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4 months ago ::
Feb 02, 2013 - 7:34PM
#51
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Date Joined:
Apr 21, 2010
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You then took it to be a deep an intellectual statement connected to relativity and the fundamental nature of time in the universe, proving that you can posses a large amount of knowledge and still have absolutely no idea how to apply it to the subject at hand.
This is incorrect; I knew exactly what Dilleux meant. Dilleux made a joke about my comment; Enigma made a joke about Dilleux's joke. I brought out the "deep philosophical/metaphycsical nature-of-time" bit to poke fun at their jokes. When it kept going, I kept talking about it because I enjoy this sort of thing. Then you came in and told me I had missed the point (which apparently just changed from "we're talking about practical uses of clocks, not metaphysics" to "it was an idiom, we weren't really talking about clocks at all"; backpedal much?  ). I understood the original tangent; I responded in kind; and the conversation moved forward along the new tangent, as conversations do. If anyone is lacking wisdom here, it's the one who doesn't understand how conversations progress.
Etiamnunc sto, etiamsi caelum ruat.
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4 months ago ::
Feb 03, 2013 - 1:59AM
#52
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Date Joined:
Dec 12, 2007
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Kamigawa was not a weak set. Kamigawa standard and particularly block was a weaker meta. Do not confuse the meta with the set. Kamigawa was full of cards that made the transition to legacy, vintage, and modern, and that is the proper measure of a sets power level. Hell some of them are even banned(counter/top). Gatecrash is a weak set all around, there are really less then 5 or so cards that will make that transition and they are all niche instead of main. Kamigawa has plenty of flavor and at least a couple of decks built just around the resources it started (ninjitsu and rats in general). Mirrodin was only off a little, affinity was not broken in block, it is only broken when you consider the low cost artifacts available around it. They really only blew it a very tiny bit disciple of the vault  and the artifact lands are the only really questionable problems.
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4 months ago ::
Feb 03, 2013 - 4:45AM
#53
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Date Joined:
Apr 21, 2010
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affinity was not broken in block
What
Etiamnunc sto, etiamsi caelum ruat.
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4 months ago ::
Feb 03, 2013 - 7:51AM
#54
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Date Joined:
Aug 20, 2008
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affinity was not broken in block
What
Yes, that is puzzling, since "the low cost artifacts available around it" were part of the same block.
I'm thinking he meant that affinity wasn't inherently broken, in principle; maybe he was loan-translating and trying to say that affinity wasn't broken en bloc.
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4 months ago ::
Feb 03, 2013 - 10:10AM
#55
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Just wanted to address this particular point; I'm surprised nobody else did: The sequence of block types is generally believed to have gone something like this:
Antiquities - Artifact
Legends - Multicolor
The Dark - Tribal
Fallen Empires - ?
Ice Age - ?
Homelands - Weak
Then, the cycle repeated itself twice:
Urza's Saga - Artifact
Mercadian Masques - Weak
Invasion - Multicolor
Odyssey - Gimmick
Onslaught - Tribal
Mirrodin - Artifact
Kamigawa - Weak
Ravnica - Multicolor
Time Spiral - Gimmick
Lorwyn/Shadowmoor - Tribal
And then Wizards shook things up:
Alara - Multicolor
Zendikar - ?
Scars of Mirrodin - Artifact
Innistrad - Gimmick
Return to Ravnica - Multicolor
I suppose Tribal is coming soon...
I'm not sure where to class Zendikar, but some have classed it as weak. It's true they used hidden treasures and full-art lands to sell it, but the economy tanked just before that year.
Moving Gimmick to the most challenging position, after Artifact, may eliminate the need for Weak, so Multicolor - Tribal - Artifact - Gimmick may turn out to be the new repeating cycle, although I suspect Wizards will want to have unpredictable variety for the future.
There is no such cycle.
People have been predicting future blocks based on perceived "cycles" since I started playing. They have been wrong. Again. And again. And again. But no matter what they keep tweaking the data until they can find some sort of pattern and thinking "Oh, this time it'll be different!" But it never is. It's just apophenia.
