As I have been Stalking the forms this month I have notesd something, Every form has a complant about the power and speed of standerd and its current card pool, I belive that Even with the way we have been that 2 things need to happen.
1: We need the complet removal of the Reserved List. I say about 80% of cards on it are not holding value and stop the number of good reprints for cards. Dont get me wrong I dont think we need reprints of the power Nine + cards but Redickulas cards Exist on the list and we see better uncommons with more relivent types (Examples: Braingeyser is no better than Blue sun Zeneth, Roc of Kher Ridges is a 3/3 flyer for 4?????)
Not to mention over half of the cards on it are not even $1 anymore.
2: We need another Kamigawa/homelands.
Now hear me out While the sets are notorus for BAD cards they are alot of what has kept magic fun, Why? Because if they never ramped down the power of the cards in the game we would have it go the way of other cardgames, Like yugioh(old cards are not playable) yuyu hakucho (Dead and gone) and many others, So i belive another Severly under powerd block WILL BE GOOD FOR THE GAME.
Thats my rant Thank you for reading and talk over the pros and cons of these and others you point out.
Somewhere, deep down in my "heart of hearts", I believe that you have a point. I also think that said point that you may (or may not) have might have been an interesting one, especially in light of the fact that the Magic General forum evokes emotions of having to say something that everyone knows Has Been Said Before.
Secretly, the point of Magic General may be just to be a place to say things that have been said before, in some way, shape, fashion, or What Have You. I don't know. I'm just saying with a bit more organization of your post, and a little more spell checking (I don't comment on grammar, because I never know what a user's native language is) may have made this an interesting topic.
What is it that we Magic players talk about all the time that hasn't already been talked about? What complaints are new? What is the new Mana Burn, Reserved List, Card Type, Damage ON/OFF the stack? Could a zero mana one-one exist if it's anything more than vanilla?
Et Cetera.
Do we care enough about the game to talk about the game itelf, or is the game just uninteresting enough such that we talk about the many varied aspects of it (like Hasbro's commercial greed and it's influence on the game we play, the "powercreep" of creatures, and the neutering of blue)?
The reserve lists contains more than powerful cards because they're a series of sets that collectors don't want reprinted. It's not the value or the power as much as the collectibility. They cover the whole sets to protect a few cards, right, but nothing keeps them from doing similar cards.
A severely underpowered block just means Standard stays stale with the same decks for a whole year. The fun is when new cards, as powerful as the last block, come in and change the meta. Printing a severely underpowered block doesn't dial down the power anyway, you can just print a reasonably-powered set. If there's something worse than power-creeping to oblivion, it's doing it in cycles (more and more powerful, then crap and rise up again slowly). It tells your players "come back in two years, when we'll have reached an acceptable level again", and then they don't come back.
The only thing good about Kamigawa was the flavor.
Yeah... Until next game, where it'll be right back.
Seriously, there's no way to deal with Rancor in any format. It should be banned, except Gleemax is a lobbyist for the Rancor party, so that'll never happen.
You can't ban rancor, it just returns to your deck.
You might want to actually talk to the Flavor & Storyline Board people... since, you know, our whole reason for playing Magic is the flavor. I'm willing to bet you'll get a lot more interest there than in General.
Indeed, both posters down there would be thrilled.
When talks about banning Jace first started, I was thinking that I would see him banned come June 20th. But as I think more about it, I don't really think that Jace is the problem anymore. Sure his power level leaves very little to the imagination (opening Jace is like opening a refrigerator box with a naked girl on the inside), and sure his price does have a strong impact on what players choose to play (playing Jace is like being intimate with a woman and she doesn't charge you in the morning), but it is not the source of all the problems in Standard.
How do people think saving room to print more abilities on cards is dumbing down the game?
Do you really think, say, Akroma would ever be printed if she said, "Akroma can block by creatures with this ability and cannot be blocked by creatures without this ability. If a creature without this ability would deal combat damage by Akroma would be destroyed, prevent all combat damage that creature would deal to Akroma this combat. Attacking does not cause Akroma to tap. If Akroma is blocked and deals lethal damage, it deals the remainder of its damage to the defending player. Akroma may attack and use abilities that require tapping in the casting cost the turn it enters the battlefield. Akroma cannot be damaged, enchanted, equipped, blocked or targeted by black or red sources" rather than her "dumbed down" wording she has? No freaking way. Keywording and shorthand allows them to make complicated cards easy to play with, allowing them to be printed in the first place.
