, they could have just shown off some famous multiplayer card...like Congregate.  Or just do a symbol of a table with multiple players at it.  Anything but those goofy-ass costumes from Fate of the Flammable .  (Okay the guy on the top is almost cool, but the others...ugh.)

Didn't we just have a multiplayer week? When's kitchen table week?

Everyone who's complained about MaRo's complete lack of templating--now you know how the rest of Wizards feels.  Templating isn't Design's job, so MaRo really doesn't know or care exactly how cards would be worded on final pass.  It's up to whoever he passes the design file off to to try to make sense of the stuff he comes up with.

Also, is it just me, or did it feel like this one kind of went off the rails toward the end?  At the beginning, he started with very minor (or no) tweaks, but by the end of the article, he was 'improving' cards by completely replacing cards with completely different ones, which kind of defeats the point.

I like these articles, please keep doing them.

Mark, I would love it if you ranked all of your articles with a "*" to "*****" rating regarding how helpful you think they'd be to designers.  Somehow, I managed to miss the Skeleton of Sets Design article.

I am VERY glad that I eventually saw it, but I did miss it.  That would have been heartbreaking.