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It is the big intuitive hole in the damage assignment order that the attacking player (tells the defending player how to) arrange(s) the defending creatures on the table.

Compared to the big intuitive hole in DotS (that an absent creature still dealt damage) it comes up far less often in practice - it requires multiple blockers blocking a single attacker, and a relevant combat trick rather than just a relevant combat trick and falls into the "in this messy situation with lots of moving parts, things get tricky" rather than "you have to know this strange thing before you can make sensible combat decisions at all".

I'm still not a fan of CLoD combat, but it's no longer a battle I feel is worth fighting - someday something better will come along, or at least a better metaphor will arise...

Jul 31, 2012 -- 7:31AM, Twanbon wrote:

Jul 30, 2012 -- 2:23PM, rmsgrey wrote:

It is the big intuitive hole in the damage assignment order that the attacking player (tells the defending player how to) arrange(s) the defending creatures on the table.

You do realize that you don't actually have to physically arrange the creatures on the table in order, right?
Most of the time when my opponent blocks with two creatures, I'll just say, for example, "Huntmaster, then Wolf". This just tells my opponent that as those creatures are squaring off preparing to do battle, my attacker is eyeing down his Huntmaster as his first target.
The physical placement of the card doesn't mean anything. If how your cards are physically placed actually means something, then do you not find it odd how your Cheetahs, Dragons, and Oozes all stay in a single-file line most of the time?

I also realise that you don't have to physically move equipment (nor the creature) when you equip it to a creature. It is, however, a recommended mnemonic. Among experienced players, damage assignment order only needs to be tracked when there's enough happening between blockers being declared and damage being dealt - which means at the least a relevant combat trick, and probably responses to it too.

The other time it's useful to rearrange creatures to reflect the damage assignment order is when teaching a new player - and that's when the unintuitive aspect is most significant too...

You don't lose that much information by making combat damage no-holds-barred, but it does significantly reduce the usefulness of both pump and damage prevention in multi-blocking situations. Either could potentially save a creature, but they would never have any significant effect where the blockers have equivalent stats.

The current system is far from perfect, but it's reasonably intuitive (at minimum, it's FAR better than damage on the stack ever was). There are hardly any "unusual tricks that loads of players cannot know are possible". For what few there are, if you want to define them that way, it's far better having a few loopholes than making combat tricks (especiall damage prevention) even more unusable than they already are.

The person who pulled the trick likes it. You don't like your creatures getting killed either, but they keep printing kill spells.

As for damage prevention: It will usually only save one creature, and frequently your opponent gets to choose which creature that is. It's never been that effective in combat. But at least it's useful in fringe situations. Say you're opponent's attacking you with a Craw Wurm and you throw four Maritime Guard s in front of it. Under the current CLOD rules, you can at least use your Shieldmate's Blessing to keep one of your creatures alive. If you can assign your combat damage however you like, it doesn't matter what you prevent damage to. They'll just choose to kill something else, and you'll lose two creatures AND waste a spell.

The problem gets worse with Deathtouch or other on-damage effects. Maybe someone's Lure d their Giant Scorpion . You're going to be really annoyed that they'll be killing a creature no matter what even when you have the Bandage in hand to prevent the damage.

There's a huge difference between a combat step with a minimum of possible action and a "clear" combat step. The current system is pretty easy to undrestand: "Pick an order to kill their creatures in, and then do it." Using pump as a combat trick is incredibly simple in this situation. in fact, the only area it gets messy in is with damage prevention (which is, admittedly less than ideal, but with how often multi-blocking comes up simultaneously with damage prevention, I'll happily take that risk), and that's easy enough to explain that they can do more damage to an earlier creature if they feel like it.

Long story short, Magic likes giving players a chance to react. DOTS did that excellently, but also created some incredibly counterintuitive situations. CLOD is the next step down, giving you reasonable (but not complete) information to act on while eliminating some of the nonsense tricks where nonexistant creatures deal damage. What you're proposing is giving the attacking player complete control over combat without giving the defender any chance to respond. That is just plain bad.

Regeneration is also hit by no-holds-barred - if you have three regenerating blockers against a creature with enough power to kill two, and enough mana to regenerate two, then DotS and CLoD both let you save all three blockers; no-holds-barred lets the attacker kill one.