I really don't get flavorwise why Young Wolf has undying.
The flavor text suggests that they are sent into dangerous situations early and either come back stronger or come back dead.
Undying makes it come back both? :p
Exactly what Symar said. Critter has to die to get stronger, thus the word "dies" in the undying mechanic. Young Wolf isn't a zombie or spirt wolf or anything.
Mechanically, yes, it has to die to come back stronger. However, the "flavor" is that it didn't actually die, but that it was maybe near death, but was able to come back stronger from the experience.
Mechanics and flavor don't always line up 100%, you gotta give them a little leeway sometimes.
(I think Mark R. even said at some point that undying represents the moment when you *think* you've killed the monster, but then it comes back stronger.)
You know what? SCREW ERIK LAUER. He ruined a perfectly playable, flavourful and - most importantly - logical card that was Reap the Seagraf . I understand his motives, but this time Mr. Lauer fails to grasp that it would actually be more intuitive and logical to have the flashback exile a creature from the graveyard.
First of all, none of the players I talk with, even recognize that the off-color flashback cards are a cycle. There are so many flashback cards at different rarities, people just think of them as "cards with off-color flashback". They don't give a flip if the flashback color "goes in one direction" or if it's higher, lower or straight up different than the other flashback cards, because every single one of these cards does something completely different and is evaluated separately.
Secondly, Innistrad has already introduced the concept of blue stitching corpses to get their share of the zombies. There are basically just two types of zombies in blue: enabler zombies and beatstick zombies. The first ones don't require stitching and dump bodies into the graveyard. The beatsticks are usually vanilla creatures that require stitching corpses as a cost to play them.
So you spend two whole sets to teach players this logic, just to ruin it with a card that says "hey, you can have a beatstick zombie without stiching". What's worse is that the reasoning behind this is to make the card more intuitive (as part of a cycle), but it ends up being less intuitive, because it's inconsistent with the previously established logic of the setting. Just ask the players how many people recognize the off-color flashback as a cycle (and how it works) and how many people feel a blue zombie that's meant to go to combat should exile a creature from a graveyard as part of it's cost. The second number is bound to be much bigger.
No offence, but it's not the first time that Mr. Lauer's meddling led to the creation of something overly simplified and frankly a bit insulting to the playerbase. I understand you want the game to be strategic and the pieces don't need to be complicated do achieve that goal, but Mr. Lauer just takes it to the extreme, where he just spoon-feeds us simplistic designs that just insult our ability to think logically. Case in point: the deck "Faeries" is running rampant. What does it do? It's a UB control deck: it counters stuff, has removal and defends itself with 1/1 black faerie tokens (that cost life to produce) until it takes control of the game. Erik Lauer designs Great Sable Stag . Just shove it in your deck and don't worry. Next year, "Jund" is running rampant. What does it do? Well, it uses Bloodbraid Elf to cascade into Blightning , dealing a lot of damage and decimating your hand. Erik Lauer designs Obstinate Baloth , which offsets the discard, regains the life and blocks Bloodbraid Elf. Tailor made and again: just shove it into your deck and don't worry.
Those are just some examples I can come up with from the top of my head, but there are more. So, what I'm trying to say is: Mr. Lauer tries too hard to make cards very simple and straightforward, while forgetting that players actually can think logically, evaluate and properly use every card that's being designed. IMHO, with Reap the Seagraf he actually out-thinked himself making the card not only less flavourful but also less intuitive and logical, ironically - for the sake of intuition and logic.
I picked on Somberwald Dryad in my Dark Ascension Review, and now I get the answer to why it exists - not even to "fill some boring Limited Quota", but for even less reason than that. I get that they wanted to use this really pretty art, I do. But could they possibly have made a more boring, useless, forgettable card in the process?
Useless? It's extremely playable in limited. It ravaged our opponents at the 2HG Prerelease.
Little Red Riding Hood shout-out? R&D, you are the best. Mad props.
