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I feel like the statement "The kind of person who finds us on Twitter tends to be highly enfranchised in whatever mode of play they like. Tournament players who tweet at us tend to be extremely active and willing to travel several hours to play... we have to make sure we view extreme statements made by such people as though they may have come from a specific perspective rather than a broad one. However, this is one of our best ways to get feedback from those groups, and I value it."

Is in responce to the massive backlash at his anti combo tweet a few weeks ago.

Oct 27, 2011 -- 11:11PM, mlanier131 wrote:

I feel like the statement "The kind of person who finds us on Twitter tends to be highly enfranchised in whatever mode of play they like. Tournament players who tweet at us tend to be extremely active and willing to travel several hours to play... we have to make sure we view extreme statements made by such people as though they may have come from a specific perspective rather than a broad one. However, this is one of our best ways to get feedback from those groups, and I value it."

Is in responce to the massive backlash at his anti combo tweet a few weeks ago.

Could be, but it happens all the time. People on this board are higher than avarage enfranchised too.

For me, limited Magic is all about interaction and variance, and I think Innistrad design and development focused so much on flavor that they seriously dropped the ball on this one.  The set plays like a glorified core set in limited.  The new mechanic and ability additions are evidence of this: Morbid and Fight technically already existed, with Transform being the only really "new" idea (cough, flip cards, cough) that adds to gameplay decisions.  Additionally, there seem to be a metric ton of vanilla and French vanilla creatures in the set, even more than M12.  We have Riot Devils, Kindercatch, Abbey Griffin, Voiceless Spirit, Thraben Purebloods, Chapel Geist, Spectral Rider, Moon Heron, Fortress Crab, Diregraf Ghoul, Markov Patrician, Rotting Fensnake, Typhoid Rats, Walking Corpse, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Vampire Interloper and Orchard Spirit.  I concede that there needs to be a scale of complexity for all cards, but this is way more simplicity than I'm used to seeing from an expert level set.

Add to that the annoying dilution of instants in this set, and you have a limited environment that focuses almost all of its interesting decisions on creature combat.  Sure, this is what Wizards has been pushing for a while, but it's a severely flawed philosophy.  Creature interaction requires both players to be developing their boards consistently for it to work, and combat becomes painfully linear when one person is clearly ahead, either in quality of creatures or quantity.  Because I have such little play on my opponent's turn, I have very little I can do to outplay, outmaneuver, and bluff my opponent into making poor plays outside of the very core set skills of working around counterspells and cards like Rebuke.

The set is balanced, in general, so that's a plus, but it just doesn't feel like they put the shoe on the right foot when designing it.  They had such a fever for flavor that they focused more on that then on how the set actually played in limited.  Basically, Innistrad limited for me feels like M11.5, a tempo balance between the plodding pace of M11 and the aggression of M12, with just a sprinkling of "expert level" on the top.

Oct 28, 2011 -- 2:17AM, willpell wrote:

7.3% of the people who voted in the poll are smartallex.  (Or at least are willing to publically if anonymously admit to being smartallex.)

I was genuinely surprised it was only 7.3%.