Community

Jan 11, 2011 -- 9:16PM, MtFrostM wrote:

looks like the curse of the bottom row is broken.

Also the curse of East Coast residency, as Shawn again did well this round.

I will say that being last alphabetically (which is how the top and bottom rows were determined) felt like it often caused people to read, comment on, or review my set last, which may not have helped my submissions.  Hopefully the judges at least spent enough time in a non-alphabetic manner that there was no direct effect on that end.

Can't say I'm surprised by the final ranking of the contestants, having had a week to look over all the submissions.  @ mana (I hate that I pronounce that mentally as "at mana," E mana or L mana or whatever would handle more smoothly) presented an intriguing first impression when Loucks first posted it, but I became concerned when his final pack eliminated refract and dig entirely.  Speaking of community contributions above, Loucks' was also the least-organized of the final five hub pages.  Shawn, Devon, Scott, and Ethan all (eventually) kept an updated skeleton, with the first three providing separate pages for each card.  Johnathon posted a sample booster but didn't update it much, if at all, in response to the community feedback, and didn't post a whole lot on the wiki in general.  The most active page doesn't need belong to the best designer, but encouraging community collaboration can only help the candidates.

Someone (probably multiple people) called the Intro Pack challenge a week or two back.  I like that "The deck needs to be fun to play." is one of the rules.  We can't have anyone turning in a terribly boring set of cards thinking they've found a loophole.

I realize Ethan wasn't wanting for praise this week, but did anyone else feel that Ken's comments in his U3 and conclusion were a bit unfair?  MaRo has noted many times that the key quality in this challenge is vision.  Is it such a bad thing that cards are emerging fully-formed from a candidate's head?  Stepping on the toes of other departments seems more in the realm of office management, certainly one metric on which to measure a potential employee but pretty far outside the scope as stated of this contest.

Congratulations to Shawn on a well-deserved W.

Pretty interesting results. I'm surprised Devon was knocked so much, as i thought he was going to get a little more flexibility. (Then again i also thought Willaims was going to get another week before the hammer fell).

I disagree heavily with Maro on the Ape Human tokens. (and Merfolk Fish tokens). They make no sense even from a biological standpoint.

I'm a little surprised Maro didn't go off on a tanget about Blight given that he told Shawn it needed work several weeks ago when it was introduced and it still hasn't changed. (But i find the inner workings of Maro's brain to be a confusing place at times). Though the Intro pack challange is a great place to show off what Blight can do. (Or assault... assault's more likely)

I'm also a bit surprised no judge pointed out how random Scott's rare was.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As for the challange... good luck guys. That's Crazy with a capital C. Though I guess two weeks and being able to work alone can help.

Now pointless guessing:

Epolith:
Green / something else = Evolve

Wodotha:*
Black / red = Blight
or
White / Red = Assault

Utopia:
Black / Blue = Gold

Malgerath:**
Black / Green = Persist

* While seeing blight with a full deck behind it would be sweet, i think assault's the way to go. I can't imagine a blight deck being fun to play with/against. "And i kill that... then that.... then that.... good game." Shawn has enough brownie points to make it to the top 3 without doing blight. I wouldn't take the risk.

** I really have no idea. Persist is the best mechanic to build a deck around, and because of the odd nature of the rules, he could include a few discharge spells in there.

This is the point at which I stop reading the series, I suppose.

From my perspective WotC has almost as much to learn from Loucks as he has from them. I hope the audience WotC seem to think they're making sets for appreciate the efforts they're putting in to keep things simple, because I certainly don't.

After all the rude comments about the original version of Living Reflection I tested it out on my nine year old daughter. She had no trouble with the concept at all. And her usual W/G deck already has multiple types of tokens in it (from Icatian Crier and Presence of Gond ) so it's not as though that's a barrier either.

Maybe in some future year WotC should try releasing an extra set that kills a few of their sacred cows regarding complexity (everything except lines of text, about which I think they have the right idea)? I guarantee it would see more draft play on MtGO than anything they'd ever done before.

I call Ethan as the winner of GDS2.

My guess is that Shawn's "blight" theme is going to expire soon. It can be properly-executed (as it is), but it just can't go far beyond that. It's a simple linear mechanic that just blows stuff up all the time.

11) Uncommon Card #1 –
Initial Half
Poisonous Amphibian
[Chah invented creatures that flip into Equipment, the death trigger was my idea, and this specific card idea was Jay Treat's]
[Poison Dart Frog - community.wizards.com/magicthegathering/...]
2B
Creature - Salamander
2/1
Deathtouch
When CARDNAME is put into a graveyard from the battlefield, return it to the battlefield flipped.

Flipped Half
Poison Dart Blowgun
Artifact - Equipment
Equipped creature has deathtouch.
Equip 2

Art: A brightly-patterned Eryops sitting on a log. Flipped, the log becomes a blowgun.

I like this... but as has been said: why a flip card?

Why not two cards:

Poisonous Amphibian 2B
Creature - Salamander
2/1
Deathtouch
When CARDNAME is put into a graveyard from the battlefield, you may exile CARDNAME and tap an untapped creature you control, if you do search your library for a card named Poison Dart Blowgun and put it unto the battlefield attached to the tapped creature.

Poison Dart Blowgun 1
Artifact - Equipment
Equipped creature has deathtouch.
Equip 2

The creature could be simplified but the fact a creature must be tapped is flavourful, the additional cost of tapping a creature to cast that 0 mana equipment, while clunky, is interesting from a flavour perspective.

The naming of a specific card doesn't appear a lot in Magic but both cards are usable separately.

1) Common Card #1 –
Being from Below
4@
Creature – Horror
5/4
(@ Can only be paid with colorless mana.)

Art: A pale gray horror emerging from a large dark crack in the ground.

Small not to KEN and MP: this can be cast using 4 different colours of mana, it only needs ONE colourless.

D'uh...

Sorry for multipost but we got interesting designs this week.

3) Common Card #3 –

Pale Elder
2G
Creature – Elf Druid
1/2
T: Add 2 to your mana pool.

Art: An elf with pale skin drawing dark energy from the ground.

Pale Elder
G
Creature – Elf Druid
1/2
T, 1: Add 2 to your mana pool.

Problems solved, no?

KEN: Part Wild Colos, part Lava Axe, the Enraged Goblin represents the first red card a player should see from Malgareth. If your opponent is at 8 life, feel free to rage 3 during their end step, then rage 3 again during your turn for an 8/2. We don't print "end-step-loophole-matters" cards, so something needs to change here.

The thing that needs to change is Ken's ignorance of the rules.  You can activate the rage ability during your opponent's end step, and the Goblin won't be sacrificed until your next end step, but the +3/+0 will only last until your opponent's cleanup step.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 1:00AM, Pegaweb wrote:

I call Ethan as the winner of GDS2.

My guess is that Shawn's "blight" theme is going to expire soon. It can be properly-executed (as it is), but it just can't go far beyond that. It's a simple linear mechanic that just blows stuff up all the time.

That's ridiculous. First off, MaRo said himself that "The winner of the GDS2 will be the best designer, not the best design." Even if Ethan's world concept is more likely to actually see print than Shawn's, that is not what will determine who wins the competition. Furthermore, the winner of the GDS2 will be determined in part by the interview, so the relative quality of their sets doesn't really factor into that aspect.

MR: [...] Fortunately, all of the above are things that can be learned (as opposed to idea generation, which cannot),

Seems someone has forgotten all about A whack on the side of the head... =p

Meh, nevermind, not gonna be an ass.

VVVVVV Yeah I was both wrong and a jerk, which is why I edited it out VVVVVV 

Jan 12, 2011 -- 2:54AM, Ildemar wrote:

Ken Nagle: "Removing the parameter makes them less common and means you don't get to make 1/1 survival 2 and next set  0/1 survival 3, but maybe Magic is better with one rare 0/1 survival instead."


Ken,

In the future, please ask Mark Rosewater to explain to you how Magic rules work before attempting to comment on a proposed mechanic.

Head designer, ladies and gentlemen. 

Uh, what? He's saying that if there's a limit on how big the creature can go, the mechanic is much more likely to be at common, but maybe it's better to have no limit and only put it at rare, anyway. He was sort of being glib, in that what he really means is that the mechanic shouldn't have a keyword at all, but he definitely understands the rules here.

Kind of interesting to read that Ken expected Chandra to be Magic's first colourless Planeswalker:

"I expected Chandra here as the first colorless planeswalker—she has a colorless story arc with the Purifying Fire and the Eye of Ugin"

This makes it strange that the latest iteration of Chandra, Chandra Ablaze , is actually one of the most colour-intensive of all the Planeswalkers printed so far - two of her three abilities require you to be playing with a decent concentration of Red cards, her first ability really demands a LOT of Red cards to be truly useful (Nissa and Koth are pretty close behind though). Seems to be a disconnect between creative and design there.

Also, goblinrecruiter makes an excellent point. The least these applicants deserve is to have their designs assessed based on a correct understanding of the rules. I suspect the official retort would be something like "ah, well if even a designer gets confused about how the card works that's a sure sign it's too complicated!" but I think that's a cop-out. Please really think about how the rules actually work before assessing and commenting on (or for that matter, designing) cards, eh Wizards?

[Edit: MaRo's comment on the same card shows that he has also made the same mistake. A pity. And the comment above his brings out that hoary old business of "players don't like killing their own stuff" - PLEASE reconsider this position. I am sure you have data that says "new players don't like cards with drawbacks", but that is EXACTLY what is great about them (and I'm not just bashing noobs here, please read on). If you go back to those same new players six months later they will have developed and worked out why the cards with drawbacks were actually better than the cards without drawbacks that they had been playing with. For me it was painlands, the day I understood that damaging yourself occasionally was far less significant than having smooth mana was the day I truly fell in love with Magic and its sophistication. And I don't believe the counter-argument that those new players won't still be around in six months to make that discovery if we put them off with drawback cards - because the no-drawback cards will still be there for them to use as well.]

Jan 12, 2011 -- 2:09AM, unbrokencircle wrote:

Jan 12, 2011 -- 1:00AM, Pegaweb wrote:

I call Ethan as the winner of GDS2.

My guess is that Shawn's "blight" theme is going to expire soon. It can be properly-executed (as it is), but it just can't go far beyond that. It's a simple linear mechanic that just blows stuff up all the time.

That's ridiculous. First off, MaRo said himself that "The winner of the GDS2 will be the best designer, not the best design." Even if Ethan's world concept is more likely to actually see print than Shawn's, that is not what will determine who wins the competition. Furthermore, the winner of the GDS2 will be determined in part by the interview, so the relative quality of their sets doesn't really factor into that aspect.

This is just my prediction. I am obviously not psychic. I think you misunderstand my problem with Shawn's theme.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 3:05AM, Pegaweb wrote:

Jan 12, 2011 -- 2:09AM, unbrokencircle wrote:

Jan 12, 2011 -- 1:00AM, Pegaweb wrote:

I call Ethan as the winner of GDS2.

My guess is that Shawn's "blight" theme is going to expire soon. It can be properly-executed (as it is), but it just can't go far beyond that. It's a simple linear mechanic that just blows stuff up all the time.

