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Sep 24, 2012 -- 10:40PM, Fenix. wrote:

Sep 24, 2012 -- 1:29PM, chronego wrote:

Sep 24, 2012 -- 8:05AM, Fenix. wrote:

What if I wanted to play a draw-go control deck with big finishers?

You mean "pilot a draw-go control deck with big finishers". I'd hardly consider "make sure my opponent can't do anything" to be playing the game. If Draw-Go is what you want, then you can get much the same experience out of goldfishing; you don't need to bring along an opponent to make miserable.

The reason Draw-Go isn't made viable these days is because the game is played by more than one person. Draw-Go style decks should never have been viable in the first place.

That is your opinion. As much as Magic is about catering to newer players, so it is to keep experienced ones in, and guess what, a lot of competetive good players like to play with and against draw go. I do. It feels truly like a mental battle, baiting them to counter something non-essential and sneaking in what I need to win right after. I'm sorry if I don't enjoy "LOL I MIRACLED BONFIRE BEFORE YOU DID LOLOLOL" type of games that seem to be norm now, but that doesn't mean the archetype I enjoy to play should outright not exist.

If you feel miserable playing against draw-go, it is because you are not good enough, or are not trying hard enough. Simple as.

This is not related to newer versus experienced players though. Even among experienced players, the majority dislikes playing against it. To please both newer and experienced players, Wizards makes sure the archetype doesn't exist. This is unfortunate for the group that does like the playstyle, but Wizards has chosen to appeal to the masses rather than a niche.

Sep 24, 2012 -- 12:23PM, longwinded wrote:

for the "fizzle" rule, there are a few cards it breaks wide open, a few that it alters, and a few that it breaks the flavor of. For example, it's just weird to Drain Life from nothing.  But Consuming Vapors ... should that work? At the time it resolves, there no creature to be that creature. Adding rules on how you keep track of how to identify "that creature" if it leaves the board, and how to evaluate it's qualities sounds like a bookkeeping pain. Add in good-old characteristic-defining abilities as seen on Tarmogoyf (pretend it' just became the only creature in a graveyard), and you have more issues that need to be clarified. 

The "easy" way to go would be a brand new rule setting values of characterisitcs of non-targets to zero. We have similar rules for X costs when tallying up CMC, and for P/T set by characteristic-defining abilities that are impossible to evaluate at any given time. Still, that sounds like a lot of new edge cases to accomplish essentially countering the spell.

I'll note that the rules are already happy to define what happens when there's no specified creature for something like Consuming Vapors . (Basically, you use "zero" or "undefined" everywhere.) 

Sep 25, 2012 -- 10:06AM, alextfish wrote:

Since people are worried about it, I'll mention that the "fan kits" for all the guilds (that are downloadable from their "fan pages"), including the Gatecrash guilds, include artwork that seems to be obviously the keyrunes for all ten guilds.

Sep 24, 2012 -- 12:23PM, longwinded wrote:

for the "fizzle" rule, there are a few cards it breaks wide open, a few that it alters, and a few that it breaks the flavor of. For example, it's just weird to Drain Life from nothing.  But Consuming Vapors ... should that work? At the time it resolves, there no creature to be that creature. Adding rules on how you keep track of how to identify "that creature" if it leaves the board, and how to evaluate it's qualities sounds like a bookkeeping pain. Add in good-old characteristic-defining abilities as seen on Tarmogoyf (pretend it' just became the only creature in a graveyard), and you have more issues that need to be clarified. 

The "easy" way to go would be a brand new rule setting values of characterisitcs of non-targets to zero. We have similar rules for X costs when tallying up CMC, and for P/T set by characteristic-defining abilities that are impossible to evaluate at any given time. Still, that sounds like a lot of new edge cases to accomplish essentially countering the spell.

I'll note that the rules are already happy to define what happens when there's no specified creature for something like Consuming Vapors . (Basically, you use "zero" or "undefined" everywhere.) 

The issue is not "there already is/would have to be a rule". The issue is in the total number of rules, and in how necessary it is to teach them.

If you can get rid of one rule only by creating 10 more to clarify on weird, narrow interactions, it is probably not a good idea. At the same time, if the interactions are so narrow that players essentially never need to know them -- that is, they amount to errata of individual cards -- it mitigates things a bit. Once the problem card falls out of a format, or even the current metagame, you don't need to remember its quirks. That's very dangerous, of course, because you build up a body of "unwritten" text for certain cards -- for example, the way Gifts Ungiven really says "search for up to four cards" --  but it's an option.

So you have to consider both the rules as a whole -- where, all else being equal, it's better to only make players read 200 pages instead of 250 -- and the rules you actually need to teach a format's new players to get them functional in that format.  In both these cases "when in doubt, counter" is a cleaner rule than trying to generalize from multi-target to single-target spells.

Alternatively, if you really want to make things simple and consistent, try countering a spell whenever ANY of its targets become invalid. That would be really easy to learn and remember, and be very simple and general... it's just that nobody actually wants to play that kind of game, so they never mention that option.