1. cast frankie peanuts 2. ask opponent "will you concede the game this turn"? if they say yes, you win; if they say no, play a staying power 3. subsequently ask "will you attack this turn"? and "will you cast a spell this turn"? (using a Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir for the second question if necessary) to ensure they can't disrupt the combo 4. donate them a platinum angel 5. play a mox lotus and braingeyser them for every card in their library. play an opalescence and donate them a glorious anthem and a blacker lotus , then play enchanted evening . play and activate a mindslaver and then donate them a fastbond and the mox lotus (returning one of the donates to your hand with eternal witness or whatever) 6. during their turn, play every permanent in their hand (playing lands with fastbond) then (as yourself) cast mirrorweave on the blacker lotus, so every permanent becomes a copy of it. proceed to tear up every card they control, and hopefully do it before they notice that they aren't bound by staying power's ability anymore and can concede
Dark Ritual being overpowered is determined more by what is done with it than the card itself.
True, but the fact that it enables so many ridiculous things is pretty telling. It's like, sure I can use a shotgun as a bludgeoning instrument, but that doesn't make it not a shotgun.
Shortly before Serra died, she transferred her spark into an angel whose full name was Asha Avacyn Bolas. Her dragon father groomed her for her positions in Alara and Innistrad, and she's also been getting help from her uncle Ugin in the form of Urza, who was resurrected as Marit Lage to be the avatar as which she projects herself into material realms. Grieslbrand is a split personality who sometimes wanders the planes disguised as a human woman named Liliana Vess.
Everyone's life would be easier if players would, instead of coming to the 'net for help with a deck, just netdeck and be done with it. And I'm not talking about some Top 8 lists, for the Casualists, too, can benefit from netdecking. I've netdecked plenty of decks from the Casual Play forums from users such as Mown, Raedien, Floopfoot, and a few others. I snatched straight the heck out of my web browser. Yes, people, your original idea fell victim to a savage netdecker. You have been assimiliated.
Suppose I wanted a Zombie deck. Why on earth would I spend time searching Gatherer for a decent list of Zombie cards when Raedien already did it for me? Taking time to be creative or waiting on people on the forums to tell you why your deck sucks or 'go to Casual forums' is a disasterous waste of time (to me).
That being said, Magic was ruined back in Alpha when they added all that rules and cards [Debutantes avert your eyes]. My friends and I still like playing it the "pure" way (Basically we go into the woods and hit eachother with wiffle bats while shouting made up obscenities. You know, the way Garfield wanted it to be played).
Don't worry about it. I've come up with a list of changes to fix EDH.
-First off, there's no commander. -The minimum deck size is 60 cards, and each deck can have up to four of each card, save basic lands and relentless rats. Also decks have no color identity. -Starting life total is 20.
Here's a clever play you can try yourself: -Convince friend to run relentless rats.dec in legacy tournament -Get a deck with lots of mill, yixlid jailer, and humility -Drop humility and jailer, wait for him to dump his hand, mill him out -All his rats now have no abilities. Call a judge because he's playing an illegal deck with more than 4 of a single card. -Get him/her banned from competitive magic play
L, is for the leather gloves you weaaaar. O, is for the organs that guy could spaaaare. V, is very very, extraordinay. E, is for every vagrant i butchered in a wine cellar befooooore.
The outer layer of the Magic: the Gathering box, the carton, or crust, is fairly thin and light, and contains largely aluminosilcates.
Within that lies the middle layer, consisting of the familiar booster pack. Although solid, the booster packs' high temperatures allow them to acutally move around within the booster box. This flow, sometimes called convection, is cited by frustrated box mappers as one of WOTC's most genious uses of thermodynamics since the Ravnica block.
No one knows what lies at the core of the booster box, but scientists theorize that it must be especially dense in order to make up for the large amount of fluff distributed amongst the booster packs.
I imagine [Ajani 3's] second ability involves him hurling the creature at your opponent Brion Stoutarm style, then the guy is just like "Okay, that may have worked, but don't- GOD DAMN IT!" as he does it again because cats don't give a **** :33.
Its like that one time Elves broke out in a field of Jund. Elves became a resurgent hit, then died off again once Jund adapted to the rest of the field of G/W that it required mass removal that inherently pooped on Elves too.
Submit to the menace. Delver can, and will blot out the sun.
"I remember my days as a youth at Tolarian Academy ." "Wow, small multiverse, I actually went there too." "WAIT, DON'T- Well ****, there's $200,000 in student loans well spent."
And flavor goes out the window when you cast a second copy of a planeswalker right after the first one dies, so...
"Hey Nissa, I need a favor." "You just asked me for a 'favor' like thirty seconds ago, and it turned out to be having Sarkhan Transmogrify my only follower into a dragon like 5 times -which dickery aside also violates some laws of causality - and then you let me get beaten over the head by that hedron crab." "...I'll give you " "...Well all right then."
GM, I don't think Dill is better than you. I KNOW it. Even if he wakes up every morning, clubs a baby seal, steals all the TV remotes from within a block's radius of his house and then robs hungry orphans of their food he'd be better than you, for the simple reason that he learns from his mistakes.