That's ridiculous. First off, MaRo said himself that "The winner of the GDS2 will be the best designer, not the best design." Even if Ethan's world concept is more likely to actually see print than Shawn's, that is not what will determine who wins the competition. Furthermore, the winner of the GDS2 will be determined in part by the interview, so the relative quality of their sets doesn't really factor into that aspect.

This is just my prediction. I am obviously not psychic. I think you misunderstand my problem with Shawn's theme.

You said that there was a limit to how good Shawn's blight mechanic is. I said that it doesn't really matter at this point, because MaRo really likes the mechanic, so even if there are fundamental limitations to it the fact that MaRo likes the core of it and that Shawn has done so well up until now means that he is basically a lock for the final three. My point was less about your specific problem with Shawn's theme and more that using ANY specific aspect of Shawn's theme to predict the winner of the GDS2 is pointless.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 2:59AM, SternJudge wrote:

Kind of interesting to read that Ken expected Chandra to be Magic's first colourless Planeswalker:

"I expected Chandra here as the first colorless planeswalker—she has a colorless story arc with the Purifying Fire and the Eye of Ugin"

This makes it strange that the latest iteration of Chandra, Chandra Ablaze , is actually one of the most colour-intensive of all the Planeswalkers printed so far - two of her three abilities require you to be playing with a decent concentration of Red cards, her first ability really demands a LOT of Red cards to be truly useful (Nissa and Koth are pretty close behind though). Seems to be a disconnect between creative and design there.

Also, goblinrecruiter makes an excellent point. The least these applicants deserve is to have their designs assessed based on a correct understanding of the rules. I suspect the official retort would be something like "ah, well if even a designer gets confused about how the card works that's a sure sign it's too complicated!" but I think that's a cop-out. Please really think about how the rules actually work before assessing and commenting on (or for that matter, designing) cards, eh Wizards?

[Edit: MaRo's comment on the same card shows that he has also made the same mistake. A pity. And the comment above his brings out that hoary old business of "players don't like killing their own stuff" - PLEASE reconsider this position. I am sure you have data that says "new players don't like cards with drawbacks", but that is EXACTLY what is great about them (and I'm not just bashing noobs here, please read on). If you go back to those same new players six months later they will have developed and worked out why the cards with drawbacks were actually better than the cards without drawbacks that they had been playing with. For me it was painlands, the day I understood that damaging yourself occasionally was far less significant than having smooth mana was the day I truly fell in love with Magic and its sophistication. And I don't believe the counter-argument that those new players won't still be around in six months to make that discovery if we put them off with drawback cards - because the no-drawback cards will still be there for them to use as well.]

There will always be more aspects of the complexity of Magic to discover. It's not as though, by dialing down on the number of drawback cards in Magic, R&D has completely eliminated the role of skill and the ability for people's knowledge about the game to allow them to play better. That's why painlands, etc. aren't necessary - yes, there are some players that enjoy that process of realization, but the whole of the complexity of Magic is for them. For the players who just want to have fun, drawback mechanics often just get in the way.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 3:22AM, unbrokencircle wrote:

That's why painlands, etc. aren't necessary - yes, there are some players that enjoy that process of realization, but the whole of the complexity of Magic is for them. For the players who just want to have fun, drawback mechanics often just get in the way.

Hmm... so given that you accept this as a valid reason not to print drawbacks, do you also feel WotC should abandon its longstanding habit of printing cards which appeal only to certain psychographics?

WotC are very good at talking about why they do things, but sometimes you have to read between the lines a bit too. Magic is clearly diminished as a game by the absence of drawback mechanics, but Magic sales are not. (That isn't meant as a criticism of WotC - they're a business - but it's worth mentioning because WotC are uncomfortable about spelling out when they make the game worse on purpose.)

An an aside: I'd recommend anyone interested in this issue read Gavin Verhey on drawbacks.

You make fair points, we will simply have to politely disagree (something I still hope is possible on the internet).

Dungeons and Dragons has gone the same way; penalites for various things have been more or less done away with, it's now more a case of bigger bonuses for others. I can't help feeling that for Magic, though, if you remove or cut down on cards with drawbacks, you are necessarliy reducing design space. Cards with all upside are great, sure, but it seems logically irrefutable that also printing cards that have "drawbacks" offers more options.

Funnily enough. my own anecdotal, small-sample-size, in-no-way-scientific experience was that Bloodthrone Vampire was one of the most popular cards amongst younger/newer players in M11 limited (but not Rise, interestingly...). That's a card that has an obvious drawback (it's clearly underpowered unless you are killing your own creatures) but they seemed to thrive on it.

KEN: [...] Many players do not understand that tokens do actually go to the graveyard momentarily. Look at Pawn of Ulamog and Firecat Blitz—we write nontoken and exile clauses on them to avoid the confusion.

What happened to the Fun Police?

Also I'm pretty sure Pawn only has nontoken to prevent loops.

You know, I actually thought that the last design challenge would be, "Ok, now design the rest of your set."

The task of designing an Intro Pack is better for everyone's sanity, I guess.

I just think that for some contestants, it might be very hard to show what they've fixed with their world since Intro Packs only explore one mechanic. 

Jan 12, 2011 -- 3:36AM, TobyornotToby wrote:



KEN: [...] Many players do not understand that tokens do actually go to the graveyard momentarily. Look at Pawn of Ulamog and Firecat Blitz—we write nontoken and exile clauses on them to avoid the confusion.

What happened to the Fun Police?

Also I'm pretty sure Pawn only has nontoken to prevent loops.

Yeah, that point is a very strange one. I mean, there are lots of cards in standard that care about creatures hitting the graveyard that don't have the non-token clause. If Ken's claim were true then Sylvok Lifestaff would have the non-token clause, especially as Scars is a set with quite a few ways to make token creatures! Someone could be playing a (admittedly terrible) Scars limited deck with Kuldotha Rebirth and Vigil for the Lost - are Wizards not concerned about the so-called "confusion" there?

A quick gatherer search showed about 10 cards in standard that could trigger off random token creatures going to the 'yard and only about 2 that had the non-token clause, so it's clearly the exception rather than the rule.

[EDIT: To be fair to Ken, I do now recognize that Pawn of Ulamog might be slightly different because it does both the token-sacrificing and graveyard-triggering things on the same card but I believe the above poster is right that it's more there to prevent a loop.]

Something else that occurred to me while I was looking through Gatherer - if Wizards are indeed concerned about that sort of confusion, I'm surprised that they aren't as concerned about Leyline of the Void , Bloodchief Ascension and Ravenous Trap . These all trigger off "cards" going to the graveyard. Now tokens, of course, aren't cards.... except that they are? I mean, since the advent of putting them in booster packs (an idea I totally support), tokens are quite literally cards, in the actual English sense of the word. Except they are not cards.

The real confusion I can imagine is having to say to a new player trying to cast Ravenous Trap "No, you can't do that. That creature that went to my graveyard wasn't a card. I mean, I know it was actually a card, that I got out of a booster pack but technically it's not a card, so it doesn't trigger. What's that? Yes, I know it triggered my Quest for the Gravelord , but it doesn't help your Ravenous Trap because it was a creature being put in a graveyard, but it wasn't a card. Even though it was actually, literally, a card."

Jan 12, 2011 -- 12:45AM, bateleur_ wrote:

Maybe in some future year WotC should try releasing an extra set that kills a few of their sacred cows regarding complexity (everything except lines of text, about which I think they have the right idea)?

They did that already. It was called Future Sight. I loved it to bits but apparently the overall reception (as measured by their actual data-gathering) was not superb.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 5:13AM, SamLL wrote:

They did that already. It was called Future Sight.

Future Sight didn't do what I was proposing, no.

It has a lot of different mechanics in one set, but not in a way that leads to a greater frequency of relevant gameplay decisions. Nor is any one mechanic particularly deep or interesting.

In any case reception of Future Sight was inevitably going to be coloured by feelings about Time Spiral block in general. Speaking as someone who hated Suspend and found Storm too random, I was never going to draft much Future Sight even if it has been a better set.

I'm hoping to see a Blight deck - yes, in some ways it's the riskier choice - Assault is easier to build a fun deck around, and it's not the heart of the set, so even a slightly lack-lustre Assault deck doesn't invalidate Wodotha the same way an unfun Blight deck would.

On the other hand, the fact that an unfun Blight deck would sink Wodotha-as-we-know-it is the reason why, in my opinion, it would be a mistake not to build the Blight deck - the challenge isn't about building the best theme deck possible, but about building the theme deck that best sells the set design as a whole. Even if the judges were unanimous about Blight working perfectly as currently deployed, there'd still be a pull toward making the Blight theme deck for this round to showcase the heart of the design. With the judges expressing reservations about how Blight is currently being used, it's even more important to show that the core of the set is solid...

A Blight deck is probably the only realistic choice there, but yes, it's also insanely risky. 

My personal feeling is that they should have been asking them to design a pair of "duel decks" rather than an "intro pack".  Making one deck that plays interestingly against itself is a tall order at the best of times; building properly different but interesting strategies into a single deck is even harder.  Having a chance to explore a couple of avenues through two decks is more likely to show up issues with mechanics as well as make the fun experience more viable - I am fairly sure that most people don't buy two copies of the same intro deck to play against each other (even though I accept that the individual decks do have to function like that, I can't believe it's the top design priority...)

Don't include more than one new mechanic in your deck.

What does this mean exactly? One mechanic new to magic or new to the contest?

If a designer uses a repeat mechanic (persist, scry), can he uses both it and a new mechanic?

Jan 12, 2011 -- 6:53AM, Scurra wrote:

A Blight deck is probably the only realistic choice there, but yes, it's also insanely risky. 

My personal feeling is that they should have been asking them to design a pair of "duel decks" rather than an "intro pack".  Making one deck that plays interestingly against itself is a tall order at the best of times; building properly different but interesting strategies into a single deck is even harder.  Having a chance to explore a couple of avenues through two decks is more likely to show up issues with mechanics as well as make the fun experience more viable - I am fairly sure that most people don't buy two copies of the same intro deck to play against each other (even though I accept that the individual decks do have to function like that, I can't believe it's the top design priority...)

I guess they're going to be played against each other, just like challenge 1 & 2 =)

Evolve deck versus Blight deck for example.

10) Premium Mythic Card – Malaziel Sellscale
4BB
Legendary Creature - Dragon Mercenary
5/5
Flying
Whenever CARDNAME deals combat damage to a player, you may pay X life.  If you do, search your library for any number of Mercenary creature  cards with total converted mana cost X or less and put them onto the  battlefield. Then shuffle your library.

Art: A huge black dragon flying at the head of a mercenary army.

Mmmmh...

10) Premium Mythic Card – Malaziel Sellscale
4BB
Legendary Creature - Dragon Mercenary
5/5
Flying
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, you may pay X life.  If you do, search your library for any number of Mercenary creature  cards with total converted mana cost X and put them onto the  battlefield. Then shuffle your library.

Art: A huge black dragon flying at the head of a mercenary army.

I think either Shawn or Ethan will win, but i won't count anyone out.

Blight does show off one of Shawn's weak points. I don't think Shawn wanted to do the Blight, nor did he really embrace it. He's had over a month to work on it, yet it turned up just the same as when he first submmited it (Even though Maro told him to work on it)

I'd like to see a blight deck, but i don't think it could work (Since i don't think the mechanic really works). So i expect an Assault deck.

