Magic The Gathering

[Logistical Nightmare]

Yeah he should be Naya, if not even just Gruul, he disobeyed orders quite a bit right?

I mean he tended to ignore the prime directive of non-interference a LOT, but usually he was giving the orders as the captian of the ship.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Hey guys.

Remember Battles?

 

[Oddjob OTP]

Hey guys.

Remember Battles?

Yeah they really nailed the "barely playable in standard" power level they were going for. Hell, one of the more played ones was the "Cultivate for 1 more mana" one in Atraxa decks which should really say something.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Hell, one of the more played ones was the "Cultivate for 1 more mana" one in Atraxa decks which should really say something.

You mean "Explosive Vegetation with minor upside number 40"

 

[Rykel22]

Im honestly baffled Kirk isn’t Jeskai or Naya?? The main thing I remember from watching TOS is him getting emotionally heated on a dime, and being quick to use his fists to solve a problem. Them making him bant makes me feel even less bothered about planning to ignore the set.

I would have gone Jeskai. White for Leadership, Blue for his quick wit and Red for his willingness to get right into the action when convinced its the right thing to do, damn the consequences

 

[Flexo]

Best Kirk is criminal Kirk.

 

[Blissed]

I used to be anti-counterfeit, but at this point if I ever started playing standard again, I’d straight up counterfeit the entire deck and play it double sleeved. Fuck them.

I always get the itch to play on arena doing drafts only as I had the most fun doing Theros drafts on MTGO, but every time I’m getting ready to load my account with $300 I always flash through 500 things I’d rather do with the money and I never pull the trigger.

 

[Logistical Nightmare]

I always get the itch to play on arena doing drafts only as I had the most fun doing Theros drafts on MTGO, but every time I’m getting ready to load my account with $300 I always flash through 500 things I’d rather do with the money and I never pull the trigger.

I’ll once again recommend MTGForge, not only because you can use it to sim drafts and play bots, but you also can play the old MTG PC game with updated cards, all for free

 

[Oddjob OTP]

I’ll once again recommend MTGForge, not only because you can use it to sim drafts and play bots, but you also can play the old MTG PC game with updated cards, all for free

MTGForge is pretty terrible at playing the game. Better than Sparky on Arena of course who still can't play some of the cards in it's decks at all after six+ years but still pretty bad. You'd be better off conning friends into playing drafts on Cockatrice or even finding a D*scord server group to draft with

 

[Flexo]

If you wait long enough, they eventually admit we're right.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/lessons-learned-part-9

The big lesson for me from this design was that all genres are not created equal. I'm a huge fan of resonance. I love taking things players already know and creating whole sets around them. But Magic at its core is about telling environmental stories. We don't control which cards you open, so it's crucial that, when you open a booster, the feel of the world can be spread across all boosters. That means we need to make a compelling environment. Something that's visual and can be reinforced in all the details of the world. The fact that we kept putting detective hats on characters should have been a sign that the genre wasn't environmental enough to hold the weight that it needed to.

 

[UncleTusky]

If you wait long enough, they eventually admit we're right.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/lessons-learned-part-9

And even when MaRo does learn, it's fleeting:
(from discussion on "Lost Caverns of Ixalan"):

I was so enamored with trying to make "color matters" fit that I didn't ask myself, "Is 'colors matter' the best fit?"

(from following discussion on "Murders at Karlov Manor"):

I will say that I'm glad we did all the puzzles. They didn't have the impact we hoped, as only a small percentage of the audience interacted with them, but I think it's important to keep pushing boundaries, and Murders at Karlov Manor did something that had never been done before with a puzzle event. It was engrained into the product in a way that no previous puzzles had been, and I'm proud that we accomplished that.

It's like he still thinks MtG is (or at least should be) his personal plaything despite being lead designer for twenty-plus years.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

We had considered setting it in New Capenna, but the audience was unfamiliar with most of the characters, and the lack of a robust legal system on the plane made it an odd fit.

It's hilarious that their decision to pull cops from the setting not only made it completely uninteresting, but also directly led to them making one of the biggest flops they've ever shat out. Thankfully, black people everywhere were liberated by their decision to not have cops on the cops and gangsters plane.

 

[Maratus volans]

It's hilarious that their decision to pull cops from the setting not only made it completely uninteresting, but also directly led to them making one of the biggest flops they've ever shat out. Thankfully, black people everywhere were liberated by their decision to not have cops on the cops and gangsters plane.

