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12 months ago ::
Jul 05, 2012 - 6:18PM
#1
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Date Joined:
Jun 24, 2008
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This thread is for discussion of this week's Latest Developments, which goes live Friday morning on magicthegathering.com.
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12 months ago ::
Jul 05, 2012 - 9:27PM
#2
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Date Joined:
Jul 22, 2011
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I like the card-by-card insight approach for development even more than I like it for design. Well done.
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12 months ago ::
Jul 05, 2012 - 9:30PM
#3
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Ahh, it's good to be back to a set that I even slightly care about, so the card-by-card articles like this interest me again. Farewell, Avacyn Restored. You shall not be the least bit missed. Ajani, Caller of the Pride: What interests me the most about Ajani is that Ajani Goldmane  's ultimate works better with Ajani, Caller of the Pride  (who buffs one creature at a time), and Caller of the Pride's ultimate works better with Goldmane (who buffs a whole bunch of creatures at a time). Serra Avatar: I agree that mythics should feel cool because of their potential, rather than the fact that they're obviously powerful and undercosted. Too bad so many mythics instead opt for the 'undercosted' route. Oblivion Ring: I'd love to see this card be in Standard for the rest of Magic's existence too. It's a great pressure valve, without being too strong. And the 'bounce while the trigger is on the stack' is a lot harder to pull off with an enchantment, than a creature like Fiend Hunter  . Augur of Bolas: I like how this card replaces Ponder  , but does so in a way that doesn't empower Delver of Secrets  and Snapcaster Mage  . Very good work, here. Battle of Wits: I feel like the real reason this card is showing up here is because it won't work in the current environment. Last time, it had Transmute to make the unwieldy deck workable. Now, tutoring is going in the other direction, and control in general is getting weakened. It's a shame that such a cool card is being printed without the support needed to make it playable... Master of the Pearl Trident: This really shouldn't cost two mana. Or, more accurately, if this is going to cost two mana, then you should print a landwalk-lord in all four other colors that also costs two mana. Blue's not supposed to be the best at creatures. Diabolic Revelation: That is the ugliest mana cost I have ever seen. Murder: Too bad you had to get rid of Doom Blade  to print this. Now I'll be unable to feel anything but annoyed when I look at it. Tormented Soul: This is such an elegant card design, and it plays well with so many themes. I love it.
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12 months ago ::
Jul 05, 2012 - 9:44PM
#4
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Date Joined:
Oct 28, 2006
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Oblivion Ring: If it were up to me, this card (or something very close to it) would be Standard-legal for the rest of Magic's history.
Same here. I remember as soon as Scars of Mirrodin was spoiled, I realized there was no O-ring in the format and decided R&D really had no concept of how important answers are. Fortunately that particular Zendikar/Scars environment turned out to be wonderful with absolutely no troublesome permanents to worry about. Certainly no non-creature permanents that non-blue players would have enjoyed the flexibility to deal with.
Master of the Pearl Trident: At last, another Merfolk Lord. It was embarrassing to only have 4. Duress: When Duress first came out, I hated it and felt it was completely broken. Now all the Necropotence  decks, Yawgmoth's Will  decks, Yawgmoth's Bargain  decks, etc not only had the most overpowered spells, they could easily disrupt anything relying on Survival of the Fittest  , Sneak Attack  , or anything more build-around-me interesting. In hindsight I realize this was because Magic creatures were so unexciting back then, taking a non-creature spell was all you'd ever want to do anyway. But since it's return I've been happy with Duress around, and I think that's a testament to how much more fun an environment is when the broken cards are creatures and not sorceries. Battleflight Eagle: "Nobody's going to take a a bird cleric  reprint seriously. We need a name people will respect. 'Thunderwar'. 'Skymasher.' Something like that."
Free MTGO Tournaments you should be playing: Pauper (all commons) - Tuesday Nights, prizes by MTGOTraders Peasant (Pauper + 5 uncommons, with paper rarity) - Sunday Nights, prizes by MTGOTraders Silverblack (Modern-era Commons and Uncommons - Most Wednesday nights, prizes by MTGO Bazaar Heirloom ("Cheap" cards only, e.g. rares under 20 cents) - Sunday afternoons, sponsored by MTGOTraders Check the superbly-made Gatherling site for more. Other games you should try: Spectromancer - Online card game by Richard Garfield, available cheap on Steam. DC Universe Online - action-based MMO. Free to play. Surprised me how well designed it is. Simunomics - Free-to-play economy simulation game.
