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Jun 6, 2011 -- 12:45AM, ProfN wrote:

This isn't helped by the fact that any angel name, even a made-up one like this, which uses the "-iel" suffix, is by definition male.  Feel free to check your bible if you care; there's no mention of god ever making any lady angels.  And if you're trying to avoid stepping on real-world religion's toes by not using "Sariel", a la Day of Judgment vs. Wrath of God , well, you still didn't get it right - because the "-iel" suffix means "of/pertaining to 'him'", him being god, in Hebrew (because Jews are commanded not to speak the name of god, so euphemisms must be employed).  So, if you were really serious on avoiding real world references, you'd not use "-iel" for angel names just to make them seem more angelly.

After all - Wrath of God was certainly more, well, Wrathy, than DoJ.  Can we have some consistency here, as long as you're taking away the greatest card name of all time?  Don't become hypocrites for the sake of some soon-to-be-two-dollar quasi-unplayable angel legend in a specialty product.  :P

Grow up. Um, I mean, don't worry, the connection between the -el or -iel suffix and divine beings has long since entered the secular vocabulary in day-to-day use. With the possible exception of Michael, I'm pretty sure the best-known fictional, angel-like character with a name like that is Kal-El. (And that character was created by Jewish writers itself, of course.) Now that you mention it, I'm kind of surprised this hasn't come up before, since almost all Angels in Magic: the Gathering seem to be female.

Jun 5, 2011 -- 10:32PM, willpell wrote:

Random.  WHY did it have to be random?  It is a huge effort to randomize creature cards in your graveyard, even if you don't have a Krovikan Horror in there to make reordering them illegal, and a much more significant one if you do.  The card should have had a player choosing - maybe you (too strong, so make her smaller), maybe the targetp layer (too weak, so make her bigger), or "choose an opponent" (best of both worlds, one opponent gets to choose what you get from another, hilarity ensues - in a duel would revert to the target choosing for lack of any other options).

I hope developers keep this kind of thing in mind just in case, but I doubt this card would cause this problem 99 times out of a hundred. How often does anyone play with Krovikan Horror these days? Besides that, physically shuffling cards is obviously not the only way to randomize. If I ever see this card played, I assume a dice will be used. If there six or less creatures in the graveyard, roll a d6, and if there are seven or more creatures in the graveyard, roll a d10 or d20, and reroll if you get something higher than the number of creatures (or take the modulo, depending on how anal the people I'm playing with are about randomizing or how important the result is to the game). If there more than 20 creatures in the graveyard, then things might get complicated, but that probably means either that the target is losing badly and won't care about it getting even worse, or that they've got some kind of recursion strategy going on and could respond to the angel's ability somehow anyway.

Jun 6, 2011 -- 1:14AM, willpell wrote:

So... is she the one who had to fire someone over the Walking Atlas goof? Or is she the replacement? :P

I doubt anyone got fired over a goof that minor. Anyone can figure out Walking Atlas is an artifact; if it had been printed with the wrong card  frame or with wrong rules text, THAT might have justified disciplinary  action, but a goof like this is not much worse than forgetting to type  the ^ over El-Hajjaj's name (they did something similar on some other  card but I forget which one it was so I'm going with the one I can  remember).  Heck, even "rathi Berserker" was a worse goof than this.

Uh, no. I thought Walking Atlas wasn't an artifact. I always trust text over card frame, and text said it wasn't an artifact, so I played it as if it wasn't.

Jun 5, 2011 -- 9:24PM, Sidar_Jabari_02 wrote:

This is seriously one of the most interesting articles on creating a Magic set I've ever read. Really. This touches on things that Mark's and the R&D columns never talk about. 

(Now the inevitable criticism)
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Once the printer has the files, they print a test sheet of the card file and send it to Wizards of the Coast for proofing and approval. A team of proofers gets to work quickly making sure that the card files are correct and the card colors look good. These folks are amazing—they look over every card to make sure that it looks exactly how we want it to. 

Exactly how you want it to look except for the occasional thing like Walking Atlas not being an artifact. (I'm just kidding. I know accidents happen.  

I've never seen pictures and a description of the printing process before. I think I know why. I don't think they want us to know anything about the collation process of "randomizing" the packs (which we all know isn't really random). With Commander, there is no randomizing, just printing of the cards and packing them. 

Seeing the behind the scenes stuff like translations, proofreading, and QA/AI on the factory floor is really interesting. Thanks for the article.  

Agreed, excellent article, but that does make a lot of sense that they're showing it for a non-randomized product. 

I've wanted to see this kind of look at the nuts and bolts of the game for a long time, and I imagine this is as detailed as we're ever going to get.

Jun 6, 2011 -- 6:41AM, omniszron wrote:

Wow, looks like I'm the only one here that actually loves the art. Yes, it's cheesy, yes, it's busy, but it's absolutely bad-ass in every imaginable fashion. The raven feathers of the wings, the red blindfold, the spiked armour, the skulls dangling on chains and the axe... Fantastic design.

I do agree with the others that it really doesn't work on the card scale, but it works well enough at larger sizes that I immediately made it my desktop theme on my big widescreen monitor at work.  

Jun 6, 2011 -- 6:41AM, omniszron wrote:

As for the article - I really appreciate the inside look at the physical process of cardmaking. It's just great to know how the whole thing looks in reality and how much work is done by how many people to bring us the cards. I'll be forever linking to this article to all the ignorants that say that printing a Magic card costs 2 cents, so WotC is basically printing money.

 
I imagine the physical cost is dirt cheap, but that's only a fraction of the whole cost. Most people pulling that argument out are going on about how the "rarities" are artificially created. Of course we see all those people along the process chain that also have to be paid, so that's why 30c worth of cards has a $4 MSRP. 


And Walking Atlas wasn't the card that came to my mind when I saw the proofreader, but further back to when they changed the card frame and all the artifacts came out looking white. I can see missing something small on a type line, but a big color shift like that? 
 

Jun 6, 2011 -- 7:09AM, Uhhsam wrote:

i feel bad for the people who work there.  i bet the whole factory smells like a freshly opened pack of cards and they are now thoroughly used to (and possibly sick of!) it by now.  i can think of no sadder fate than to lose the olfactory delight in opening packs.

I used to go to high school across the street from a bakery and let me tell you...you never get used to the incredible smell of baking bread.  It was especially torturous the period before lunch.