First, I am not complaining about the preview card AT ALL. I have no real opinion on it because it isn't in my wheelhouse. I am lamenting that cards like the preview card get a ton of attention and cards I feel are aimed at me don't. It seems to me like deadeye navigator is aimed at me, and it is too good. It doesn't get the right level of attention. If it has other applications, I was unaware. But it seems aimed at me and should be fun, but it isn't. I really wish there was a step that controlled for that in their processes.
To your last point, I think it is fair to request that they try not to enable casual play to become blatantly degenerate. Supposedly we are a big market share from what I read. I am the only person I play Magic with that even reads these articles let alone tries to give feedback. Supposedly we are a silent majority, but when I talk, I just get run over.
I play with guys that like wild red cards like scrambleverse, and it doesn't work out the way they want because it is too tediuos for the rest of us in cases like scramblevese. I am willing to go through the motions for warp world, but not the more extreme waste of time ones-and scrambleverse, which is the worst of them all. I think it is fair to say that card missed the larger mark. You really must have one of the most laid-back-groups to put up with all that effort that blantantly undoes everything that happened before you could resolve that card.
Ultimately the power creep occuring here is eroding my fun because cards like scrambleverse paint me into a corner of feeling I need to play counterspells to protect the game from not being destroyed by stupid crap like this. I don't want to always play that way, and the neglect of development kind of paints me into that corner. That more than anything is my biggest gripe with development other than they never really tried to balance casual cards in the first place. I am really not trying to be rude. The process on the preview card is freaking sweek. I just wish it happened for stuff aimed at me.
Deadeye Navigator is aimed at casual players that do not mind its power level. Again, Wizards knows there are people like you that don't like it, but you are, as Spuuky says, in a minority and Wizards consciously doesn't change cards to accomodate you. The people that don't play magic because of that are more than made up for by the people who do because of it.
With Scrambleverse , there are people that like it and people that don't. This is not a flaw in its design. You can't please everyone. If you made it so that the haters don't hate it anymore, the likers likely don't like it anymore. If there are people in your group that don't like it, it simply shouldn't be played, depending on what the majority thinks.
Also, how can you name Scrambleverse and power creep in the same sentence? Actually, what would you like Development to have done to that card? What should they have done to satisfy you?
Scrambleverse was specifically named in an article called when cards go bad, yet you are sticking to your guns on it as a success. What they should do is make cards like Guild Fued where it is very easy for other players to go along with it and let the caster have his fun. These kinds of cards basically tell a large set of other players 'screw your fun, I am going to have mine.' These cards need to allow the other players to accept that. Scrambeverse crosses the line. They appear to have a better grasp of these cards now, which is why we are seeing Guild Fued as opposed to something that takes a massive amount of time and effort to resolve like scrambleverse.
I am not sure where you saw anything about power creep. Deadeye navigator is better than it needs to be. That is just raw power and has nothing to do with power creep. It seems like I get no D from R&D on cards in my wheelhouse. Navigator can be fun for lots of people if powered down a little. It doesn't need to be that good and I doubt they did very little to determine how good it was in the casual setting. People that don't want things better than they need to be should do what? Just go f ourselves? You seem to have a witty reply to everything.
where on Navigator does it say it supposed to be a casual card not a competitively playable card ?
Where it costs 6 to screw around instead of reduce opponents' life totals quickly. Titans/wurmcoil engines are significantly better for the cost if you just have to do 20 damage to win.
I am fairly comfortable thinking that there is too much hexproof in Blue, not enough in Green.
It's worth keeping in mind, too, that "just the right amount" of Hexproof might be different in different colours. (You seem to be coming to this conclusion too, but you don't quite come out and say so.) Say Standard had six blue guys and eight green ones with Hexproof - that would in no way count as evidence against your statement, because it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, any more than it would be a fair comparison to note that green had more creatures overall than blue.