Shawn and Ethan have been frontrunners the entire time, so i don't think they have to worry about being eliminated unless they screw up royally.

I don't quite understand Ken Nagle.  He chewed out Ethan for "being too ambitious" when the parameters of this test was to include art descriptions with each card.

 

I do think its important to remind the contestants that such elaborate card frames  (like the poison dart frog) may not be profitable, but at the same time this isn't what was asked of them.  The contestants are being asked in this stage to appeal to the players, not to Wizards.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 8:09AM, Bandswithother wrote:

I don't quite understand Ken Nagle.  He chewed out Ethan for "being too ambitious" when the parameters of this test was to include art descriptions with each card.

 

I do think its important to remind the contestants that such elaborate card frames  (like the poison dart frog) may not be profitable, but at the same time this isn't what was asked of them.  The contestants are being asked in this stage to appeal to the players, not to Wizards.

Ethan used scientific names for no apparant reason. which is more evocative:

Two friendly groups of Australopithecuses, clutching primitive weapons, meet in the savanna.

Two friendly groups of cavemen, clutching primitive weapons, meet in the savanna.

^ He was being a bit too scientific. Of course this is a nitpick, and i don't think really impacted his grade.

* Ken was mostly pointing out that scientific names aren't trademarkable. You can trademark "Phyrexia" but not "Parasite", you can trademark "Naya" but not "Jungle world". I think Ken wanted Ethan to have named things, not just read through a scientific journal.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On a differnt note, Shawn has decided to go with Blight for his mechanic, which is pretty cool. I'll certainly be offering suggestions for that.

I don't know why the judges liked Fleischer's Feathered Theropod // Toothed Bird.
This would have been much more simple and elegant:

Feathered Theropod
1UU
Creature - Lizard Bird
2/3
When a creature with flying enters the battlefield, Feathered Theropod becomes 4/3 and gains flying.

You can even add a clause so it doesn't trigger each time a flier enters the battlefield and a reminder text for "this effect doesn't end at the end of turn", and that would still be simpler than the flip card. Also, I probably would add an "under your control" clause.

Forgive me I should have used more specific examples.

I'm refering to his criticisms of Ethan's Uncommon #3 where Ken suggests Ethan is a controlling prick over a little art trick that he wouldn't have any say in to begin with.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 10:18AM, Bandswithother wrote:

I just wanted to vent about how Ken Nagle is an arrogant dick.  Because the internet cares.

(He is a skilled MTG designer, no doubt, I just don't like his personality.)

That's just the burning passion of the young. He'll calm down in a few years. 

We did this exact challenge over in YMtC.  The funny thing was that the original version of the challenge was much more insane.
community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758...

Jan 12, 2011 -- 8:15AM, Skibo_the_first wrote:

On a differnt note, Shawn has decided to go with Blight for his mechanic, which is pretty cool. I'll certainly be offering suggestions for that.

Thanks, Skibo. While an assault deck would let me play with some of my favorite themes (*cough* tokens) and might be easier in certain regards, I'd be remiss to sidestep the opportunity to address the judges' concerns about blight.

We discussed and playtested a few variants last round (making the destruction only hit one player, adding a clause to correct some of the consistency problems Tabak pointed out), but in the end, I decided not to clutter the cards with text that might be responding to problems the judges wouldn't have. Now we have something of a mandate, though- to explore possibilities for less parasitic blight. The initial question is whether we need a mechanical shift (maybe decoupling the counter placement & the destruction) or whether the answer is in the execution of individual cards.

Wodotha's wiki page is here if anyone wants to help out.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 10:49AM, DrJones wrote:

Jan 12, 2011 -- 10:18AM, Bandswithother wrote:

I just wanted to vent about how Ken Nagle is an arrogant dick.  Because the internet cares.

(He is a skilled MTG designer, no doubt, I just don't like his personality.)

That's just the burning passion of the young. He'll calm down in a few years. 

Not that anyone cares, and hopefully his personality IRL is better, but I agree with the comments about Nagle.  Actually I have quit reading them because most of the time I just want to slap him.  Seriously, it has colored my view of the man.  Very arrogant sounding, as I recall... he didn't actually win the last GDS.

Is he being serious? I'd assumed he was imitating the style of TV shows like Dragon's Den and The Apprentice due to the whole reality show theme.

It's all in the eyes of the watcher, really. Written media is very bad at representing nonverbal communication, so original intention is lost along the way and everyone has to recreate it again from scratch. That's why smileys got created in the first place.

Wow.  I was surprised that Rosewater had problems conceptualizing some of T-Rex's abilities in Ethan's booster pack.

Specifically: CARDNAME must be blocked by exactly one creature if able.

Given the art, the idea that Tyrannosaurus's "blocker" would be the one creature running away from him makes perfect sense!

Additionally, the judges didn't seem to understand the "Lord" ability by commenting  that Rex hunts alone... Let's look at the ability:

Other Lizard creatures you control get +1/+1, have trample, and attack each turn if able.  

It makes perfect sense.. Rex isn't HELPING them, he's TERRIFYING them.  I almost think though that there should be a qualifier that if Rex isn't blocked and you have at least one Lizard creature attacking, that a lizard has to be sacrificed.  The templating would likely be a mess though. 

Jan 12, 2011 -- 3:31AM, bateleur_ wrote:

Jan 12, 2011 -- 3:22AM, unbrokencircle wrote:

That's why painlands, etc. aren't necessary - yes, there are some players that enjoy that process of realization, but the whole of the complexity of Magic is for them. For the players who just want to have fun, drawback mechanics often just get in the way.

Hmm... so given that you accept this as a valid reason not to print drawbacks, do you also feel WotC should abandon its longstanding habit of printing cards which appeal only to certain psychographics?

WotC are very good at talking about why they do things, but sometimes you have to read between the lines a bit too. Magic is clearly diminished as a game by the absence of drawback mechanics, but Magic sales are not. (That isn't meant as a criticism of WotC - they're a business - but it's worth mentioning because WotC are uncomfortable about spelling out when they make the game worse on purpose.)

An an aside: I'd recommend anyone interested in this issue read Gavin Verhey on drawbacks.

Drawbacks still have a place in Magic, that place just shouldn't be front and center. It should be done occasionally and it shouldn't be at the core of the game.

The idea that "Magic is clearly diminished as a game by the absence of drawback mechanics" isn't clear to me at all, actually.

The majority of players are casual gameers. They aren't spikes, they aren't Johnnies, they are mostly Timmys.

Timmy doesn't like drawbacks. T-Rex wants to be an Uber-Timmy card, it wants huge states and impressive abilities. Having bizzare abilities, or drawbacks doesn't make Timmy exicited.

Timmy cards should appeal to Timmy. Spike cards to spike. Johnny cards to Johnny. If you start trying to make every card appeal to every one... well you end up with a card no one wants.

Also, spike isn't concerned with the flavor of the game, and neither is Johnny. If you are designing cards off of popular tropes, you should make them appeal to Timmy since Timmy is the group that enjoys experiencing the game. Making T-Rex a spike card would be a waste of resources, the idea of T-Rex is too appealing to use on a spike card that discourages Timmy.

* Not saying that you can't make a Spike/Timmy card. But such a card would need to appeal to both.

I don't want to be That Guy who says "Can't we just get along?" but I would gladly play every set proposed by the finalists. I liked @ as a more generic form of "snow" for a pseudo-Sixth Color and blight sounds really fun as long as most of the cards that use it are capable of doing it at least twice.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 12:45AM, bateleur_ wrote:

This is the point at which I stop reading the series, I suppose.

From my perspective WotC has almost as much to learn from Loucks as he has from them. I hope the audience WotC seem to think they're making sets for appreciate the efforts they're putting in to keep things simple, because I certainly don't.

After all the rude comments about the original version of Living Reflection I tested it out on my nine year old daughter. She had no trouble with the concept at all. And her usual W/G deck already has multiple types of tokens in it (from Icatian Crier and Presence of Gond ) so it's not as though that's a barrier either.

Maybe in some future year WotC should try releasing an extra set that kills a few of their sacred cows regarding complexity (everything except lines of text, about which I think they have the right idea)? I guarantee it would see more draft play on MtGO than anything they'd ever done before.

I think you are missing the point of the critisicms raised. The point was not that Living Reflection was too complex to understand, it was that it is not a common mechanic - and, in it's original rendition, it probably belongs on a couple of rares, and not much else. The problem is that, with it at common, you have all these random Living Reflection tokens running around, likely bits of paper, with the original creatures potentially in the graveyard, exiled, on the bottom of the library, or returned to one's hand. The overall problem with Loucks's mechanics in those stages was that (as stated by the judges) all were borderline in their complexity - one could be at common, but not all could be at common at the same time. I guarantee that Wizards has more market research than you about the amount of complexity that the majority of Magic players enjoy, given that it is inherently a very complex game.

That said, I understand that there are sections of players that enjoy the additional complexity of cards - that, to me, is what uncommons/rares (moreso rares) are for. It's not like Wizards refuses to print these complex cards - it's that they print them so that the casual player does not have to deal with them in huge amounts, but that the competitive player can get ahold of 4-ofs of all of them, and create really unique, complex decks.

The other thing that I wanted to say is about Shawn's deck - I think it is definitely a good idea to tackle the Blight deck, and prove that the mechanic can be made fun and non-insular. The very fact that a number of people said "He can't make the Blight deck because it won't be fun" implies that Blight still needs to prove itself, or get scrapped. Kudos to you for taking on the challenge! 

Jan 12, 2011 -- 3:22PM, Miksal wrote:

That said, I understand that there are sections of players that enjoy the additional complexity of cards - that, to me, is what uncommons/rares (moreso rares) are for. It's not like Wizards refuses to print these complex cards - it's that they print them so that the casual player does not have to deal with them in huge amounts, but that the competitive player can get ahold of 4-ofs of all of them, and create really unique, complex decks.

Listen to this, everybody: experienced players who like complexity (often Johnnies, but most experienced players fall here to some extent), competitive players (usually Spikes) and players who buy vast quantities of cards (a small portion of the player base) are all the same people!

Certainly there are no casual Spikes, or budget Spikes, or experienced casual players, or experienced budget players, or experienced casual Spikes, or experienced budget Spikes...

Jan 12, 2011 -- 3:33PM, ROBRAM89 wrote:

Jan 12, 2011 -- 3:22PM, Miksal wrote:

That said, I understand that there are sections of players that enjoy the additional complexity of cards - that, to me, is what uncommons/rares (moreso rares) are for. It's not like Wizards refuses to print these complex cards - it's that they print them so that the casual player does not have to deal with them in huge amounts, but that the competitive player can get ahold of 4-ofs of all of them, and create really unique, complex decks.

Listen to this, everybody: experienced players who like complexity (often Johnnies, but most experienced players fall here to some extent), competitive players (usually Spikes) and players who buy vast quantities of cards (a small portion of the player base) are all the same people!

Certainly there are no casual Spikes, or budget Spikes, or experienced casual players, or experienced budget players, or experienced casual Spikes, or experienced budget Spikes...

Perhaps you misunderstand my point. Magic is a pretty complex game, and there are already a fair number of complex cards printed at lower rarities. My reply was to a poster talking about printing cards that have the complexity of many uncommon or rare cards at common, and suggesting that a large subsection of players want this.