What would they have to fight about? Like, all I can think of now is Gideon going "Hey, long-ears! I'm gathering a group of 'Walkers together to fight some tentacle monsters.....you want in?" and Tamiyo going "Ew! Hentai no bakka Gideon-desu desu!" and flying away.
I open 4 packs just to be on the safe side. Not only do I get more cards than everyone else, but I also get to spend the rest of the night off. Win Win.
MaRo has a thing for people opening boosters with bad cards. But since he can only get so many bad cards printed in each set, he has found a devious way of getting more bad cards into circulation: He makes entire print sheets with just bad rares, then puts them onto the assembly line. He proceeds to wring his hands and twirl his evil mustache that he grew for twirling purposes as a lightning bolt strikes in the background. Afterwards, he goes to make sure that the good cards are only opened by everyone's friends, and that we all only get to open bad cards. He does this by memorising each booster, than switching them around accordingly. Whenever someone complains about a card, he immediately jumps out from behind a chair to yell "WELL, IT'S NOT FOR YOU!" before merging back into the shadows in order to devise new ways in which he can screw over players, then claim that he has valid reasons for doing so.
Mark Rosewater is sitting in a seemingly innocuous cable TV van, outside of Bankaimastery's house. Sitting nearby are two hardened criminal hackers, fresh out of prison, and filled with resentment at their lack of physical fitness. "Have you managed to hack his brainwaves yet? The set deadline's coming up fast." "We're almost through. It should be coming up on the screen any second." The hacker presses a button, and Kevin's thoughts flash onto the screen. Mark and the hackers stare in amazement at the sheer beauty, the elegance, and the raw truth of what they see. It's like the ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Brilliant light shines across the screen, the truth of existence is made clear to them, and they despair at their own foolishness, their own ignorance, their own inadequacy. And then they steal his ideas. As they return back to R&D, Mark sneers at a haggard old man chained to a cast-iron sphere. The man looks up from his laborious task of breaking rocks in the dungeon of Wizards of the Coast headquarters, and asks a question: "Kevin, my greatest student. He - he's all right, isn't he? You didn't hurt him?" Mark deals him a weighty blow with his boot. "Know your place, Richard. Get back to work."
I'm only opposed to it because it bears so little relation to how people actually play the game. The example of Miracles is actually a much better one then the Clone example I was trying to use.
From the game's perspective, the card can move instantly from face down in the library to revealed in the hand and that's fine for the rules. But in real life, we can't actually do that, so the card spends a good bit of time in locations that are neither where that player's library is nor where that player's hand is. And that's fine for real life. What I don't want is the disconnect to be explicitly codified. Along the lines of
183664.697 A game of Magic as laid out by these rules exists only as a pure Platonic ideal, utterly unrealizable by fallible mortals limited by the confines of physicality and the ravages of evil and sin.
183664.698 The cake is a lie, too.
I know it's true, but I don't want the rules to actually straight-up tell me that.
Pfft this cant be serious can it? If it is please delete your account OP. Its not even close to ban worthy, considering what JTMS and stoneforge had to accomplish to get banned i see the WotC selling magic to aquire Pokemon before that ever happens.
I'm trying to imagine sorin markov as a gym leader in one of those pokemon games which you have to beat him to get his badge... somehow I imagine that he would stab you in the chest with his sword before giving you the badge, even if you beat his pokemon....
Personally, I'd be fine with tea time but then I'm not gonna waste the mana summoning Emrakul, the Aeons Torn . He always takes all the sugar, drinks the whole pot of Earl Grey and doesn't even say thank you. SO. RUDE.
Break the Card is a regular thread in the Cards and Combo Forum. Quite simply, the participants are given a Johnnystatic card (e.g. Xenograft ) and are asked to build a deck around it. The winner and honorable mentions are sigged below. Get brewing!
This week's Break the Card was based around Xenograft . Thread : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27681049/Break_the_card_:_Xenograft?pg=1
Winner : Axterix with his Vampdrazi deck. Finalist : Vektor480 with his Ally/Golem/Plant deck. Honorable mentions : Zammm for the Turntimber Ranger combo and TinGorilla for suggesting Sarkhan the Mad .
Here's the link to the Mindlock Orb contest : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27697565/Break_the_Card_:_Mindlock_Orb?sdb=1&pg=last#497536269
Here's the link to Break the Card : Bludgeon Brawl : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27715169/Break_the_Card_:_Bludgeon_Brawl?sdb=1&pg=last#498208797
Winner : Vektor and his Grab the World deck. Finalist : Crandor with his Awesome Aliteration deck. Honorable mentions : RP Jesus with his Wat deck and Zix200 with his Signet Renewal deck.
This week was Followed Footsteps : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27748677/Break_the_Card_:_Followed_Footsteps?pg=1
Winner : Tevish_Szat with his Exponential Growth deck. Honorable mentions : Zix with his Carbon Copies deck and Escef with his Fungus of Speed and Time deck.