Jeff Heikkinen DCI Rules Advisor since Dec 25, 2011
I am fairly comfortable thinking that there is too much hexproof in Blue, not enough in Green. Where the developers may be thinking thet Green is balanced by caring about hexproof more, this only enforces the disparity over time as Blue has gained more and more creatures with the ability (static) than Green has, in a shorter range of time than since Green first appeared with the ability (Portal: Three Kingdoms). Moreover, they may feel hexproof is better in Blue, while Green's creature identity has largely benefitted from the ability historically. I do not know the reasoning, and they've not been wont to share their exact, precise reasoning about where abilities go.
Not sure I agree that the reasoning is going unshared, do you read MaRo's Tumblr regularly? One example here of an answer about what colors get hexproof:
While blue has a lot of spell space designwise, it’s actually the color that has the most trouble with creature keywords. Hexproof (and shroud before it) exists in blue because we’re desperate for creature keyword abilities that make color pie sense in blue.
I do not read what MaRo rights anymore, due largely to an unrelated experience of his egoism. That said, the advent of hexproof was met with mixed blessings:
1. Hexproof in Green is good: it benefits the group while protecting it from its enemies. 2. Hexproof in Blue is bad: it renders Shroud obsolete when that was one of the features that distinguished the two colors -- Green could target itself, but its enemies couldn't, and pays a cost for that; Blue can't target itself, but neither could it's enemies, and pays a smaller, if negligible cost for that, meaning Blue can get Shroud cheaper than it could get Hexproof.
What we find looking back is that Blue is getting Hexproof at Blue's discount for Shround, while Green has to pay a slightly higher cost for its Hexproof.
It's not a matter of whether Blue has limited design space for creature keywords, which is certainly true, but that's because Blue is not the color that delves into creature keywords. Where Blue's keywords have resided have been strongly arrayed in evasion from combat strategy --
Unblockability, Islandwalk + methods to make islands, Flying
-- leaving that little slice of self-protectiveness, where countermagic, taxing (now somewhat in White) and good ol' Shroud were originally sufficient. Apparently not.
Shroud and Hexproof have different tensions in the game, and this is recognized by both developers and players: some feel the ability should be better, others that it is enough. The developers started looking into the ability as though it were a drawback, not a tension-developing ability, and wanted to make "normal" creatures with the perfection of Green's "only I can target" ability, thus coopting Green's slice of the efficiency pie. Blue's Shroud may have been meant for cards on which you did not necessarily want to slap equipment or enchantments onto, or target for defense. Instead, it could have been used for allowing stronger abilities on weak cards, cards you wouldn't want to try playing combat math with. Defenders with static abilities, etc.
But instead, we got Blue touting some of the best swingers in the game right now (Geist, Stalker) leaving Green with one, and it's not even in Standard (Dungrove -- Thrun, maybe, but didn't show up as much as Dungrove did, as I recall).
"Possibilities abound, too numerous to count."
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)
"Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion Backs)
Not sure I agree that the reasoning is going unshared, do you read MaRo's Tumblr regularly? One example here of an answer about what colors get hexproof:
While blue has a lot of spell space designwise, it’s actually the color that has the most trouble with creature keywords. Hexproof (and shroud before it) exists in blue because we’re desperate for creature keyword abilities that make color pie sense in blue.
That is a terrible reason, and here's why:
Blue already had Shroud. By keywording Hexproof, Blue didn't gain a keyword, it just traded one for another. However, on the whole, they lost a keyword, because now they can't print Shroud anymore (by their own rules at least).
So "Blue now gets hexproof because it needed more creature keywords" is a complete non-argument. It's either foolishness on their part, or deliberate deception.
Scrambleverse was specifically named in an article called when cards go bad, yet you are sticking to your guns on it as a success. What they should do is make cards like Guild Fued where it is very easy for other players to go along with it and let the caster have his fun. These kinds of cards basically tell a large set of other players 'screw your fun, I am going to have mine.' These cards need to allow the other players to accept that. Scrambeverse crosses the line. They appear to have a better grasp of these cards now, which is why we are seeing Guild Fued as opposed to something that takes a massive amount of time and effort to resolve like scrambleverse.