Undoubtedly a very large portion of players enjoy Magic for it's complexity - but, there is such a thing as too much complexity for some people, and we have to look at what is healthy for the game and most attractive to the majority of the player base. The way Magic is set up, if you really want that additional complexity, you can seek it out at higher rarities. I was misleading by saying "competitive" players, and for that I apologize. Note that "additional complexity" means "above and beyond what the average Magic player wants out of an already complex game."

It's not that Wizards doesn't like complexity, but limiting complexity is a restriction in order to give the game some desirable traits. For example:

1. The draft format. Players are required to open a booster of a new expansion, then read all the cards, then figure a strategy, choose the best card for that strategy, and pass the rest.

"Wordy" cards, cards that take a while to understand, cards that don't work like they seem to do at first read, cards that are hard to read due to tiny fonts, etc. All this complexity adds extra time and the player will take longer to pass the booster to the next player. As commons outnumber rares by 10 to 1, it's better if the "complex" cards are at higher rarities for the draft format to be dynamic and fast-paced.

2. Being able to "restore a game". Most people have no troubles remembering choices they make as the game goes, specially if the game doesn't take long and the choices are relevant all this time. Now, let's say that in the middle of a match you stop playing to watch a movie, go to sleep, whatever. The memory issue happens if after getting back into the game, you are unable to recover the game state because you forgot something (for example, your life total or the last cumulative upkeep paid). Games such as chess have no memory issues. If a player has to go, another one can continue from that point onwards with no additional information.

That's why WotC limits mechanics that cause memory issues or that require a lot of accounting.

3. The "jump" to get into the game. That is, how much explanation is required before you can start playing. The bigger the jump, the more unlikely someone is bother to try. Much like a logline has to be short and sexy, the initial explanation has to be kept at minimum. Magic belongs to a gaming category called Ameritrash, which among other things means that the jump is very big from the start, and that there is a lot of setup and "game pieces" to track to do. Expansions only make this jump bigger every set until you reach a critical point, so complexity that was acceptable back when there were few sets is no longer acceptable, because it's added on top of it.

That's why WotC is always trying to simplify "rules baggage" that are not relevant most of the time, that's why it kills narrow mechanics, and that's why sets rotate out of standard and introductory products are deliberately simple. Theme decks and linear mechanics also allows new players to start playing without having to read +15000 cards in gatherer beforehand.

I was concerned for Loucks as soon as I saw him first put up the @ ideas.

That said, I think he was judged unfarily on a few other things.

Take Amorphize for instance:

Amorphize
2U
Sorcery
Draw a card, then put a card from your hand onto the battlefield face down. (It is a 2/2 creature.)

Why did MaRo let him use Morph if he doesn't want him to play with it?

In my opinion, Rules is scared of Morph for no reason. I really wish we'd get a new Morph set just so they'd finally have to confront their fear and fix it. Amorphize seems like a brilliantly obvious card to me, but it "doesn't work?" Why not? Nonpermanents can't be in play? Then let them through cards like this. That's what the basic rulebooks tell you, and it's something I think the Rules people should live by as well.

If something is grokkable and simple to put on a card, find a way to put it in the rules (as long as it also plays well and such, of course).

It reminds me of Tribal again. I couldn't remember the exact problem, but I read recently that it was because supertypes can't have subtypes? That's really stupid. You make the rules. It's not like you're following some sacred ancient document. If Legendary can have the Legend rule, then I don't see why Tribal can't have a rule that explains that it allows whatever type it's affecting to have creature types. I mean, it's not like making Tribal a card type didn't come with unique changes anyway. A card type that can never appear on its own, and shares subtypes with another card type? That makes it more strange than if it just applied a change to an existing type.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 5:01PM, Jokubas wrote:

In my opinion, Rules is scared of Morph for no reason. I really wish we'd get a new Morph set just so they'd finally have to confront their fear and fix it. Amorphize seems like a brilliantly obvious card to me, but it "doesn't work?" Why not? Nonpermanents can't be in play? Then let them through cards like this. That's what the basic rulebooks tell you, and it's something I think the Rules people should live by as well.

In Mago's opinon, having nonpermanent cards on the battlefeild is a huge hassle for little gain.

Whose opinon do you think has more weight? If you don't like the rules, feel free to go down to the rules theory forum and suggest a change.

Rewriting half the rulebook so that one card can exist is ridiculous. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

If something is grokkable and simple to put on a card, find a way to put it in the rules (as long as it also plays well and such, of course).

The rulebook is over a hundred pages long. Adding a dozen pages to it every time you want to print a new card isn't feasible.

It reminds me of Tribal again. I couldn't remember the exact problem, but I read recently that it was because supertypes can't have subtypes? That's really stupid. You make the rules. It's not like you're following some sacred ancient document. If Legendary can have the Legend rule, then I don't see why Tribal can't have a rule that explains that it allows whatever type it's affecting to have creature types. I mean, it's not like making Tribal a card type didn't come with unique changes anyway. A card type that can never appear on its own, and shares subtypes with another card type? That makes it more strange than if it just applied a change to an existing type.

Because the rules are designed in a very specific way. You can either have a card type, and have it work in the existing rule structure, or have a supertype and have to rewrite parts of the rulebook.


* If you don't know the rules, don't complain about the rules. The rulebook is very long and has to work with thousands of cards. When the rules change, hundreds upon hundreds of cards have to be considered. It's easy to say "Oh, we can have instants on the battlefileld", but have you considered all the cards such a rules change would effect, and all the cards that would need errata now.

I'm kinda dissappointed as to how the judges are...well...judging.  They ask the contestants to shoot for the moon.  However, they applaud a mechanic that adds +1/+1 counters for attacking or playing creatures, but then roast a contestant because he tried to do a 6th color without superb implementation.

I'm not saying that there were no faults with @, but there should at least be some judging scale where taking a big risk with a great, but untried, idea is allowed some lieniency for less-than-stellar execution.   Otherwise, the safest route to take will always be a mechanic that says "here's a bonus for doing something that has already been proven to work countless times (like attacking or playing creatures)".  

To me, this punishes the more creative contestants who want to try new things and rewards those who want to win by staying low enough under the radar. 

I was surprised by the results this round, I thought Devon's was the hands-down worst submission.  I thought Jon was lacking spectacular execution, but I hoped the judges would give him enough credit for trying something so radical and unproven, especially this late in the contest.  Having the guts to do it should count for something, in my book. 

Jan 12, 2011 -- 5:20PM, Skibo_the_first wrote:

 Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

I see you've read Jurassic Park and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein

Jan 12, 2011 -- 5:20PM, Skibo_the_first wrote:

Jan 12, 2011 -- 5:01PM, Jokubas wrote:

In my opinion, Rules is scared of Morph for no reason. I really wish we'd get a new Morph set just so they'd finally have to confront their fear and fix it. Amorphize seems like a brilliantly obvious card to me, but it "doesn't work?" Why not? Nonpermanents can't be in play? Then let them through cards like this. That's what the basic rulebooks tell you, and it's something I think the Rules people should live by as well.

In Mago's opinon, having nonpermanent cards on the battlefeild is a huge hassle for little gain.

Whose opinon do you think has more weight? If you don't like the rules, feel free to go down to the rules theory forum and suggest a change.

Rewriting half the rulebook so that one card can exist is ridiculous. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

If something is grokkable and simple to put on a card, find a way to put it in the rules (as long as it also plays well and such, of course).

The rulebook is over a hundred pages long. Adding a dozen pages to it every time you want to print a new card isn't feasible.

It reminds me of Tribal again. I couldn't remember the exact problem, but I read recently that it was because supertypes can't have subtypes? That's really stupid. You make the rules. It's not like you're following some sacred ancient document. If Legendary can have the Legend rule, then I don't see why Tribal can't have a rule that explains that it allows whatever type it's affecting to have creature types. I mean, it's not like making Tribal a card type didn't come with unique changes anyway. A card type that can never appear on its own, and shares subtypes with another card type? That makes it more strange than if it just applied a change to an existing type.

Because the rules are designed in a very specific way. You can either have a card type, and have it work in the existing rule structure, or have a supertype and have to rewrite parts of the rulebook.


* If you don't know the rules, don't complain about the rules. The rulebook is very long and has to work with thousands of cards. When the rules change, hundreds upon hundreds of cards have to be considered. It's easy to say "Oh, we can have instants on the battlefileld", but have you considered all the cards such a rules change would effect, and all the cards that would need errata now.

It seems like the easy fix would just be too make instants and sorceries on the battlefield do nothing, and get put into the graveyard as a state based action, probably along with some minor rewording to the definintion of a permanant. I certainly don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of cards or rules of this game, but I can't really think of any cards you would need to errata or any weird interactions. Aside from the obvious "its easier to cheat if you can put lots of cards without morph face down", what makes this not work?

Considering what a mess the rules for face down cards are, I wouldn't be suprised if this was a nightmare ruleswise, but I'm interested in what the specific issues are, since multiple people have talked about what a rules headache it is without really providing any examples of the big problems it would cause.

Dear Mr. Nagle -

Magic is not Uno.  Magic survives by virtue of groups of players willing to give up Friday nights to play it for five hours.  Do you know many people who play Uno for five hours every Friday?  Magic must, by necessity, get better as you play it more.  Uno, we all know, is pretty much the same game after an hour as it is after a week, or a month, or a year.  Magic as Uno is Magic at its end.

Your attitude towards dedicated players is insulting, and painful, and most importantly, damaging to the game.  Magic does not survive the day people stop wanting to play it in every free moment.

You have hurt the game more than you've helped it.

Is the big reality show twist at the end going to be that the winner gets Ken Nagle's job?

Jan 12, 2011 -- 8:34PM, Zadok001 wrote:

Magic survives by virtue of groups of players willing to give up Friday nights to play it for five hours. 

Magic does not survive the day people stop wanting to play it in every free moment.

The problem is that Wizards believes this is actually the niche group.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 9:55PM, ROBRAM89 wrote:

Is the big reality show twist at the end going to be that the winner gets Ken Nagle's job?

Ahahah! :P

Let's be honest, he's being bitchy (and not 100% rightfully).

Jan 13, 2011 -- 4:38AM, TobyornotToby wrote:

Jan 12, 2011 -- 8:34PM, Zadok001 wrote:

Magic survives by virtue of groups of players willing to give up Friday nights to play it for five hours. 

Magic does not survive the day people stop wanting to play it in every free moment.

The problem is that Wizards believes this is actually the niche group.

Ahhh... but are they really wrong?

I remember reading an article once about the position of the "hardcore gamer" within the market.  I believe it was largely oriented towards console gaming, but the ideas it presented were applicable to any activity that has a hardcore element that devotes itself wholeheartedly to it, and a casual element that is more transient.

The hardcore gamer/sports fan/etc. believe themselves to be "the heart and soul" of the activity.  They're the ones that stick through thick and thin, spend their hard-earned money on the product, and otherwise devote themselves to it.  They see themselves as the center of the activity, and feel that they are the ones those organizing the activity should pay the most attention to.  A game should be marketed to the hardcore gamer, a sports team should strive to excel in order to please its hardcore fans, and so on.