The funny thing is, hiring a private detective to investigate a murder makes perfect sense in an environment where you believe that law enforcement is too corrupt or too inept to do it properly themselves. The biggest (real) narrative strike against New Capenna is that they already did a murder mystery story there: when Xander got killed, it wasn't yet known who was behind it, and the characters only figured out it was Ob Nixilis later.

It's also hilarious seeing how he breaks down fixing the mechanics. Suspect was one of the few good ones, yet he wants to get rid of it. He'd keep the Detective tribal stuff even though it really muddied the messaging (the players should be assuming the role of detective, not random beatdown idiots). He claims that it's a lesson learned that Collect Evidence should have been named something more generic so it could be reused, but he's also said previously that "name your mechanics something that's not setting-specific" was a lesson they learned with bushido and ninjutsu in Kamigawa block over twenty years ago. Overall, it feels like Ixalan II and the LA Noire Hat Set were just Rosewater's hubris in card form, no wonder they bombed.

But boy, I am excited to see what he has to say (and not say) about Thunder Junction and Aetherdrift. Those are still the nadir of in-universe releases for me.

 

[Flexo]

But boy, I am excited to see what he has to say (and not say) about Thunder Junction and Aetherdrift. Those are still the nadir of in-universe releases for me.

Thunder Junction just really conveys how intrinsic guns are to a wild west setting (a lot of that because you realize that the force multiplier that guns give to individuals is the only reason the wild west was possible - otherwise it would be like any other instance of nomadic peoples wandering about in history). Replacing those with the stupid halo sword things still makes me cringe - and I have some soft spot for the desert and mount flavor from the set.

It was really the height of stupidity. They want to do a "wild west" theme set - but everything about their environment and paradigm makes 99% of the wild west problematic. They should have realized that and just not bothered with it.

Aetherdrift is just a mess.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

The funny thing is, hiring a private detective to investigate a murder makes perfect sense in an environment where you believe that law enforcement is too corrupt or too inept to do it properly themselves. The biggest (real) narrative strike against New Capenna is that they already did a murder mystery story there: when Xander got killed, it wasn't yet known who was behind it, and the characters only figured out it was Ob Nixilis later.

It did not help that they revealed the killer in the set announcement stream, and that the killer made no fucking sense given she shares a mind with 2 other people who somehow did not know that she was murdering people with magic mind control plants.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

Suspect was one of the few good ones

Eh, it was almost totally-irrelevant in draft and did nothing in constructed. I suppose conceptually, if it was like RTR's "Unleash" mechanic and had more-properly been seeded on RB cards, it could be an interesting tradeoff to choose between letting your creature block and giving it menace.

 

[Oddjob OTP]

It's funny how bad Murders was in constructed, keyword wise Suspect was a dud, Investigate didn't matter though I guess nuTreban Inspector is playable if you want 8 of them for a pioneer convoke deck, Cases are somehow less playable then Class/Room/Sagas, Disguise was just morph and adding ward: 2 still doesn't make that playable in constructed. Collect Evidence was probably the least bad but all the cards it are attached to are; Conspiracy Unraveler saw play in a deck that immediately died to rotation and Detective Phoenix is a pushed MH3 card and doesn't count.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

, Cases are somehow less playable then Class/Room/Sagas

Hey now Classes and Sagas can be pretty value.

 

[Oddjob OTP]

Hey now Classes and Sagas can be pretty value.

If they are pushed enough, yeah. I think Mirror Breaker is the only non-land saga that has managed to be playable outside of standard and classes are fine as long as they are 2cmc or less and you basically only care about the first or 2nd step.

 

[UncleTusky]

He'd keep the Detective tribal stuff even though it really muddied the messaging (the players should be assuming the role of detective, not random beatdown idiots). He claims that it's a lesson learned that Collect Evidence should have been named something more generic so it could be reused,

"Detective tribal was fine but collect evidence was a mistake" seems like a double standard, collecting evidence is one of the things everybody associates with detectives so it's hard to see how a future plane could support one but not the other. He's just trying to salvage some part, any part, of what was probably his pet idea.

but he's also said previously that "name your mechanics something that's not setting-specific" was a lesson they learned with bushido and ninjutsu in Kamigawa block over twenty years ago.

And there have been very close calls like delirium and embalm, the names are so specific that they only fit with a small handful of plane + plot combinations.

If Kamigawa is the only time WotC has admitted a mechanic name was too setting specific all that really means is they weren't looking very hard.