Not a Scrambleverse fan but you're really misinterpreting that LaPille article. He's not saying making Scrambleverse was a mistake, he's explaining why it's costed so that it will never be seen in a tournament and will thus considered to be a bad rare to open by most players.
Not sure I agree that the reasoning is going unshared, do you read MaRo's Tumblr regularly? One example here of an answer about what colors get hexproof:
While blue has a lot of spell space designwise, it’s actually the color that has the most trouble with creature keywords. Hexproof (and shroud before it) exists in blue because we’re desperate for creature keyword abilities that make color pie sense in blue.
That is a terrible reason, and here's why:
Blue already had Shroud. By keywording Hexproof, Blue didn't gain a keyword, it just traded one for another. However, on the whole, they lost a keyword, because now they can't print Shroud anymore (by their own rules at least).
So "Blue now gets hexproof because it needed more creature keywords" is a complete non-argument. It's either foolishness on their part, or deliberate deception.
This seems to me to be conflating two different things, the decision to use hexproof over shroud (for now at least), and why blue gets those sorts of abilities in the first place.
where on Navigator does it say it supposed to be a casual card not a competitively playable card ?
Where it costs 6 to screw around instead of reduce opponents' life totals quickly. Titans/wurmcoil engines are significantly better for the cost if you just have to do 20 damage to win.
there are also Johnnies playing tournament Magic... and they also need some toys to play with.
Not sure I agree that the reasoning is going unshared, do you read MaRo's Tumblr regularly? One example here of an answer about what colors get hexproof:
While blue has a lot of spell space designwise, it’s actually the color that has the most trouble with creature keywords. Hexproof (and shroud before it) exists in blue because we’re desperate for creature keyword abilities that make color pie sense in blue.
That is a terrible reason, and here's why:
Blue already had Shroud. By keywording Hexproof, Blue didn't gain a keyword, it just traded one for another. However, on the whole, they lost a keyword, because now they can't print Shroud anymore (by their own rules at least).
So "Blue now gets hexproof because it needed more creature keywords" is a complete non-argument. It's either foolishness on their part, or deliberate deception.
This seems to me to be conflating two different things, the decision to use hexproof over shroud (for now at least), and why blue gets those sorts of abilities in the first place.
Blue "gets" hexproof for one reason: Shroud is "downside". R&D set out to start overtaking keywords that were useful, and make them agree with new player expectations and remove "bad stuff," just as they re-did CDotS (by making the Conga Line of Doom), and removing mana burn entirely, which also coincides with not printing the pain lands.
Shroud is the Blue keyword of self-protection; Hexproof, as it continues to be defined, was the Green keyword going waaaay back, and to simplify things, they were merged. This meant, for the developers, Blue had to start getting Hexproof. It doesn't matter that the two keywords have distinct tension, or that they aren't the same keyword at all. It also didn't help that Green was also getting Shroud, but it was more in Blue than in Green.
1. Prohibit Shroud from appearing on new cards. 2. Define the "opponents can't touch this" ability for Green as Hexproof. Hexproof is now the "new" Shroud for Green, where applicable. 3. Splash Hexproof where Shround might go in Blue or Green, but keep Hexproof in Green where it would have gone anyway. 4. Increase Hexproof in Blue and Green. 5. Pretend that Blue is lacking in creature types it should have, ignoring arguments that Blue is the least-creature-focused color out there. 6. Make Blue the "aggro" color by printing new lords for R&D's new "baby," Merfolk, further justifying taking "Green" keywords from Green's "domain."
Part of this whole scheme, as some may note, is that there are now very, very few keywords that appear in only one color. For example, vigilance is appearance more often in Green, as is Haste, while Fear was lost so that Intimidate could be splashed into other colors. R&D is trying to homogenize creature keywords, rather than forcing players to use certain colors for abilities, in any diversity of a format. This is becoming "standardized" because it is happening in the Core Set, where setting-specific bleed is not easily explained.
"Possibilities abound, too numerous to count."
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)
"Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion Backs)