I disagree. The reasoning is actually very simple. We now have 1."Gothic Horror" (tropes resolved from the conflict between man and his inner nature, or the extent to which man can decieve himself); 2. "Pure Fantasy" involving magic, elementals and the like; 3. "Science Fiction" (tropes involving the exploits of science "gone wrong" or just with aliens and whatnot, often as a foible to man's primitiveness); 4. "Dumb Horror" (tropes involving extrapolations of typical horro but then just ignored for the sake of campiness, with the prime example being crap like "Night of the Living Dead"); and 5. "Fairy/folk Tales", including references to the Grimms. While Red Riding Hood is part of the fifth category, you have smatterings of the others peppered throughout the flavor structure, such that someone just pulled up a list of "tropes" and decided to make representatives in them without understanding (or caring) what the differences were and that the whole would feel cobbled and jumbled, which it does. This, including the use of dryads, feels heavily out of place in context with the others. Because zombies HAD to be part of the complex of tropes being used, the set feels distant from its mystical or magical roots, and should have departed from them just as Scars had. But perhaps this is because Scars feels so dissonate with Magic as a game in context with sets like the Rath cycle or Ice Age, which were steeped in the magical originality Garfield had enforced. It's fine, I think, that the game can evolve, but it shouldn't evolve outside of its magical roots, and keep itself within those boundaries as a Golden Rule (just as you shouldn't have changed the backs of cards you were supposed to put inside the deck).
"Possibilities abound, too numerous to count."
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)
"Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion Backs)
Well, MaRo, you've certainly managed to bring out the zeroes on this thread. Personally, I value a lot of the cards highly (yeah Gravecrawler ! ) and appreciate your work on this flavourful block.
Really like the Red Riding Hood trio!
'I have had players complain about having extra rares in a pack. I’ve had players complain about getting free things. I have had players complain because they liked something “too much”.' - Mark Rosewater's Twitter, May 7th, 2013
Little Red Riding Hood shout-out? R&D, you are the best. Mad props.
I disagree. The reasoning is actually very simple. We now have 1."Gothic Horror" (tropes resolved from the conflict between man and his inner nature, or the extent to which man can decieve himself); 2. "Pure Fantasy" involving magic, elementals and the like; 3. "Science Fiction" (tropes involving the exploits of science "gone wrong" or just with aliens and whatnot, often as a foible to man's primitiveness); 4. "Dumb Horror" (tropes involving extrapolations of typical horro but then just ignored for the sake of campiness, with the prime example being crap like "Night of the Living Dead"); and 5. "Fairy/folk Tales", including references to the Grimms. While Red Riding Hood is part of the fifth category, you have smatterings of the others peppered throughout the flavor structure, such that someone just pulled up a list of "tropes" and decided to make representatives in them without understanding (or caring) what the differences were and that the whole would feel cobbled and jumbled, which it does. This, including the use of dryads, feels heavily out of place in context with the others. Because zombies HAD to be part of the complex of tropes being used, the set feels distant from its mystical or magical roots, and should have departed from them just as Scars had. But perhaps this is because Scars feels so dissonate with Magic as a game in context with sets like the Rath cycle or Ice Age, which were steeped in the magical originality Garfield had enforced. It's fine, I think, that the game can evolve, but it shouldn't evolve outside of its magical roots, and keep itself within those boundaries as a Golden Rule (just as you shouldn't have changed the backs of cards you were supposed to put inside the deck).
Right, sure, but what matters to me is that there is now a card for Little Red Riding Hood.
Different priorities, you know?
Goblin Artisans a Magic: the Gathering design blog
You know what? SCREW ERIK LAUER. He ruined a perfectly playable, flavourful and - most importantly - logical card that was Reap the Seagraf . I understand his motives, but this time Mr. Lauer fails to grasp that it would actually be more intuitive and logical to have the flashback exile a creature from the graveyard.
First of all, none of the players I talk with, even recognize that the off-color flashback cards are a cycle. There are so many flashback cards at different rarities, people just think of them as "cards with off-color flashback". They don't give a flip if the flashback color "goes in one direction" or if it's higher, lower or straight up different than the other flashback cards, because every single one of these cards does something completely different and is evaluated separately.
Secondly, Innistrad has already introduced the concept of blue stitching corpses to get their share of the zombies. There are basically just two types of zombies in blue: enabler zombies and beatstick zombies. The first ones don't require stitching and dump bodies into the graveyard. The beatsticks are usually vanilla creatures that require stitching corpses as a cost to play them.
So you spend two whole sets to teach players this logic, just to ruin it with a card that says "hey, you can have a beatstick zombie without stiching". What's worse is that the reasoning behind this is to make the card more intuitive (as part of a cycle), but it ends up being less intuitive, because it's inconsistent with the previously established logic of the setting. Just ask the players how many people recognize the off-color flashback as a cycle (and how it works) and how many people feel a blue zombie that's meant to go to combat should exile a creature from a graveyard as part of it's cost. The second number is bound to be much bigger.
