Lurker > trdl23

I was in grad school when it came out, and by the time I started playing again, it had already been banned. Having seen it in Cube though... yeesh.

Anyway, more later

Oh right, FIRE design was a pushback against the intentional depowering of Standard that happened in Battle for Zendikar and Kaladesh. It deliberately pushed for more powerful and exciting cards instead, especially at common and uncommon. Unfortunately, it also pushed more and more complexity into higher-rarity cards, resulting in design abominations like Questing Beast and Bonecrusher Giant. Throne of Eldraine gets its bad reputation because it was the first set to explicitly use FIRE design and created multiple obnoxious cards as a result, but FIRE's legacy remains with the ever-heightening power and complexity creeps.

Emeraldegg posted...

I protest dimir being purely evil as they were one of the few unambiguously good guilds to help fight off bolas, and were in fact hte main reason ravnica knew bolas was coming

Also what does FIRE mean

The Dimir in the original block were purely evil. They got more nuanced in the future blocks under Lazav's leadership, much like the Rakdos.

Kenri posted...

I regret to inform you that the imp is actually 1/1 for 3. I mainly just like it for the cute art :3

Fuck. I'd drop it by 10 more points, but upon review the art is in fact cute, so it gets to stay where it is.

NFUN posted...

my friend Andy who plays too much Magic

95/100

As critical as I have been and will be, I do still love this game. For all its faults, it's one of the best games ever made. There's a reason I keep bouncing off every alternative I try and come back to Magic. It sounds like Andy's in a similar boat.

TeamRocketElite posted...

Blacker Lotus

48/100

I used to be bigger on this card, but adding to scarcity of a low-printed set has soured for me in the face of the reserved list in the modern era. It doesn't even have the memetic history of its fellow tear-me-up card from Unglued, Chaos Confetti.

Sceptilesolar posted...

Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar

95/100

There's a 0% chance you typed that without looking it up, and that alone makes me love this character. Her story is hilarious, all the flavor text associated with her even moreso -- especially when it's divorced from context of how and why she was compelled to make such bizarre dishes. In that sense I kind of wish I didn't know her story, which is why I can't give her a perfect score. Still, this is the charming goofiness I hope we can find more of in the future. Truly suffering from success.

pjbasis posted...

questing beast

30/100

Go ahead. See if you can recite all of Questing Beast's rules text from memory. I'll wait.

A perfect encapsulation of the problems with FIRE design, even moreso than Oko (who was actually the product of a similar fuckup to Umezawa's Jitte, where they made a supposedly minor change late in development that they didn't get to test well). Plus, it's not even called "THE Questing Beast," leading to damn near everyone to forget it's both Legendary and a major player in Eldraine's culture. Once you parse it, it's not that complex nowadays as more and more abilities get slapped on cards for the purposes of slobbering over Commander, but it was still just a chore to see, read, and play against.

Hbthebattle posted...

Eight Fucking Bears

88/88

holy shit

MarkS2222222222 posted...

Dakkon Blackblade

65/100

Really cool card, cool visual design, unique idea. Why is an exclusively lands-matter card in WUB? Because Legends was a weird era, man. The callback with Blackblade Reforged retroactively made him cooler.

Mobilezoid posted...

Thromok the Insatiable

78/100

Clean, simple, yet fun design focused entirely around making a giant idiot. Makes me nostalgic for a time when this was okay for a legendary creature.

Dedf1sh posted...

Nantuko (the race/creature type)

90/100

Nantuko are so goddamn cool. Insect people are usually seen as swarming, gross, brutal masses, and that can be compelling, but seeing them as wise sages of nature who could still chomp on someone's dumb ass makes for a unique visual and flavorful design. One of the big Ws from Odyssey block's design.

Kenri posted...

Teferi's Imp

27/100

Why does Teferi, the wisest man of Jamuraa, have an imp? Why is it in mono-blue? Why was phasing a mechanic, and why would I include such a shitty downside mechanic for incredibly slow looting? At least a 2/2 flyer for 3 was a good rate back then, but come on.

BlackMageJawa posted...

Any of these videos about trying to play Magic with cards designed by AI
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLHPZ4KRrrKuyPuiAumJ-aO0x8fP_0Y43

90/100

Largely because Cardmarket content is just wonderful. I'm helping advise a store looking to get into content, and I hold Cardmarket as the gold standard of "fun stuff" unrelated to specific formats.

If you haven't seen Robo Rosewater on Twitter spitting out AI cards, it's a treat -- and somehow better than what you'll see from many "custom MTG" designers.

KanzarisKelshen posted...

Ravnica block (ideally all three parts separately, but an overall rating is cool too)

93/100

You're not getting all three parts separately because I don't feel like writing an analysis the size of a goddamn book.