This week's card was Jace's Archivist : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/28063377/Break_the_Card_:_Jaces_Archivist.
Finalists : Jentaru with his "Consecration of the Draw" deck and HereticSmitty with his "ADHD: The deck" deck. Winner : JaxsonBateman with his "The Archives Are Endless!" deck.
Was the power level of Kamigawa really that low? Some of the most powerful cards across several formats come from that block (Umezawa's Jitte and Sensei's Divining Top to name a few.)
As I have been Stalking the forms this month I have notesd something, Every form has a complant about the power and speed of standerd and its current card pool, I belive that Even with the way we have been that 2 things need to happen.
1: We need the complet removal of the Reserved List.
Welcome to Magic General. We have this argument about once a week. In fact, we're still having it right now.
2: We need another Kamigawa/homelands.
Yeah, except weak sets don't sell as well. And current standard isn't really that over or underpowered. It's about where it's been forever. Sure, standard is creeping very slowly up, but ultimately the standard of today isn't that much more powerful than the standard of five years ago.
No, we need 6/6's for 3 mana with upsides and all of the trimmings. This will make it a better game.
We beed tri-coloured lands that come into play untapped without drawbacks.
We need a simic tusk that is a 8/8 trample, haste, hexproof creature that gains 20 life when it enters the battlefield and makes two 6/6's when it leaves the battlefield, all for 3GU.
We need a 0-casting cost artifact that let us draw a card and play an additional land for each point of damage we deal.
We need a land that counters a target spell just 1 mana (doesn't tap).
We need cards that let us play any number of spells in our opponent's hand without paying the mana cost.
This is where magic needs to head for it be a better game! This is what is unsaid!
Congratulations! You know how to design totally overpowered cards! GOOD JOB! Do you want a prize?
Have you played Standard? As in, played it at a high level? For a long period of time? Try running Jund today. Try running Time Spiral era storm. It'll hold up pretty well, I think.
There's a reason Legacy and Vintage aren't just CardsPrintedInTheLastYear.dec. If power creep was as absurd as you seem to be implying, we'd see nothing but brand new cards used in eternal formats. We don't. Only one to two cards per set (If any) are Vintage or Legacy quality. This is because the Standard rotation allows wizards to keep a mostly constant power level without needing each year's cards to be better than the last.
Sure, Terra Stomper is a 6 mana 8/8, clearly a violation of the normal curve. You know how much play it saw? None. Phyrexian Obliterator is a 4 mana 5/5 with trample and one of the most awesome upsides ever seen. You know how much play it saw? Almost none.
There are a lot of powerful cards, but Development has years of practice costing cards so that they appear amazing without being overwhelming, and they've gotten very good at it.
I thought you were serious simply because I've seen people claim such things in full seriousness with some regularity. Remember: Poe's Law: There is no satirical stance so extreme it cannot be mistaken for the real thing.
I think there's a lot of power creep when it comes to spells/creatures in the game. I wish it wasn't so obvious what were the limited cards vs. edh vs. constructed, but there's a very clear line Wizard is drawing - especially in Gatecrash.
My post was just to poke fun of what might actually happen 15 years down the road if they keep it up.
Some things I'd like to see in magic's future.
1) Staple cards should be relatively inexpensive, such as dual lands (shocks, fetches, etc.). A good mana base is critical to good deck design, and I think more availability of these kinds of lands would make more games interesting, because casuals would at least be able to keep up in tempo with everyone else. They won't lose games purely because of colour-screw and land tempo issues.
As an aside, I want to commend Wizards for printing more shocks in Dragon's Maze and not taking up a rare slot. I hope they do this in the future for all rare/uncommon lands. It would help keep the prices down, and would let more newer players into Modern.
2) Mythics shouldn't really be 4-of staples - leave that to the rares (Boros Reckoner is a great example of what Wizards should be doing all of the time). I have no problem with things like Angel of Serenity being a mythic because of the high casting cost (and you don't necessarily want 4 of them in a deck anyways), but I don't like it when they print stuff like Geist of Saint Traft or Huntermaster of the Fells that we see in half of the standard decks over the last year+. These cards should never have been printed as it is (Geist for sure - he doesn't even make sense for those colours), but by having him as a mythic, you price out a lot of people from acquiring and playing with him.
3) The power level curve of cards should squashed. Bad cards should be a bit better (and still have some really bad cards like life gain - it's fine), but good cards should only be a little better than the average cards. I want to see cards that give very small incremental advantages over others - not huge disparities. This will also max each booster box more valuable as a whole, because there won't be so many price swings where a few cards are worth $30-40, and most others are $0.25. It'll also make the game more skill-based and will encourage more rouge-decks and innovation.
: Regenerate.