No offence, but it's not the first time that Mr. Lauer's meddling led to the creation of something overly simplified and frankly a bit insulting to the playerbase. I understand you want the game to be strategic and the pieces don't need to be complicated do achieve that goal, but Mr. Lauer just takes it to the extreme, where he just spoon-feeds us simplistic designs that just insult our ability to think logically. Case in point: the deck "Faeries" is running rampant. What does it do? It's a UB control deck: it counters stuff, has removal and defends itself with 1/1 black faerie tokens (that cost life to produce) until it takes control of the game. Erik Lauer designs Great Sable Stag . Just shove it in your deck and don't worry. Next year, "Jund" is running rampant. What does it do? Well, it uses Bloodbraid Elf to cascade into Blightning , dealing a lot of damage and decimating your hand. Erik Lauer designs Obstinate Baloth , which offsets the discard, regains the life and blocks Bloodbraid Elf. Tailor made and again: just shove it into your deck and don't worry.
Those are just some examples I can come up with from the top of my head, but there are more. So, what I'm trying to say is: Mr. Lauer tries too hard to make cards very simple and straightforward, while forgetting that players actually can think logically, evaluate and properly use every card that's being designed. IMHO, with Reap the Seagraf he actually out-thinked himself making the card not only less flavourful but also less intuitive and logical, ironically - for the sake of intuition and logic.
I picked on Somberwald Dryad in my Dark Ascension Review, and now I get the answer to why it exists - not even to "fill some boring Limited Quota", but for even less reason than that. I get that they wanted to use this really pretty art, I do. But could they possibly have made a more boring, useless, forgettable card in the process?
Useless? It's extremely playable in limited. It ravaged our opponents at the 2HG Prerelease.
I really like Stagg and Baloth so I guess I should thank him? Its nice to have more madness stuff. I like that they exist more than I care what they were originally made for.
The thing I find interesting about people complaining about that card, why is it that black can summon a zombie out of thin air? How come people have no problem with that? Isn't a zombie something that has been re-animated? So should the black part be caring about zombies or creatures in your graveyard in some way? Nope. People are perfectly OK with just poofing out a black zombie from nowhere but somehow blue needs to have more restrictions.
Probably get some people in with the "well, well, well, it should just poof them out without caring that nothing is being re-animated". Then I can say "well, well, well, the blue should just poof them out without caring about stitching something".
Little Red Riding Hood shout-out? R&D, you are the best. Mad props.
I disagree. The reasoning is actually very simple. We now have 1."Gothic Horror" (tropes resolved from the conflict between man and his inner nature, or the extent to which man can decieve himself); 2. "Pure Fantasy" involving magic, elementals and the like; 3. "Science Fiction" (tropes involving the exploits of science "gone wrong" or just with aliens and whatnot, often as a foible to man's primitiveness); 4. "Dumb Horror" (tropes involving extrapolations of typical horro but then just ignored for the sake of campiness, with the prime example being crap like "Night of the Living Dead"); and 5. "Fairy/folk Tales", including references to the Grimms. While Red Riding Hood is part of the fifth category, you have smatterings of the others peppered throughout the flavor structure, such that someone just pulled up a list of "tropes" and decided to make representatives in them without understanding (or caring) what the differences were and that the whole would feel cobbled and jumbled, which it does. This, including the use of dryads, feels heavily out of place in context with the others. Because zombies HAD to be part of the complex of tropes being used, the set feels distant from its mystical or magical roots, and should have departed from them just as Scars had. But perhaps this is because Scars feels so dissonate with Magic as a game in context with sets like the Rath cycle or Ice Age, which were steeped in the magical originality Garfield had enforced. It's fine, I think, that the game can evolve, but it shouldn't evolve outside of its magical roots, and keep itself within those boundaries as a Golden Rule (just as you shouldn't have changed the backs of cards you were supposed to put inside the deck).
Right, sure, but what matters to me is that there is now a card for Little Red Riding Hood.
Different priorities, you know?
But it's not "Little Red Riding Hood"; it was inspired by the story, to be sure, but it's a werewolf. In the story, the girl is eaten, killed by the wolf, and it is the woodsman who kills the wolf itself. That was before the family-friendly remake that allows the girl and grandmother to live. Neither were themselves turned into "werewolves," and it is pretty clear that the Wolf in the story was just that, a Wolf, not a were anything; the Grimms tales are filled with talking animals. Werewolves themselves do not actually feature in the Grimms tales -- as they were largely created well after the fact from stories of lunatics or schizophrenics, or tangentially from stories of shapeshifters in eastern European or Russian folktales, such as one of the roots of "Dracula."
