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Mar 29, 2012 -- 6:09AM, willpell wrote:

No doubt the Romans regarded Jesus as obnoxious, or the Klansmen of the early 60s did Martin Luther King.  Innovators and reformers must always be willing to bloody the nose of the villains who profit from the current quagmire.  The evil of our society is small-minded capitalism, and I will not apologize for speaking bluntly in condemnation of it.

You are comparing your little crusade against the ~lowest common denominator~ to Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King. Just in case you didn't realize how absolutely deluded you sound.

Mar 29, 2012 -- 2:57PM, chronego wrote:

TL;DR: Willpell, if you had your way, the game would die and then nobody would be happy.

I don't think so.

If everyone involved with Magic in any official capacity were to suddenly disappear, and there was nobody left who could claim ownership of Magic (and hence prevent it from being produced), I believe that Magic would continue to exist in some form.  There are plenty of people who design sets in their spare time for fun, so people could continue to produce the game, at least online, at essentially zero cost.  Would they do as good a job as the professionals that Wizards has?  Not if the professionals are trying to design the best game possible, but it has been made abundantly clear that they aren't.  Mediocre designers trying to make a great game might very well do as well as, or better than, great designers trying to make a mediocre game.

Mar 29, 2012 -- 2:57PM, chronego wrote:

How do you figure? They're not reducing the quality of the game at all; they're just designing for a different game today than they were in the past: Limited, while still giving Constructed players cool stuff, just typically at higher rarities.

Doing this makes the cool stuff nigh-impossible to afford, starving players who want better than vanilla Limited jank without having to break their budget.  Also there are things like cards whose flavor text is a bad joke or a line of trash-talk (see the Fact or Fiction in Jace vs. Chandra for a particularly egregious example), designed to appeal to jock mentality and shattering the metaphor that the serious fantasy consumer wishes to completely immerse themself in.  To say nothing of the vast amount of wasted potential inherent in providing art and flavor text for cards like Lagac Lizard which could exist on any plane, and thus providing less detail specific to the particular plane of the set, which won't be seen again for years if ever.

Wizards of the Coast is interested in making money, which is required to keep the game alive. If they stop making a profit, the game disappears, and then all that flavor you love so much ceases to exist as well.

They could operate on a donation basis, a la Kickstarter, instead of maintaining an ironclad release schedule.

The fact that they manage to tell the stories they do tell at all is impressive.

That much I'll agree with.

You can't compare a one-and-done medium like novels to a continuing medium like a trading card game. Once the novel's done, you no longer have to worry about continuing to turn a profit lest you then lose the story that novel told.

Nor does Magic for that matter.  If JRR Tolkien had dropped dead before publishing the Two Towers, there would still have been fans obsessing over the Fellowship of the Ring.  If Magic had closed its doors after M12 went out, Innistrad would never have happened, but every other plane would still resonate in the hearts of fans for the rest of their lives, and crop up among seekers of antique lore now and again even a century later, the way forgotten classics of the 1900s still manage to find a handful of fans.  This is far better than the mass-market model of disposable product which intentionally obsoletes itself in order to capture a fickle audience.

It is treated with exactly the reverence it deserves. The flavor is just one part of the whole; if you focus exclusively on the flavor, ignoring the gameplay and the marketing, then the whole thing collapses.

I don't advocate ignoring the gameplay entirely, just approaching it with a few different priorities.  But marketing is the process of manipulating people's opinions en masse by treating them as if they were nothing but data points on a graph.  It SHOULD be ignored - if not outlawed - by the entirety of society.  It is an intolerable insult to the entire human spirit and concept of individuality.

Which is exactly what Savor the Flavor did.

And will not do for several weeks, because it's clearly not Wizards' highest priority.

I don't recall seeing Doug Beyer continuously ramble on about "The relative value of this card as compared to other means of entertainment of similar price is much higher, so you should buy more cards" or any such marketing talk.

He's done plenty of salesmanship; consider his nonstop pimping of the Alara Unbroken novel even after fans had already read it and pointed out that it wasn't very good.  He didn't say something like "I had to write it in two months so yeah it's a little rush, but hey check it out anyway", he just pushed the same old tired The Company Does No Wrong line.  I cannot stress enough how evil and wrong that attitude is, and how absolutely vital it is that society revolt en masse against it.  If one person refuses to take that nonsense from their boss any more, they lose their job.  If fifty million do, society changes.  This is the only reason I bother to rant at all, instead of just being discontented and antisocial; I am a hopelessly naive idealist and I keep thinking that if I blurt out enough utopianism, I might actually change a few minds and make some slight progress toward things actually getting better someday.

I don't know if this is an attack on Doug Beyer, or on Wizards of the Coast.

Not an attack, a criticism.  An assassin and a surgeon both come at you with a knife, but their intentions for cutting into you are very different.  And yes I criticize Doug Beyer, because at best he didn't always deliver a quality performance.  Sometimes he did good work, but more often he bumbled his way through things like that article about darksteel where he didn't even know the pre-established canonical answer to the question which was the entire point of his writing that week.  I'd rather he'd just admitted he didn't know, but instead he had to expose the fact that he couldn't be bothered to find out.  He deserves to be slammed for a goof like that, just as he deserves to be praised for his better answers (for example saying that the non-Flamekin creatures of Lorwyn with the Elemental type were "dream elementals", hence their distinctly non-elementish appearance - they were made of symbolism so they looked like symbols, that's genius, but too few of his articles managed such quality).

If they had any way to keep the column going, they would do so immediately.

They have such a way.  I would write next weeks StF for them, for free (and devoid of ranting against company policy, because that would be off-topic and would deprive my article of quality).  All they have to do is ask and it shall be done.  But they're going to follow corporate procedure instead, and not let anyone speak for them whom they can't control by withholding a paycheck if they refuse.

Mar 29, 2012 -- 11:00AM, Iron_Golem01 wrote:

MTG does get boring after 3 or 4 years if there's not some flavor to keep you (me) coming back.

I dunno.
I've been playing this game for about eighteen years, and it's the "isn't the flavor AWESOME?!!!" sets (Homelands, Mercadian, Lorwyn, Kamigawa, and pretty much the entire Zendikar/Mirrodin2/Innistrad run) that make me seriously consider wandering off.

I suspect this is because they use "OMFG NINJAS!" or "OMFG CLIVE BARKER!!!" to thinly disguise sets full of mostly awful cards with a tiny peppering of Fetchlands or somesuch (or something so far above the pile that they end up banning it in about fifteen months after pretending to agonize about possibly banning it for about six months).

They got it "right" roughly twice: Tempest and Ravnica (likely also Invasion).  Those were narratively robust, and had good enough cards to make the obligatory guy at the shop who gushed about the soap-opera bits mostly tolerable while shadowmen or very-efficient golds were screaming at me to kick some tired cards out of old decks.

Mar 29, 2012 -- 11:19PM, willpell wrote:

We're lucky we got a set at all following Urza Block; expecting it to have done anything better than lay groundwork for Invasion to be awesome is demanding a lot.

Strange how we've never even seen any mention of the block that was supposed to follow Urza's before they panicked and squirted out Masques.

But really, though, when Wizards ships a knowingly weak block, the mothership always plays up the flavor just a bit too much - even when that flavor is mediocre.