But the truth is, from the perspective of most groups, the hardcore fanatics are really just the fringes of an available market.  They're not the center -- they're on the outer edges, those eccentrics that make up a tiny minority of the population.  The real market lies in the more normal, casual people.  The hardcore point at the casuals, and decry them for being transient.  The hardcore are dependable and reliable!  A transient gamer may make one purchase and then disappear!  Why would transient gamers/sports fans/etc. make up the majority of marketing decisions?

Because they outnumber the hardcore, for one.  Look at any sports event -- what percentage of the population in the stands has painted their faces and jumps around and cheers and waves banners?  For every hardcore sports fan, there's probably a hundred more normal people who are just attending the game.  So who makes up the majority of the ticket sales?  Sure, a casual fan might only buy one ticket or invest a little in the product, but if any particular event/set/game has 10 casual people buying it for every 1 hardcore person, then the casual market is far outweighing the hardcore market.

Sure, Magic may be different from most other activities -- as was said earlier, it already has a fairly steep entry curve, which weeds out some of the more transient casual population.  Magic also has a fairly dedicated, even professional competitive scene. But Wizards is also a pretty giant company, and has likely invested a lot into its market research, so if they feel that the casual market still outweighs the likely much smaller hardcore scene, they may very well be correct.

Jan 13, 2011 -- 11:03AM, Mischa wrote:

Jan 13, 2011 -- 4:38AM, TobyornotToby wrote:

Jan 12, 2011 -- 8:34PM, Zadok001 wrote:

Magic survives by virtue of groups of players willing to give up Friday nights to play it for five hours. 

Magic does not survive the day people stop wanting to play it in every free moment.

The problem is that Wizards believes this is actually the niche group.

Ahhh... but are they really wrong?

I remember reading an article once about the position of the "hardcore gamer" within the market.  I believe it was largely oriented towards console gaming, but the ideas it presented were applicable to any activity that has a hardcore element that devotes itself wholeheartedly to it, and a casual element that is more transient.

The hardcore gamer/sports fan/etc. believe themselves to be "the heart and soul" of the activity.  They're the ones that stick through thick and thin, spend their hard-earned money on the product, and otherwise devote themselves to it.  They see themselves as the center of the activity, and feel that they are the ones those organizing the activity should pay the most attention to.  A game should be marketed to the hardcore gamer, a sports team should strive to excel in order to please its hardcore fans, and so on.

But the truth is, from the perspective of most groups, the hardcore fanatics are really just the fringes of an available market.  They're not the center -- they're on the outer edges, those eccentrics that make up a tiny minority of the population.  The real market lies in the more normal, casual people.  The hardcore point at the casuals, and decry them for being transient.  The hardcore are dependable and reliable!  A transient gamer may make one purchase and then disappear!  Why would transient gamers/sports fans/etc. make up the majority of marketing decisions?

Because they outnumber the hardcore, for one.  Look at any sports event -- what percentage of the population in the stands has painted their faces and jumps around and cheers and waves banners?  For every hardcore sports fan, there's probably a hundred more normal people who are just attending the game.  So who makes up the majority of the ticket sales?  Sure, a casual fan might only buy one ticket or invest a little in the product, but if any particular event/set/game has 10 casual people buying it for every 1 hardcore person, then the casual market is far outweighing the hardcore market.

Sure, Magic may be different from most other activities -- as was said earlier, it already has a fairly steep entry curve, which weeds out some of the more transient casual population.  Magic also has a fairly dedicated, even professional competitive scene. But Wizards is also a pretty giant company, and has likely invested a lot into its market research, so if they feel that the casual market still outweighs the likely much smaller hardcore scene, they may very well be correct.

Yes indeed, I meant "the problem" as "the problem for those in the hardcore group" ^^;

Jan 13, 2011 -- 11:03AM, Mischa wrote:

Jan 13, 2011 -- 4:38AM, TobyornotToby wrote:

Jan 12, 2011 -- 8:34PM, Zadok001 wrote:

Magic survives by virtue of groups of players willing to give up Friday nights to play it for five hours. 

Magic does not survive the day people stop wanting to play it in every free moment.

The problem is that Wizards believes this is actually the niche group.

Ahhh... but are they really wrong?

I remember reading an article once about the position of the "hardcore gamer" within the market.  I believe it was largely oriented towards console gaming, but the ideas it presented were applicable to any activity that has a hardcore element that devotes itself wholeheartedly to it, and a casual element that is more transient.

And if at any point I referred to the hardcore PTQ grinders that make up a relatively tiny percentage of the game's fanbase, you would have a point.  But the players I'm referring to are FNM players, who, yes, you must hold the attention of for five hours per week, in general.  Uno-level complexity cannot do that, and will not do that over the long term.  (And replacing all the Red cards with Purple cards every three months won't do the trick.)  And the FNM fanbase of Magic is VASTLY larger than the actual hardcore.

FNM players actually often require *more* complexity in the game than PTQ players, both because they cannot be driven by higher goals and accomplishments and because they are more restricted in terms of the formats they focus on.

This isn't hardcore vs. casual.  This is "Plays the game consistantly" vs. "Plays once every three months."

Seriously, when's the last time you played Uno?  And how long has it been between games for you?

Think that'll work with Magic?  Anyone?

The statistic they keep using to justify simplicity is that the average Magic player is thirteen, which sounds like a complete fabrication.

Jan 13, 2011 -- 8:14PM, ROBRAM89 wrote:

The statistic they keep using to justify simplicity is that the average Magic player is thirteen, which sounds like a complete fabrication.

Possibly?  I doubt the average age for active Magic players is 13, but it might be the modal starting age.  That's when complexity most matters - when you're picking up a game.  If it's too complex, you give up.  If you stick with it after that, you already know the rules, and complexity doesn't matter that much.  I think that my brother, and my cousins whom he introduced to the game, were 13 or younger when they started.

If the typical age of the players they're concerned about is 13, then FNM is not the main location of play; it's kitchen tables and school playgrounds.

13's a tad ridiculous when you realize that recommended age for magic is 13+, most players I know are in thier 20's and the rest are older. (Bear in mind, this isn't hard evidence).

I don't think there's much difference between a 13 year old and a 30 year old when it comes to picking up the game of magic. It's not like years of experience will help you understand the game better. Complexity is a problem for every new player.

And complexity is a problem for established players as well. Take 100 of the most complex cards in the game and shuffle them together, then play that deck. I'm certain you won't be having fun. You'll be spending your time reading cards, counting creatures, scribbling notes to yourself.

Complexity doesn't equal fun. At a certain point, playing the game becomes a chore, and that point is different for each person. It's not Wizard's fault that they have to serve everyone, and everyone includes newer players.

I think they overestimate the gap between knowing how to play Magic in general and being able to read a complex card and tell what it does. They seem to think there's some long, winding road between the two and I'm not convinced there is.

Jan 13, 2011 -- 9:09PM, Skibo_the_first wrote:

13's a tad ridiculous when you realize that recommended age for magic is 13+, most players I know are in thier 20's and the rest are older. (Bear in mind, this isn't hard evidence).

Yeah; how exactly would you expect to meet 13 year-old players?

I don't think there's much difference between a 13 year old and a 30 year old when it comes to picking up the game of magic. It's not like years of experience will help you understand the game better. Complexity is a problem for every new player. 

And complexity is a problem for established players as well. Take 100 of the most complex cards in the game and shuffle them together, then play that deck. I'm certain you won't be having fun. You'll be spending your time reading cards, counting creatures, scribbling notes to yourself.

Complexity doesn't equal fun. At a certain point, playing the game becomes a chore, and that point is different for each person. It's not Wizard's fault that they have to serve everyone, and everyone includes newer players.

For Christmas, I was given a book written by Zvi about his old articles.  In one of those articles from 10 or so years ago, he pushed for the infusion of a great deal of complexity to the Pro Tour (similar to what was later seen in the Invitational sometimes).  In his modern commentary, he notes that although some of the complexity he suggested might have improved the game, there was also a strong selfish component.  The complexity in question would have given him a competitive advantage, and that was part of why it was appealing.

I can relate to this desire for more complexity, but when people are complaining that the game is "dumbed down" or the like, we do need to ask ourselves, "Would this make the game better?  Or would it just be harder for people who aren't us, thereby giving us an advantage."  If it's the latter, then the main effect of implementing such a change might be to shrink the playerbase (with a new higher average demand for complexity, so the complexity might as well be raised a bit more, shrinking the playerbase further, etc).  That's not good for Wizards, and it's probably not good for those of us who play the game, either, even if we might enjoy a bit more complexity.  A critical thing that makes Magic fun is being able to find opponents to play against, in person.

I see no reason they can't put out a single smaller-run expert set every year. Every two even. They'll do things like Archenemy or the duel decks, and with Commander they're doing original content. This is actually what I recommended to do for experienced players in my GDS2 essay.

Jan 13, 2011 -- 9:41PM, ROBRAM89 wrote:

I see no reason they can't put out a single smaller-run expert set every year. Every two even. They'll do things like Archenemy or the duel decks, and with Commander they're doing original content. This is actually what I recommended to do for experienced players in my GDS2 essay.

That's actually a very interesting idea - the obvious issues to work out would be that, if the cards were not Standard-legal, then the set may not be as appealing to many of those who would be interested in buying it. Of course, that could be a totally wrong assumption, and it would be interesting to see what would happen.

Fractal raises a very good point about complexity in that we need to have players to play against. One of the great things about Magic is that even a first-time player has the potential to beat any other player. I play both chess and Magic at about the same level - I'm a fairly poor tournament player. Actually, my performance at PTQs is generally better than my performance in chess tournaments. Out of all my friends, I have 2 (outside of chess club) that are willing to play chess with me, and that is primarily because they enjoy playing and learning even when they lose.

However, I can very easily get together 6-12 of my non-FNM friends for Sealed, or just playing casual Magic - my girlfriend owns a single precon deck, yet we play on a regular basis. This is because Magic is much more accessible than chess - it is much easier to reach a level of competency where you can actually enjoy the game. Yet, it still has a lot of strategic depth - at the very high levels of play, Magic easily rivals chess in complexity and depth. Magic's strength is that it can achieve all of these different levels of complexity within the same game, and removing its ability to function on a more simple plane of existence would be a big mistake.

The issue of an "expert set" as far as format legality puzzles me. Letting it into Standard tends to stratify players, but let's face it, people who care about that sort of thing would probably be buying the product.

Keeping it out would be safe, but no "hardcore" players would bother with it, and the overlap between "experienced" and "competitive" is, while nowhere near complete, vast. 

Jan 13, 2011 -- 11:48PM, Miksal wrote:

removing its ability to function on a more simple plane of existence would be a big mistake.

Certainly this is true, but it seems to me you're confusing a number of separate issues here:

1) Speed of learning the game.
2) Accessibility of strategy.
3) The frequency with which a weaker player can beat a stronger one.

Magic has 3) about right in my view and R&D do pretty well at 1). However, it's a myth that complexity in gameplay causes problems for 2).

The important thing about strategy is not necessarily wins, it's that executing a strategy successfully is inherently fun. With a greater diversity of worthwhile strategies, this aspect of the game becomes more accessible to beginners. It's much more fun to come up with your own idea and execute it successfully than to simply copy something you've seen or been taught.

