Community

Aug 15, 2011 -- 3:03PM, milo_bloom wrote:

Deck size and card limitation - Is there ever any thought given to doing card specific modifiers to certain cards? Like "Unique", a deck may only contain one Unique card. Or doing more things like Relentless Rats ? How about errata'ing Plague Rats to work like Relentless as they were so obviously designed to do?

Both of these ideas seem very unlikely to me. As for "unique", by itself it's all-downside, which they have said recently they like to avoid. And presumably you'd put it on good, or at least big, creatures or effects, which would make it swingy, and few people like that either. And also, it dumbs down deckbuilding in a way that I suspect the designers want to avoid. Right now you have to think about how many copies of each and every card to include. You generally want all four copies of your best cards, but then again there isn't room in a 60-card deck for every good card in your general theme, but then again tutoring effects like Stoneforge Mystic make it easier to find single cards... but "unique" cards take all that away. You can only put one of them in your deck, and if it's as good or at least big as they'd probably be, you'd have to include one. How simple. Boring. Mindless.

And as for errataing Plague Rats , what you call obvious isn't. For example, see Aaron Forsythe's comments on Ivory Guardians. We often don't know what people intended way back in Legends and earlier sets. And even if we were clear, they very rarely errata cards just to make things make sense. All those named characters in Arabian Nights should be legendary, but they weren't printed that way and so it hasn't been changed. Fireball is a massive headache for templating, but they keep trying to find a clear way to say what it does rather than errataing the card to change what it does to something simpler. Any merfolk that don't have feet in their art should have islandhome because clearly they can't attack outside water, but that has never been errataed. Fixing all that would come before errataing Plague Rats to work they way you think it should, which is, after all, one single card, and not a particularly memorable one at that.

Aug 14, 2011 -- 11:35PM, ong312 wrote:

FOR THE NEXT ASK WIZARDS, PLEASE:
(Extensive commentary on the Reserved List clipped)

You misunderstand, or perhaps you understand but want to fundamentally change, the purpose of the Reserved List. It has nothing to do with design standards, power level, or any of the various other considerations people tend to mention when the subject comes up. The only reason it exists is because of complaints from collectors, mostly about Chronicles, that reprinting hurt the value of their collections. The goal was to maintain the value of then-existing collections.

I think people both in and out of WotC have since collectively come to their senses about the fact that this was (a) a goal WotC should not have adopted in the first place and (b) a short-sighted and sometimes even counterproductive way of trying to achieve said goal. But at this point, WotC nevertheless continues to feel bound by this promise, the reason they've given publicly being that they want to be seen as trustworthy.

WotC, rightly or wrongly, would seem to be claiming this point about trustworthiness outweighs (a) the fact that it was a promise they now recognize as one they shouldn't have made, (b) the potential benefit to the game of breaking it, (c) the fact that the circumstances under which it was made have changed in ways that undermine the original point of it, and even (d) the fact that on the whole the people they made that promise to no longer want them to keep it.

I couldn't disagree more, but any attempt to persuade WotC to change course on this must address the above points. No amount of discussion about changes in design standards over the years bears the faintest relevance to the topic.

Aug 15, 2011 -- 11:48PM, Qmark wrote:

It's fear of litigation.  Nothing more.

Do you have a source for that, and/or can you elaborate? Because I'm not a lawyer, but I can't think of any case there that wouldn't be laughed out of court. Wizards has no legal obligation to protect the secondary market value of old collections, and an announcement by a company of what they plan to do is not a legally binding contract, certainly not without the signature of the second party and all that. If Wizards was going around selling those cards on the reserve list, there might be a false advertising concern, but they aren't.