Remember when folks predicted that Time Spiral would be a graveyard-based set? After all, the three years prior to it were Artifact-Weak-Multicolor, just like Odyssey! (Ignore the fact that Saga block was enchantment-based.) Welp, that didn't work, so it must be because the pattern wasn't actually 'graveyard', it was 'weird', yeah! And hey, the pattern correctly predicted Lorwyn, so it must be correct! (Ignore the fact that Shadowmoor exists and doesn't match the 'pattern'.) Oh, hey, wait, but now Alara block's out, and that doesn't match the pattern at all...must be because they're changing the pattern, yeah! That must be it!
No, it isn't. The simple fact is that there is no such pattern. Popular themes recur, but there is no predetermined pattern to that recursion. (And 'weak' or 'gimmick' isn't a theme, so stop pretending it is one.)
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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4 months ago ::
Feb 03, 2013 - 11:10AM
#56
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Date Joined:
Oct 12, 2010
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affinity was not broken in block
What
Yes, that is puzzling, since "the low cost artifacts available around it" were part of the same block.
I'm thinking he meant that affinity wasn't inherently broken, in principle; maybe he was loan-translating and trying to say that affinity wasn't broken en bloc.
Affinity in a vacuum isn't broken, and you don't see Ghoultree  ripping up Standard right now. Nor did Khalni Hydra  . Both have affinity, but neither is broken. Come to think of it, convoke is a variant on affinity where you have to tap creatures to get the discount, and while it did see play, I wouldn't call it broken.
But I don't think anyone would say "Let's make things cheaper by encouraging people to play things that have this same cheap mechanic, have a half-dozen lands that support this, have an additional couple free artifacts that support this, and include sac outlets, and include a death trigger that can win you the game!" isn't broken.
Clever deduction Watson! Maybe you can explain why Supergirl is trying to kill me.
----
Autocard is your friend.
[c]Lightning Bolt[/c] = Lightning Bolt 
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4 months ago ::
Feb 03, 2013 - 11:36AM
#57
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By pass the mana system and things can break.
Also, weren't the artifact lands banned in block?
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4 months ago ::
Feb 03, 2013 - 3:59PM
#58
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Date Joined:
Dec 12, 2007
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What I am really trying to say about afinity is that it is not broken :p Both mox goblins and red/green pumper infect can goldfish on the second turn, neither is really broken (even though they just banned invigorate). So speed is not really the problem as long as it is not also assured and can be countered.
Ravager affinity was not to fast. Frogmite affinity was not to fast. Even with disciple of the vault the deck was not to fast. The problem was that nothing else in the meta could match it. It was not that it was so good, it was that they did not print any good counter strategies. Disciple is the real culprit anyway since it does not let mid-range or control stabilize.
The same problem we have with jace the mind sculptor, when he was dominating it was because there was no good strategy against him. This is also why legacy is a better format then modern or standard. Legacy has a big enough card pool that even your cant fail strategy can be hated out. Why legacy has a real meta instead of just one deck, the problem modern cannot seem to handle.
This is oddly enough my main problem with modern. Control is not viable in modern and single deck archetypes tend to dominate until they ban a piece and then the next one developes. There is no real meta.
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4 months ago ::
Feb 03, 2013 - 4:06PM
#59
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Date Joined:
Aug 20, 2008
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Also, weren't the artifact lands banned in block?
Skullclamp  was banned at the time, I think, but the ban on the artifact lands happened later, I thought.
Oh, no: you're right, they were banned from Standard in June, 2004!
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4 months ago ::
Feb 04, 2013 - 7:18AM
#60
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Date Joined:
Oct 12, 2010
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Also, weren't the artifact lands banned in block?
Skullclamp was banned at the time, I think, but the ban on the artifact lands happened later, I thought.
Oh, no: you're right, they were banned from Standard in June, 2004!
Yeah, but how many non-degenerate things can you do with artifact lands? Not nearly as many as degenerate things you can do with them.
Clever deduction Watson! Maybe you can explain why Supergirl is trying to kill me.
----
Autocard is your friend.
[c]Lightning Bolt[/c] = Lightning Bolt
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