I play a lot of Limited and regularly run Sealed games for beginners. One of the things I always notice is that they're fascinated by unusual abilities on cards and try to make use of them as much as possible. More often than not, they're frustrated in this by the fact that sets have too little support for this sort of thing and games end up just being about efficient creatures and removal spells, same as always. The interesting mechanics get deferred to the debrief session. "Shame you killed because my deck can do !".

Imagine a hypothetical set where there's something interesting about at least 3/4 of the Commons. WotC talk about complex board states and things being "overwhelming" and so on, but the beginners I know would love this, so there's something more complex going on than beginners vs experts (or casual vs hardcore).

Jan 13, 2011 -- 5:08PM, Zadok001 wrote:

Jan 13, 2011 -- 11:03AM, Mischa wrote:

Jan 13, 2011 -- 4:38AM, TobyornotToby wrote:

Jan 12, 2011 -- 8:34PM, Zadok001 wrote:

Magic survives by virtue of groups of players willing to give up Friday nights to play it for five hours. 

Magic does not survive the day people stop wanting to play it in every free moment.

The problem is that Wizards believes this is actually the niche group.

Ahhh... but are they really wrong?

I remember reading an article once about the position of the "hardcore gamer" within the market.  I believe it was largely oriented towards console gaming, but the ideas it presented were applicable to any activity that has a hardcore element that devotes itself wholeheartedly to it, and a casual element that is more transient.

And if at any point I referred to the hardcore PTQ grinders that make up a relatively tiny percentage of the game's fanbase, you would have a point.  But the players I'm referring to are FNM players, who, yes, you must hold the attention of for five hours per week, in general.  Uno-level complexity cannot do that, and will not do that over the long term.  (And replacing all the Red cards with Purple cards every three months won't do the trick.)  And the FNM fanbase of Magic is VASTLY larger than the actual hardcore.

FNM players actually often require *more* complexity in the game than PTQ players, both because they cannot be driven by higher goals and accomplishments and because they are more restricted in terms of the formats they focus on.

This isn't hardcore vs. casual.  This is "Plays the game consistantly" vs. "Plays once every three months."

Seriously, when's the last time you played Uno?  And how long has it been between games for you?

Think that'll work with Magic?  Anyone?

You'd be surprised how tiny the FNM players' circle is within the magic audience.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 5:36PM, temparus2000 wrote:

I'm kinda dissappointed as to how the judges are...well...judging.  They ask the contestants to shoot for the moon.  However, they applaud a mechanic that adds +1/+1 counters for attacking or playing creatures, but then roast a contestant because he tried to do a 6th color without superb implementation.

I'm not saying that there were no faults with @, but there should at least be some judging scale where taking a big risk with a great, but untried, idea is allowed some lieniency for less-than-stellar execution.   Otherwise, the safest route to take will always be a mechanic that says "here's a bonus for doing something that has already been proven to work countless times (like attacking or playing creatures)".  

To me, this punishes the more creative contestants who want to try new things and rewards those who want to win by staying low enough under the radar. 

I was surprised by the results this round, I thought Devon's was the hands-down worst submission.  I thought Jon was lacking spectacular execution, but I hoped the judges would give him enough credit for trying something so radical and unproven, especially this late in the contest.  Having the guts to do it should count for something, in my book. 

Jon's been lacking execution for the entire contest. He'd gotten this far on the 'He has cool ideas!' ride. His world is the only one that changes with each iteration. (Except during the Cycles, when it was handled by the more competent Jon, who as a reward for the superb job, got cut.)

They're applauding the bonus for attacking or playing creatures, because it's a simple mechanic at the appropriate rarity. As stated by others, trying to put counters on all sorts of cards in exile, trying to put tokens of all sorts into the battlefield, those are things that may be cool, but are DEFINITELY not Common. 

Jan 15, 2011 -- 1:03AM, CrushU wrote:

those are things that may be cool, but are DEFINITELY not Common. 

This is certain the sort of thing WotC might say, but I don't see why not. Notions like this can be helpful warning lights for mechanics that might cause problems, but the next step is not to reject them, it's to test them.

Have you actually played with the original version of Living Reflection? Most likely not. In reality, it isn't even slightly confusing and nor is it unbalanced. It could be printed at Common and would be absolutely fine... except, apparently, for the fact it would cause the heads of several people at WotC to explode for violating various design heuristics.

Design theory is a tool. Don't be a slave to it.

Jan 14, 2011 -- 12:47AM, bateleur_ wrote:

Imagine a  hypothetical set where there's something interesting about at least 3/4  of the Commons. WotC talk about complex board states and things being  "overwhelming" and so on, but the beginners I know would love  this, so there's something more complex going on than beginners vs  experts (or casual vs hardcore).

I would certainly like to see some Limited environments which aren't  dominated by creatures on the battlefield duking it out.  Not all the  time, but just every once in a while, for variety.  What if there was a  set where the default Limited strategy was to mill your opponent, and  beatdown was more of a fringe strategy?  It wouldn't have to involve  more complex board states, it would just be different.

Jan 15, 2011 -- 1:03AM, CrushU wrote:

Jon's been lacking execution for the entire contest. He'd gotten this far on the 'He has cool ideas!' ride. His world is the only one that changes with each iteration. (Except during the Cycles, when it was handled by the more competent Jon, who as a reward for the superb job, got cut.)

Actually, I handled it, and I was rewarded by not being cut.

Jon and I both struggled, while working on Penumbria, with the inherant problem of how to represent two opposite factions in a game which is fundamentally designed to have an odd number of factions (the five colors).  I'm a pretty conservative designer, so I muddled along as well as I could, given the inherant tension of wanting to cut the number 5 in half and always ending up with a fraction.  My uncommon cycle, you'll recall, had an "odd man out" as a result.  Jon is much more mechanically inspired than I am, and took the radical step of trying to make an end run around the color wheel.  While this went a long way towards solving the structural problems that Penumbria was dealing with, he wasn't able to properly evoke the central idea of Penumbria (a battle between light and darkness). 

-Ethan Fleischer

Oops. I blame it on typing that at like 3am.

I do agree that the big problem was trying to represent light vs dark with 5 colors. Personally I would've tried something like making Black+Blue/Red one faction, and White+Green/Blue the other. Blue straddles the line between light and dark, just as with the normal color wheel. Red doesn't typically evoke thoughts of darkness, but can do it. Leave it 'simple' in this first set, and then in later sets in the block you could explore the 'light' side of black and the 'dark' side of white.

I am most certainly not a designer, so this is from the peanut gallery.

Jan 15, 2011 -- 3:02AM, Pariah_Press wrote:

I would certainly like to see some Limited environments which aren't  dominated by creatures on the battlefield duking it out.  Not all the  time, but just every once in a while, for variety.  What if there was a  set where the default Limited strategy was to mill your opponent, and  beatdown was more of a fringe strategy?  It wouldn't have to involve  more complex board states, it would just be different.

You know what's weird? M11, of all things, has the most mill of any set I've seen in a long, long time. Every time I use the Draft Simulator it shocks me a little bit. I guess they really DO want Jace as their mascot.

Colored vs colorless is a good idea. I think it's a very literal translation of "light and dark".

The problem is execution. Multicolor and colorless actually work great together, you just can't make playing colorless act like another color.

I think his message also got muddled because he didn't step back and realize that his old factions no longer worked.

He originally had the color pie split up between light colors and dark ones. When he switched to colored vs colorless, he should have scrapped the color distinction alltogether. (Why is black "dark" when dark represents colorlessness?)

Colorless also needed more definition.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jon has alot of good ideas, but lacks the follow through needed to execute them properly. I would not be surprised if he winds up on the next GDS.

I had written a lot of reasons about why Jon was doomed to fail, but then I realized that the root problem is that most of the top GDS2 contestants weren't good designers to begin with.

Jan 16, 2011 -- 6:17AM, DrJones wrote:

I had written a lot of reasons about why Jon was doomed to fail, but then I realized that the root problem is that most of the top GDS2 contestants weren't good designers to begin with.

Well alot of the contestants were blindsided by Maro into doing things they weren't intending to do.

Shawn's the most striking, starting with a token set without any blight, and ending with a blight set. But everyone had to make adjustments to thier set as things went on. (I think the only person who didn't have a major overhaul is Ethan, though even his set changed alot)

I think alot of designers ended up designing sets they didn't want to desgin.

Jan 16, 2011 -- 12:09PM, Skibo_the_first wrote:

Jan 16, 2011 -- 6:17AM, DrJones wrote:

I had written a lot of reasons about why Jon was doomed to fail, but then I realized that the root problem is that most of the top GDS2 contestants weren't good designers to begin with.

Well alot of the contestants were blindsided by Maro into doing things they weren't intending to do.

Shawn's the most striking, starting with a token set without any blight, and ending with a blight set. But everyone had to make adjustments to thier set as things went on. (I think the only person who didn't have a major overhaul is Ethan, though even his set changed alot)

I think alot of designers ended up designing sets they didn't want to desgin.

But that's not going to be their job, designing stuff they want to design.

It's interesting with vision being tested here. Do the designers know what of their original ideas to keep, what to alter? When to overhaul stuff, and when to stay put believing you can make it work.

With Epolith for example, I got the idea that MaRo in the beginning wasn't interested in the primal part of Epolith at all, more with the 'evolution structure of three sets', with evolution in a nonliteral way. But as the contest progressed, Epolith firmly moved into Dino Set space, and MaRo's evolutionary comments slowly disappeared.

At least that's the feeling I get.

I am impressed that Shawn Mainn managed to make a set that was criticized simultaneously as being too "biodome" and being too generic.

I keep telling myself that the GDS2 is just a remote job interview copied and pasted onto dailymtg.com, but still I find it amusing how much worry there is over complexity in this series of dense, massive, unapproachable articles comprising the GDS2.  It took three days' worth of my internet reading time to get throug this week's edition.  I wonder how many dedicated readers have slogged through this thing -- maybe 200?

It has been surprising to me that Epolith has stayed in front all contest because that is the one world that hasn't made any sense to me.  All of the other worlds, however muddled in their execution, could be easily summed up conceptually (prison world, world eaten by away by magic ooze, wild west world, etc.), but I still can't really picture "evolution world." Many designs illustrating evolution has been presented, but practically speaking could a story really be based on this world?  Which parts of time are actually sped up (if everything were sped up, then no one would notice that time was passing differently until they left the plane)?  Would it have to last three days before the characters died of old age?  

I don't mean to attack Epolith as a set.  It has had many good designs that do seem to work and make sense together.  My confusion with its flavor is the result of the difference between Magic logic and real world logic (though creative and design do need to work to narrow this gap in order to make sets with resonant flavor).

 Just to address some of the previous topics in the thread quickly --

* Personally, I really liked snow mana.  The Ripple and Kindle mechanics were what ruined Coldsnap Limited for me.  Perhaps the snow mechanic has a bad reputation with players because of their negative feelings about Coldsnap, but I separate the snow from Coldsnap as a whole.

* I feel like the metric for how worthy a rules change is should be is how easily understood the change is.  If it takes ten pages to say that whenever you would unmorph a sorcery or instant you put it in the graveyard instead I'm okay with that since most players would figure it out pretty quickly.

