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As usual MaRo likes to pretend Rarity is entirely and exclusively a design issue.  "We have to make commons ultra-simplistic and too weak to win games because players need to get their game-winning complexity at rare!"  No, what they need is to keep their money.  By making it so that only rares and mythics and occasional uncommons can deliver victories or turn around a defeat, you are essentially saying nobody has the right to play the game on a budget.  I buy nothing but commons and the very occasional uncommon, because I like eating and keeping the heat turned on in my house.  Therefore, MaRo doesn't want me to ever win a game, at least not unless I'm playing against someone even more pathetic than me who can't even afford the uncommons.

And please stop using atrocious terms like "as-fan" and "New World Order".

As a Vorthos I'm very annoyed with the idea that a card isn't welcome in the set, especially at lower rarities, unless it connects to the set's mechanical theme.  What I want to see isn't "a graveyard set" or "a land block", it's a world.  I want a setting that makes sense and feels complete.  Innistrad mostly delivers on this, but its world feels a little small and simplistic.  Zendikar did a horrible job; it was full of cool stuff but with no real sense of centering, like a city with nothing but shopping malls where no people actually live and no power plants to keep the lights in the malls turned on.  Now imagine if you created a world that was like a cross between Innistrad and Zendikar, one in which scared peasants huddle together for protection against malign forces which lair in ancient ruins and guard objects of dread power.  That would be a great setting for Magic to explore, and could substitute for either Innistrad or Zendikar in flavor terms.  But you would have to not be afraid to have that set contain both land-matters cards and graveyard-matters cards, because both of those things would help it feel alive.

The lesson here is that your set should have some focus but you need to limit yourself to that focus. In other words, don't have five cards care about Thing A, five care about Thing B, and five care about Thing C. Instead, have fifteen care about Thing A. Note that you can have variance within that focus. Zendikar, once again, made caring about lands matter in multiple ways but it stuck to land drops as being the focus.

And that made it suck.  Landfall gets boring fast; the memorable cards in the set were oddball effects that cared about land in different ways, and there should have been more of them.  A good set should have five things that care about each of A, B, and C.  It makes that set more interesting, more holistic-feeling, and less like some narrow cliche.

So the real reason Yavimaya Wurm was dropped was not because it was hopelessy outclassed by Primeval Titan, but because it was a common limited bomb.
Looks like Magic has officially adopted the HeroClix rarity model, guys.

Feb 26, 2012 -- 10:51PM, zammm wrote:

So next week MaRo's talking about Manos?

Muhahahaha!


In a way, this whole block is starting to look like Manos: The Gathering - complete with those awkward bits with the couple in the car (aka DFCs) that really didn't need to be there at all, and just make the terrible narrative seem even worse.
But, picking a random Ed Wood movie would probably be a more accurate analogue (even Glen or Glenda).

Way to try and offer as little fuel as possible by hardly discussing mythics. "They do awesome stuff." The moment a single non-PW mythic sees play in the top 8, it skyrockets in value. Lord help us if it's a PW that sees play and you want to get one.

Feb 27, 2012 -- 6:31AM, bob_the_wonder_Beeble wrote:

Feb 26, 2012 -- 9:17PM, Shiny_Umbreon wrote:

Feb 26, 2012 -- 9:05PM, bob_the_wonder_Beeble wrote:

Didn't zendikar only really care about attacking with two drops? Why do we keep pretending it was a land block?

To be fair, the biggest part of the aggression came from the +2/+2 landfall cycle starring Plated Geopede . Aside from those six , the only common landfall cards were the common Quest cycle, Glazing Gladeheart , Shoal Serpent and Surrakar Marauder , and the latter was also really good.

So, it did revolve a lot around lands. 

But none of them really made the game feel like you were playing even a variant of the game where lands drops "finally" mattered. The games that went well just felt like normal magic games (with some extra triggers to yield to online). Of course the games where you missed land drops felt even worse, but it wasn't like in non-zendikar magic, you weren't like "Yes! Good thing I missed my 4th land drop!" The format had a different feel, but it wasn't that people were drafting gimmicky land decks, it was that people were second picking goblin shortcutters. Lands mattered in zendikar the same way that:

Plated handpede 1R
1/1
First Strike
At the beginning of your upkeep ~ gets +2/+2 unless you discarded a card during the last cleanup step

would make hand size matter, or

Plated Drawstepede 1R
1/1
First Strike
Whenever you draw a card during your draw step, flip a coin, if you win ~ gets +6/+6

would make draw step matter.

Just a quick reply: you are basically straw-manning the effect of "lands matter." No, hitting your third or fourth land drop wasn't that much more important than before (although it was arguably more exciting), but it definitely mattered way more when hitting your 7th or 8th land drop - in Zendikar, you were way less likely to groan after ripping two or three lands in a row around turn 15. Also, people generally had more land in their deck, so missing early land drops was less common, which was overall nice.

That's just part of the picture, but an important part that you overlook.