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12 months ago ::
Jul 05, 2012 - 11:05PM
#5
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Date Joined:
Aug 25, 2003
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Master of the Pearl Trident: This really shouldn't cost two mana. Or, more accurately, if this is going to cost two mana, then you should print a landwalk-lord in all four other colors that also costs two mana. Blue's not supposed to be the best at creatures.
True, that, but Wizards has been ignoring the whole "blue sucks at creatures idea" for ages now.
Also, I'd like to esee more actual Multiverse comments. Not that you aren't funny or don't write well, Zac, but the Multiverse comments were generally a lot of fun.
Zindaras' meta is like a fossil, ancient and its secrets yet to be uncovered. Only men of yore, long dead, knew of it.
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12 months ago ::
Jul 05, 2012 - 11:50PM
#6
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True, that, but Wizards has been ignoring the whole "blue sucks at creatures idea" for ages now.
Well, they have to give them something... Since basically blue doesn't get any playable NON-creature spells anymore either. For example, this is apparently now what we're supposed to remember being "blue's thing":
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12 months ago ::
Jul 06, 2012 - 1:07AM
#7
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Date Joined:
Apr 12, 2008
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Three comments:
Oblivion Ring is a good card for stabilizing an environment, sure, but no card should be a mainstay of Standard Magic. I'm disappointed every time I see O-ring printed, not because it doesn't play well or because it's unfun, but because it demonstrates a lack of interest on you guys' part to fix the role planeswalkers have in the game. White should not be the only color that gets a reliable, versatile answer to 'walkers, but every time you print O-ring, you dam the creative juices from broadening the suite of answers to these guys. It's been over 5 years, guys - the shininess of the new card type is gone, and you need to start making them actually fit into sets, rather than lording over them.
Master of the Pearl Trident is ridiculous. Legacy could really use a tribal enabler of some other tribe than Merfolk. I mean, Goblins haven't gotten anything interesting in ages, and no other tribe gets any love at all, for some incomprehensible reason, but Merfolk, hey, a fifth Merfolk lord sounds like a great idea! Really? Really? Fish is a stupid deck in a stupid color for aggro, and I can't understand why you encourage it. Is it seriously too much to ask that a creature color have the best mono-color aggro deck in Legacy? Or even just any color but blue. I'd settle for that.
Vedalken Entrancer and friends is not enough to make mill worth anything in M13. Don't get me wrong, I don't want it to be - I hate that archetype. But it isn't even close. And that's a problem for new players because it's a trap to let them think it might be viable. Trepanation Blade was better mill by far: it was bad but not so bad that you couldn't make a go of it, plus it didn't require nearly so many dead cards in your deck to give you hope of it working. The way it's going to play out is like this: someone reads your article, thinks "ooh, I should try mill" and drafts all the Entrancers and Sculpts and Archaeomancers he can see, and then he gets run over because he's playing with 7 unutterably crappy cards in his deck. His mill strategy that gets no support from the rest of his deck because there IS no support for mill outside of those three to be found in the set. You're basically trolling newbies into taking the worst cards in the set in draft, while good players are now forced to convince them that mill only works if it falls into your lap.
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12 months ago ::
Jul 06, 2012 - 1:40AM
#8
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Date Joined:
Oct 16, 2007
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"I severely dislike the part of O-Ring that lets you put the ability on the stack, bounce it, and exile something permanently"Presumably because it feels like a bug in the rules rather than a feature? It has a huge upside, though: this kind of interaction is what makes Magic fun for some people. As you look around for ways to clean up the somewhat ugly examples, make sure you replace them with at least as many elegant ones. Don't make me link to some old MaRo article about psychographics! I have an Insert Link button and I'm not afraid to use it! 
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12 months ago ::
Jul 06, 2012 - 2:12AM
#9
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While I severely dislike the part of O-Ring that lets you put the ability on the stack, bounce it, and exile something permanently[...]
Psssst! Hey, Zac!
When Oblivion Circle enters the battlefield, exile another target nonland permanent. Return that card to the battlefield under its owner's control when Oblivion Circle is no longer on the battlefield. You know it's better. All you have to do is convince the others... 
And so people say to me, "How do I know if a word is real?" You know, anyone who's read a children's book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it! That makes it real. Being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction; it doesn't make the word any more real than any other word. If you love a word, it becomes real.
--Erin McKean, Redefining the Dictionary
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12 months ago ::
Jul 06, 2012 - 2:24AM
#10
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Maybe my nostalgia and memory of what Magic is/was (to me) just doesn't line up any more with the current R&D philosophy. Which in as few words as possible seems to be that people want to "smash each other with dudes that almost always resolve unhindered." It may seem fun for a bit, but it gets boring pretty fast...
Fun is subjective though. There are simply more people who were bored with how it was, and keep finding the current state fun.
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