* I still don't understand why Tribal exists.  It's a fix of a problem that really just points out the problem without really fixing it.  Everything Tribal does could have been done by changing the rules regarding creature types and subtypes (so that noncreatures could have creature subtypes but creatures could not have noncreature subtypes).

Jan 17, 2011 -- 4:21PM, schrecklich wrote:

* I feel like the metric for how worthy a rules change is should be is how easily understood the change is.  If it takes ten pages to say that whenever you would unmorph a sorcery or instant you put it in the graveyard instead I'm okay with that since most players would figure it out pretty quickly.

Well as a judge put it "Designers don't tell others how to do thier jobs, and other people don't tell us how to do ours." Yes you can say "oh we can change the rules. But that's not a designer's job.

It also doesn't help that the proposed card could be made to work in the existing rules simply by creating a 2/2 colorless token.

In the end, rules can kill any card they really want to. And they would kill this card. Rewiring the rulebook for a single card isn't something they do normally, and it would take a very impressive card like a mindslaver or time stop to convince them. This card isn't Mindslaver or Time stop. They'd just change it to make a token.

* I still don't understand why Tribal exists.  It's a fix of a problem that really just points out the problem without really fixing it.  Everything Tribal does could have been done by changing the rules regarding creature types and subtypes (so that noncreatures could have creature subtypes but creatures could not have noncreature subtypes).

Okay, go forth to the Rules Issues forum and suggest the change.

Jan 17, 2011 -- 4:57PM, Skibo_the_first wrote:

It also doesn't help that the proposed card could be made to work in the existing rules simply by creating a 2/2 colorless token.

How could you do this while still retaining the sense of mystery that the card/token actually could be unmorphed?

Jan 17, 2011 -- 4:57PM, Skibo_the_first wrote:

Okay, go forth to the Rules Issues forum and suggest the change.

I didn't realize that Matt Tabak took suggestions from the public.  Is this the case?

Jan 17, 2011 -- 5:29PM, schrecklich wrote:

Jan 17, 2011 -- 4:57PM, Skibo_the_first wrote:

It also doesn't help that the proposed card could be made to work in the existing rules simply by creating a 2/2 colorless token.

How could you do this while still retaining the sense of mystery that the card/token actually could be unmorphed?

You can't. But then i don't know how often you'd actually put a morph creature face down with the card either. More likely you get rid of an extra land you have.

Jan 17, 2011 -- 4:57PM, Skibo_the_first wrote:

Okay, go forth to the Rules Issues forum and suggest the change.

I didn't realize that Matt Tabak took suggestions from the public.  Is this the case?

Yeah, i've gotten a few things changed myself (mostly card text). Both He and Del do read and respond to threads posted there. If you have a solid idea, they'll respond.

Alot of rules changes were first proposed in the rules theory forum... it's unknown whether that sparked the idea, or whether the rules team came to the same conclusion on thier own, but it can't hurt to post your ideas.

I had expected that the submissions would be posted today, with the results next Wednesday...  Is there a different schedule for this round?

Jan 26, 2011 -- 2:26PM, orcishartillery wrote:

I had expected that the submissions would be posted today, with the results next Wednesday...  Is there a different schedule for this round?

Apparently the judging will be in two weeks, so I guess it makes sense that they won't put the submissions up until next week.  Perhaps they don't want to compete with MBS previews.

Jan 12, 2011 -- 9:55PM, ROBRAM89 wrote:

Is the big reality show twist at the end going to be that the winner gets Ken Nagle's job?

I'm really hoping the reality show twist is that no one wins. The whole gds2 has been nothing but a huge disappointment from start to finish. Every single one of the finalists was bad at first glance, and they all failed to show significant improvement as the competition wore on. My friends and I have been following the whole thing in stunned disbelief. I'm seriously considering quitting Magic if any of them get hired. What makes it even worse is Maro repeating every round something like, "What we are asking the finalists to do is very hard" as well as "We are testing for vision, not design ability."

Yeah, maybe the challenges are hard, but you know what, there are people in this world that are good at hard things, and when they aren't, they learn how to become so. The gds2 finalists are all so bad that Maro's platitudes just ring false. None of the finalists have any design ability or vision, whatever Maro thinks that is. He just sounds like a politician trying to justify the crazy things the government does when anyone with a brain can see they are straight up pandering to whoever pays them the most money, and saying whatever they need to say to keep too many people from noticing or caring.

Obviously Maro isn't being paid off or anything like that, but there's no getting around the fact that the finalists are bad, Maro did a poor job picking them, and he doesn't want anyone to notice. I don't want to hate on Maro, I think he's done a lot of good for Magic, but gds2 just isn't one of his good moments. I'm not that surprised since he mostly just picked people that happened to make world ideas trying to do something he'd failed at in the past, or people that happened to make use of mechanics that were currently in development, instead of picking people that actually appeared to be intelligent, creative, and talented.

I can just imagine him going through the piles of submissions, "Oh hey, another set with light vs. dark or good vs. evil! FINALIST!" and "Oh hey, these peeps all gave Living Weapon to auras. That's just like MBS, they must be good! FINALIST!" I guess any of the finalists' ideas could have been made decent, even if they didn't start from great spots. But instead of improving, with each new challenge all the finalists just seemed like they were intent on crafting an experience more bland and generic than the last. (There are a few exceptions, some of them have had one decent submission only to fail hard on the next ones.) I've also read a bunch of posts on the forums and the wiki complaining that a lot of the cards and sets feel even more boring and bland than a core set, and I can only agree. I really hope that's not the kind of vision Maro is looking for.

The gds2 feels like the death of Magic.

I find it encouraging, but mostly because I feel like I could have easily won if I had made it in. I'm at least as good as the supposed top eight in the field, apparently.

Jan 17, 2011 -- 4:21PM, schrecklich wrote:

I am impressed that Shawn Mainn managed to make a set that was criticized simultaneously as being too "biodome" and being too generic.

Those two concepts aren't as mutually exclusive as you think. For example, pretend there is a new set where everything is a dog. Then you could have a card like "destroy target dog" which would be good in that set, but no other set. So it's SUPER biodome. But it's also SUPER generic because it's completely bland and doesn't bring anything new to the gameplay. It's just a Doom Blade, or whatever. So when people say Shawn Main's set is biodome it's because all the cards are just too focused on all of its own stuff, and when they say his set is generic it's because the way his cards accomplish everything is just generic stuff we've all seen before.

Jan 27, 2011 -- 6:39AM, ROBRAM89 wrote:

I find it encouraging, but mostly because I feel like I could have easily won if I had made it in. I'm at least as good as the supposed top eight in the field, apparently.

I dunno why that's encouraging . It means someone who won't do a good job is getting hired, and people who would do better have no way of getting a shot.

Those who are better should've made a better intro week submission. Or read more Making Magic. Or move more to the US.

Okay, I have to ask... are the submissions REALLY that bad? I've seen more or less nothing but exceptional work from all the designers, though some more than others (Utopia for instance is a little blah even not counting the hybrid invaders). Sure, not all of them are well rounded, but all of them have their unique niche of awesomness. Epolith, for instance, is a little meh mechanically but has a lot of solid top down designs and is grounded in a strong flavor concept. Wodotha might be a tiny bit parasatic, but less so than a lot of successful blocks and has a lot of space in it's design to explore.

I mean, I understand thinking you can do better, but personally I like what they've all brought to the table so far.

I've said before that I would play every set I've seen in the challenge, they're not terrible. They're just not great. A block takes up an entire year, you can't let a mediocre one through. Kamigawa and Masques were huge blows to the game on certain levels.

I was reading The Business Rusch today. I saw a statement about writing novels that reminded me so much of the Great Designer Search 2 that I want to share it here. Kristine Kathryn Rusch said,

Very few writers—I don’t care who they are—have the skills to both write a story and to revise it properly.  Those are two different skills.  Usually writers ruin their stories by revision—and I say that as a writer, a woman who has taught writing, and as an award-winning former editor.  I can tell stories—and indeed I did at Chattacon last weekend—about writers who nearly lost their first story sale to me when I edited at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction by their inability to take instruction, and revise only the small thing I asked them to revise.

I have seen examples where the judges have said that a proposed mechanic was nice but the mechanic needed revision, and instead of making the revision the participant scrapped the idea and started over again from scratch. I shook my head at the participant throwing away good advice, and chalked it up to inexperience or panic.

However, most of my design experience, both in my job and in playtesting games for friends, is with revision. Analyzing a good but flawed idea, finding its glittering heart, and tweaking it until it fits our current needs is a delight to me. Trying to design without a starting idea is a pain. I am one of those people who has the revision skill, so I forgot that revision is hard.

But the GDS2 started with applicants who submitted a good design, and has been asking them to expand and improve the design. The judges appear to expect continual revision, asking for better taglines, asking for designes of booster packs and intro decks, and asking the participants to hone their worlds down to lean and simple sets based on their best ideas. They want both design and revision.

And that combination is rare.

Jan 27, 2011 -- 1:09PM, AnubisDread wrote:

Okay, I have to ask... are the submissions REALLY that bad? I've seen more or less nothing but exceptional work from all the designers, though some more than others (Utopia for instance is a little blah even not counting the hybrid invaders). Sure, not all of them are well rounded, but all of them have their unique niche of awesomness. Epolith, for instance, is a little meh mechanically but has a lot of solid top down designs and is grounded in a strong flavor concept. Wodotha might be a tiny bit parasatic, but less so than a lot of successful blocks and has a lot of space in it's design to explore.

I mean, I understand thinking you can do better, but personally I like what they've all brought to the table so far.

Imagine Wizards is holding a contest to hire a pianist, and the finalists consist of eight fairly amateurish renditions of Für Elise. There is little to no interplay between hands, the melody lacks distinct voicing, and even within each submission dynamics and tempo are inconsistent at best. Where Beethoven asks for light accents, or subtle changes in volume or pace, the finalists resort to exaggerated caricatures, not intentionally, but because they lack the skill to express music at such a fine resolution.

Still, 95% of people would be impressed, because Für Elise is a phenomenal piece, and the vast majority of people lack the knowledge or experience to differentiate good playing from bad. You are one of those people, and there is absolutely no shame in it. You've never trained to be a pianist, and you've never had any particular interest in it, either, you just know you like listening to the music. Your true passion, your expertise, lies in a completely different field, but that doesn't (and shouldn't) stop you from enjoying piano music.

Nevertheless, there are people that can tell the difference. Shouldn't that matter? Shouldn't a prestigious company like Wizards, that already has some of the best pianists in the world, be able to hire better talent than this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuIemP_LKYI? (Perhaps a better question, don't they owe it to their customers to do so?)

Jan 28, 2011 -- 6:37PM, TerdragonMosaic wrote:

But the GDS2 started with applicants who submitted a good design, and has been asking them to expand and improve the design. The judges appear to expect continual revision, asking for better taglines, asking for designes of booster packs and intro decks, and asking the participants to hone their worlds down to lean and simple sets based on their best ideas. They want both design and revision.

And that combination is rare.

