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Heres the problem: This was sold as a timmy card. And we all went "oh big screw your opponent with AWESOME time!!" Then we click on it, greedily devour the text, gaze at the art and realize... spike. This is spike. the reason it is spike isn't because it is super good, but because it is super-specific-meta-defines-its-usefullness time. Only spike loves this. And could the tapping be a "whenever it attacks" trigger? It matches the flavor of whenever the dragon beats its wings, gusts of wind and blasts of thunder shake the world. And elderscale is actually really cool, cooler than this guy, he can make it very difficult to lose to red (a 7 butt cannot be burned, and he is impossible to outrace) or a lot of othe popular decks. And fatties should be cool, powerful, and game changing. But thank god the titans left. They made so many great creatures unplayable. Engulfing slagwurm and liege of the tangle, to name a few.

Jun 25, 2012 -- 4:41PM, Incoming_Wormhole wrote:

In casual Magic, decks are built to maximize the fun that the user and their opponents will have, at the expense of winning. Like in limited, the decks are slower, which makes high mana cost cards easier to use. Stocking one or two six-mana cards in your deck is no problem. Now a 4/4 hasty flier is weaker than Shivan Dragon or Two-Headed Dragon, but not so much so that using it over those cards is an automatic game loss. This is good, because if cards are extremely unbalanced, one player dominates with no hope for the other player to win, which isn't fun for either of them. 

I mentioned earlier that constructed players only use high-cost cards if they immediatly win the game. These cards are not fun in limited, so they're made rare and mythic rare to reduce their impact (among other, more greedy reasons). They also wreck casual games. I'm not convinced that they don't wreck constructed games as well. Is facing a card that, unless removed, immedialty wins the game for its user ever fun? What's the point of having a seven-mana card be "playable"? Is it just to say that a card with 4GGG in the corner is "playable"? How does it make constructed more fun?

When did Baneslayer Angel become a good idea?

When you say casual Magic, what exactly do you mean?

If by casual you mean you just sit down to have a duel with a stranger with no deck restrictions, then it's basically legacy/vintage with no prizes and no meta-dependant decks, and you're unlikely to have a balanced game anyway... there is a huge discrepancy in the power levels of decks people consider casual, from the turn three dragon reanimator to the tribal frog deck. Even when someone just has an elf-overrun deck or an infect-pump deck or a land destruction deck or a burn deck, it's still going to ream you in five turns.

If by casual you mean free for all multiplayer, then you are right to say that games are usually slower. But in that case, none of these dragons are particularly effective, even the new Thundermaw Hellkite, so why complain about it? The kinds of creatures that are dominant in really slow games are Verdant Force and Dread Cacodemon , not five drops like Baneslayer Angel.

If by casual you mean duelling with your friends who know the power level standards you expect, so you mostly just make decks out of cards you already own and no one plays things like I described in casual duels with a stranger, then why do you need to buy cards to stay competitive? Your friends probably won't crack a Thundermaw Hellkite, and if they do and it turns out to be overpowered, you could just ask them not to play it.


Whether or not efficient large creatures make Standard more fun is debateable, true. I guess part of the reason they do it is because of casual Timmies trying to break into the Standard format and being disappointed / angry that they can't play anything over four mana except in very specific decks. However, Magic was still fun when the only options were aggro, combo and control. I guess these creatures are partly an experiment to see how they shake up the metagame.

Jun 25, 2012 -- 12:01AM, Senyuno wrote:

Here's some examples: If your previous set had werewolves, make sure cards in your next set with their colors have some flash (and benefit to aggro) or prevent the opponent from playing a spell somehow for a turn. If your previous set had infect, make sure in the next set there are interesting pump spell options and useful utility spells for having more access to the few infect creatures you can technically run. If your set contains exalted, make sure in the next set there's a quota filled for good support when a creature attacks alone and options to protect your field of supporters.

There's a reason Wizards doesn't do this.

Every year, Wizards comes out with a new expansion block. Standard allows the use of this year's cards and last year's cards. (The year starts in October with the first set of the new expansion.)

Suppose that the core set contains lots of cards that work well with the mechanics of last year's expansion block. Then people can build good decks with that block and the core set, and won't need to bother with this year's expansion block!

Obviously, that's no good - if this year's expansion block doesn't sell, it's a failure. And the obvious way to solve that - make it just more powerful than the last block - leads to power inflation, a trend that would kill Magic.

So what the core set needs to have instead are things that counter the good stuff in the old block so that the new block gets the spotlight even though it isn't more powerful, just different.