"Possibilities abound, too numerous to count."
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)
"Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion Backs)
The thing I find interesting about people complaining about that card, why is it that black can summon a zombie out of thin air? How come people have no problem with that? Isn't a zombie something that has been re-animated? So should the black part be caring about zombies or creatures in your graveyard in some way? Nope. People are perfectly OK with just poofing out a black zombie from nowhere but somehow blue needs to have more restrictions.
Probably get some people in with the "well, well, well, it should just poof them out without caring that nothing is being re-animated". Then I can say "well, well, well, the blue should just poof them out without caring about stitching something".
You're missing the point. Black zombies have been established as regular old summons in this block, so being able to "poof out" a zombie in Black fits with the theme completely. It's not jarring at all to see, considering we already have Moan of the Unhallowed and Army of the Damned . On the other hand, Blue zombies in this block have been established to have more hoops to jump through. Whether or not you agree that Blue should have to jump through more hoops is irrelevant; Wizards of the Coast designed it to be that way in this block, so that's how it is. And then this card comes along and breaks that established pattern.
That said, I know that Mark Rosewater (and many others) absolutely love Black zombies, but I don't get it. They're the same in almost every block: 2/2 tokens and reanimation. I like the Blue zombies in Innistrad, but they just make the same-old Black zombies even more boring-looking by comparison. By the way, this applies to elves and goblins too, but at least they mix it up a little bit more than zombies.
@Vaasgothbloodlord: See MaRo's Tumblr for lots of discussion of that issue.
Well, thanks for the info. It would be nice if he saved all those questions and answered them one after another. Or, you know, answered them in this article that talks about Dark Ascension cards.
With comedy writing in my blood, I tend to like to riff on things. "Riffing" is a stand-up term for talking about a topic and finding the inherently funny things about it. I was going off on demons eating humans:
I don't think the average human understands how demons see humans. We're snack food for them. Demon is sitting around his hell dimension and says to his fellow demon, "You know what I could go for right now? I'm having a hankering for humans." Humans aren't particularly good for demons. We're like Lays potato chips to them. They can't just eat one. So once they have a taste, they start binge eating. It's kind of why demons keep their distance from humans—they're watching their weight.
This isn't even slightly funny. Good thing he's got a different job now otherwise he'd probably be dead.
I though it was amusing, but in my head I read it as Seinfeld doing stand-up.
The thing I find interesting about people complaining about that card, why is it that black can summon a zombie out of thin air? How come people have no problem with that? Isn't a zombie something that has been re-animated? So should the black part be caring about zombies or creatures in your graveyard in some way? Nope. People are perfectly OK with just poofing out a black zombie from nowhere but somehow blue needs to have more restrictions.
Probably get some people in with the "well, well, well, it should just poof them out without caring that nothing is being re-animated". Then I can say "well, well, well, the blue should just poof them out without caring about stitching something".
You're missing the point. Black zombies have been established as regular old summons in this block, so being able to "poof out" a zombie in Black fits with the theme completely. It's not jarring at all to see, considering we already have Moan of the Unhallowed and Army of the Damned . On the other hand, Blue zombies in this block have been established to have more hoops to jump through. Whether or not you agree that Blue should have to jump through more hoops is irrelevant; Wizards of the Coast designed it to be that way in this block, so that's how it is. And then this card comes along and breaks that established pattern.
That said, I know that Mark Rosewater (and many others) absolutely love Black zombies, but I don't get it. They're the same in almost every block: 2/2 tokens and reanimation. I like the Blue zombies in Innistrad, but they just make the same-old Black zombies even more boring-looking by comparison. By the way, this applies to elves and goblins too, but at least they mix it up a little bit more than zombies.
In Shards block, you could make B/U Wizard Zombie tokens.
I've been playing (with some gaps) since the late 90's. Land Destruction can be fun! I really don't get the Command Tower backlash.
My respect for R&D and MaRo just went up massive amounts for that Red Riding Hood shout out and the Monty Python quote.
On a seperate note, I do agree that the change to Reap the Seagraf (or knowing about it) makes me wish it didn't happen... Although I already am drowining in the flavor of these sets...
@lathspel His mother AND both his brothers.... (although they technically didn't die....). And then his sister could be a Shapeshifter too!
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