I mean no disrespect to your opinions or the work of the finalists, but it is certainly generous to claim they started with good designs. The truth is they all started with decidedly sub-par designs in settings Mark particularly wanted to explore. Perhaps there is something to be said for that approach (though GDS2 can be taken as a data point that it's demonstrably bad, not to mention a tad narcissistic), but in this instance he unfortunately got saddled with an unruly bunch of candidates that show little in the way of design chops or growth. And as much as Mark claims he's not looking for a good designer, he really is. Maybe he's not looking for a good individual card designer, but he certainly wants and needs someone who can design entire worlds and exciting new playing experiences.

I don't know how much you've playtested any of the finalists' cards (if at all), but I've played with them all and find myself largely in agreement with pondjamespond's Gleemax-like sentiment that with each passing week the finalists appear "intent on crafting an experience more bland and generic than the last." It's not that playing with their cards is mostly bad or boring, because it's not. After all, you can take 200 random cards, make two decks out of them, and have a lot of fun. Magic is that good of a game. The problem is the finalists have failed to come up with anything particularly interesting, innovative, or new. Isn't that what we look for in expert level expansions? Isn't that what has kept Magic going strong all these years? The promise and allure of experiencing a fun, new game within the confines of one we already know and love? I don't see it in the GDS2.

It's hard to judge because there's little to compare it with. Real sets are made by multiple people over a long period of time. Fans sets most likely too (the time part).

If there was one contestant significantly better than the rest, it's easier to see that the others are relatively weak.

Right now there's little to put next to the submissions, except for people claiming they could/would/might have done better.

I do agree that MaRo's selection of interesting ideas might not have been the best way.

Skilled artists have a different vision than unskilled artists. For example, a skilled artist will likely be able to take a look at a picture and instantly visualize the inner skeleton of a composition/figure, even if that skeleton is not explicitly depicted and has to be imagined. This skill is also shared by skilled art critics, even if they lack the ability to make their own works of art. 

Now, when a skilled artist takes a look at a picture and visualizes broken bones and joints, or broken perspective, the overall result looks far worse to him or her than for a person that has no visualized the skeleton and only looks at the single elements, colors and lines of the work. 

What the above spectators suggest is that the GDS2 finalists have been drawing beautiful faces on broken necks, resulting in really disturbing pictures to visualize, and knowing that these kind of pictures are going to be mass produced and distributed in the not so distant future is also very frustating and saddening, moreso if they seem to have been caused by a flawed filtering method and not due to lack of talent among all applicants.

Jan 30, 2011 -- 7:35AM, GleamAxe wrote:

Imagine Wizards is holding a contest to hire a pianist, and the finalists consist of eight fairly amateurish renditions of Für Elise. There is little to no interplay between hands, the melody lacks distinct voicing, and even within each submission dynamics and tempo are inconsistent at best. Where Beethoven asks for light accents, or subtle changes in volume or pace, the finalists resort to exaggerated caricatures, not intentionally, but because they lack the skill to express music at such a fine resolution.

Still, 95% of people would be impressed, because Für Elise is a phenomenal piece, and the vast majority of people lack the knowledge or experience to differentiate good playing from bad. You are one of those people, and there is absolutely no shame in it. You've never trained to be a pianist, and you've never had any particular interest in it, either, you just know you like listening to the music. Your true passion, your expertise, lies in a completely different field, but that doesn't (and shouldn't) stop you from enjoying piano music.

Nevertheless, there are people that can tell the difference. Shouldn't that matter? Shouldn't a prestigious company like Wizards, that already has some of the best pianists in the world, be able to hire better talent than this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuIemP_LKYI? (Perhaps a better question, don't they owe it to their customers to do so?)

I do actually frequent the YmtC forums rather frequently with consistently above average grades in contests and the like, so I'd say I at least have SOME small experience knowing what's jank and what isn't. It just seems that we have very different opinions of what's bad and what's good. Which is natural really: people like different things. It seems that most of the contestants have been doing things that appeal to the people in my audience more than they have in yours. As such, you see the designers as being bad, while I see them as being good.

For instance, a lot of people HATE linear designs. They feel that it's a waste of space, that it serves little purpose, and that it shackles them to building a deck the way WotC imagined. I, and a lot of people though, LOVE linear designs. It gives you something to build around in draft, it's a challenge making a good deck out of only the pieces given to you, and it's just plain fun seeing your deck not only have synergy, but actually being designed to have that sort of synergy. When you see an infect creature drop, or drop one yourself, you KNOW what sort of game it's going to be... and yet, there's still so much flexibility even with that one linear mechanic.

This is probably why I like Wodotha better than the other contestants sets. Blight is fun, simple. and intuitive linear mechanic, and is only partially parasitic as blight does something on its own even if it's best in large numbers. Inversely, I also like sets with a balanced amount of linear and modular mechanics, which is why I love that he has Assault in there as well. Even if Assault is partially linear, it's primarily modular. Besides which, he has a very strong flavor for the set, and understands the thing I like most about design... simplicity. Or elegance perhaps. If innovation requires ten lines of text, it shouldn't be on a card. Blight however is evocative, simple, and innovative. Come on, it is LITERALLY marking a creature for death, how is that NOT cool?

Utopia, on the other hand, I really hate. The flavor is awful, the hybrid invaders are just... why? Why do that? What on earth makes hybrid, the very essence of unity useful for making the invaders of chaos stick out? And every keyword in the set seems rather... awful. Even gold counters, which are relatively innovative, seem poorly planned out and just not fun. It's mana, or it's life, woo. That said, there are a few parts of Utopia I just get... the flip card inclusion on Champions Shrine was awesome, if only because you could see what was happening. Break shrine, grab sword, and it's pretty functional too in that it's a mana stone in the early game and a weapon in the late. That sort of design seemed the exception more than the rule though.

Epolith... okay, I said it has strong flavor, but unless you really like dinosaurs it's a bit of a flunk. However, though the execution is bad, the concept is something I really like. It's more or less a power matters set, which is something that both has a lot of possibilities and hasn't really been explored yet. Plus like I said, it has some awesome top down designs. Some get a little too far afield, like the T-Rex, but others like the blow dart are cute and Squash... yeah okay, how could a card called Squash NOT be awesome?

Malgareth is awesome on so many levels. It's evocative flavor wise, mechanics wise, makes great use of -1/-1 counters in a way that Shadowmoor didn't even touch, and you genuinelly want to see how the story all turns out. A prison under the surface, the prisoners rioting against guards who've had no touch from the surface in ages, with natives to boot... it seems an excellent basis for a block novel, which I admit is something even Wodotha lacks. It's one weakness is that all of it's keyworded mechanics are rather bad with the possible except of Rage, but it's non-keyworded little interactions are awesome enough to make up for it.

So basically, the issue isn't that each contestant is bad, it's just that they don't appeal to you. Each contestant, even the ones I disagree with, I have to admit are rather good. Well, I'm tempted to agree with you with Utopia, but like I said, different opinions don't equal bad design.

It's not a case of each contestant is trying to play the piano and failing. After all, design isn't ONE instrument, it's many, many different ones. Wodotha is playing the 'awesome keywords and linear designs' clarinet, Utopia is playing the 'high mechanical concepts but not the skill to flesh them out' violin, Epolith is playing the 'top down design' drum, and Malgareth is playing the 'awesome interactions and modular designs but poor keywords' saxaphone. The problem is, in a real set, it's not a one instrument song. In a real set, even minus time issues, all these intruments would be playing together! I'd really like to see what would have happened if instead of each player designing their own set, they'd ended up contributing to one set together. It'd be really hard to grade, but with their skill sets, it would have likely been as good as a set ready to print.

Jan 28, 2011 -- 6:37PM, TerdragonMosaic wrote:

I was reading The Business Rusch today. I saw a statement about writing novels that reminded me so much of the Great Designer Search 2 that I want to share it here. Kristine Kathryn Rusch said,

Very few writers—I don’t care who they are—have the skills to both write a story and to revise it properly.  Those are two different skills.  Usually writers ruin their stories by revision—and I say that as a writer, a woman who has taught writing, and as an award-winning former editor.  I can tell stories—and indeed I did at Chattacon last weekend—about writers who nearly lost their first story sale to me when I edited at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction by their inability to take instruction, and revise only the small thing I asked them to revise.

I have seen examples where the judges have said that a proposed mechanic was nice but the mechanic needed revision, and instead of making the revision the participant scrapped the idea and started over again from scratch. I shook my head at the participant throwing away good advice, and chalked it up to inexperience or panic.

However, most of my design experience, both in my job and in playtesting games for friends, is with revision. Analyzing a good but flawed idea, finding its glittering heart, and tweaking it until it fits our current needs is a delight to me. Trying to design without a starting idea is a pain. I am one of those people who has the revision skill, so I forgot that revision is hard.

But the GDS2 started with applicants who submitted a good design, and has been asking them to expand and improve the design. The judges appear to expect continual revision, asking for better taglines, asking for designes of booster packs and intro decks, and asking the participants to hone their worlds down to lean and simple sets based on their best ideas. They want both design and revision.

And that combination is rare.

The main problem is the flow of information from the judges to the contestants. A good example is the Blight mechanic. In Challenge 1, MaRo mentioned that the Blight mechanic needed revision, but he did not really provide any specific details on the way it needed to be improved.  The only thing he said is "No Blight as a drawback." He also said that in other colors Shawn should stay "where creature destruction/damage is."  That's it. Both Ken and MaRo said that the Blight mechanic wasn't perfect, but they did not make clear how to improve it.

In reality, if they worked in R&D they'd be able to walk over to MaRo and say, "Hey, what do you think needs to be improved on the Blight mechanic?" and they'd get everything they needed after a ten minute conversation.

Everyone in this thread saying "All the GDS2 contestants suck" needs to back up their arguments with something more than rambling. Give specific examples and stop talking in generalizations. Alternatively, show me your own personal set and I'll critique it for you.

By the way, if you want to participate in the GDS2 Collaborators' Choice Awards, go here. You can vote for some of the awards already, and you don't need to know how to use the wiki in order to vote (I used another site which creates Javascript polls). If you want to, you can go to the talk page to make nominations or suggest other categories. If you don't want to use the wiki, you can fill out this survey in order to make nominations.

Jan 30, 2011 -- 1:37PM, AnubisDread wrote:

Utopia, on the other hand, I really hate. The flavor is awful, the hybrid invaders are just... why? Why do that? What on earth makes hybrid, the very essence of unity useful for making the invaders of chaos stick out? And every keyword in the set seems rather... awful. Even gold counters, which are relatively innovative, seem poorly planned out and just not fun. It's mana, or it's life, woo. That said, there are a few parts of Utopia I just get... the flip card inclusion on Champions Shrine was awesome, if only because you could see what was happening. Break shrine, grab sword, and it's pretty functional too in that it's a mana stone in the early game and a weapon in the late. That sort of design seemed the exception more than the rule though.

I was rather keen on Utopia, because I love color wars and I was intrigued by the new interpretations of the colors.  The hybrid invaders initially threw me for a loop, but I believe they could be justified philosophically: salad bowl (self-segregation of the Utopians) vs. melting pot (hybrid invaders).  However, I don't quite grasp what Utopia is supposed to be, before the invaders arrive, but that may be due to my preconceptions.

I'm aware this thread is 7 months old but I read through this stuff late. Ethan's epic t-rex design inpired me to also try a t-rex design. Check it out:
birdsofparadise-mtg.blogspot.com/2011/08...
I have a few other designs there too.