Original Ravnica is a masterpiece. The best example of bottom-up design creating a world so compelling that modern-day Ravnica is going full Sigil and officially taking Dominaria's place as the "central hub of the multiverse." We describe almost every two-color deck by its guild name. Many characters (or at least their successors) are well known even to fresh players because of how iconic they have become. Hybriid mana was a brilliant fresh piece of design that allowed for lore conveyance, accessibility, and multicolor payoffs even when mana issues would occur. The Ravnica trilogy of novels were fantastic pieces told episodically that blended into a fantastic payoff as the dissolution of the Guildpact welcomed all of the guilds' scheming for power to be brought into the light, while our protagonist Agrus Kos is increasingly disgruntled at having to prevent one madman after another from trying to subvert and/or conquer the city-world. Each guild was portrayed to have both wonderful and terrible qualities to them (except the Dimir, you need some thoroughly bad guys after all). I've DM'd a D&D campaign set in Ravnica where I drew upon both the novels and the cards themselves to generate experiences my players still talk about 5 years later.

Why do I dock 7 points from it, then? Because most of the actual guild mechanics lowkey suck.

-The Selesnyan mechanic, Convoke, was brilliant and deserves its place as getting rerun throughout other sets, even getting color-shifted multiple times. It is still best as a green-white mechanic, though. The rest? Well...
-The Boros mechanic, Radiance, played incredibly poorly in such a multicolor and hybrid-rich environment. You were often going to hit your own guys with bad effects and/or pump your opponents' guys with good effects, and while I miss symmetry in modern card design, this was egregiously awkward.
-The Dimir mechanic, Transmute, turned mediocre spells into hyper-specific tutors. This just didn't agree with their focus on milling (which itself was really cool for the time). It has enabled some combo ridiculousness though since Transmute dodges counterspells.
-The Golgari mechanic, Dredge, snapped the game in half.
-The Orzhov mechanic, Haunt, was extremely awkward to make work because it meant way too many conditions were needed to get a second, often lackluster payoff. The "good" haunt cards were generally just good ETB effects with the Haunt portion being ignorable.
-The Gruul mechanic, Bloodthirst, played pretty well and gave Red-Green a new focus to get aggressive early in order to make the big threats the combo is most known for.
-The Izzet mechanic, Replicate, was pretty cool, but it made it incredibly difficult to counter spells for the same reason as Storm cards: You can only counter one instance of it. I know it's hard to feel bad for counterspells, but it's the main way to interact with the instants and sorceries UR now leans on.
-The Azorius mechanic, Forecast, made absolutely no goddamn sense by making you tap mana on your upkeep in a color combo that largely wants to play Draw-Go.
-The Simic mechanic, Graft, had cool ideas but required you to play incredibly mediocre cards to compensate for supposed versatility that really wasn't there.
-The Rakdos mechanic, Hellbent, was perfect in terms of flavor, but having no cards in hand is pretty bad, and the payoffs for going Hellbent did not justify the inherently bad position you put yourself into. Strangely enough it would play far better nowadays, since Red's card-advantage mechanic of exiling cards to play in a limited time window gives a player options while still being Hellbent.

So yeah, three out of ten mechanics hitting isn't a great track record, which is why I can't give the most beloved block in MTG history a perfect score. I dock one point per mechanical failure. The rest is wonderful.

Hasbro; in the same way that Blizzard is just Activision now, WotC is just Hasbro now

More tomorrow

pyresword posted...

Dryad Arbor

80/100

I love wacky designs like Dryad Arbor. It's a cool juxtaposition of two basic concepts with the upsides and downsides of both. I love traditional creaturelands, so I'm all aboard with a Land-owar Elf.

"But it can be fetched or Green Sun'd!"

That ain't Dryad Arbor's problem! I think being able to fetch a 1/1 is actually kinda sick. Green Sun's Zenith was a major problem, but that's all on Green Sun's design. Dryad Arbor is just being a neat card that showed the best of Future Sight.

Now, the people who would hide Dryad Arbor in their lands and try to "gotcha" players who couldn't discern it from the rest of the land stack? Fuck those assholes. I'm glad they changed the MTR to stop that shit.

xenosaga posted...

The Reserve List

20/100

Oh boy. Here we go.

I get it. The Reserved List was necessary for the game. Chronicles was an S-tier fuckup that spooked the secondary market that TCGs need in order to thrive, and Magic was the pioneer of this territory. It was the only way to keep retailers invested. An evil, certainly, but an evil to preserve everything else.

God, I am sick of players today paying for that fuckup over two decades ago. I am sick of seeing Eternal formats that feature fantastic and unique gameplay get abandoned. I am sick of #MTGFinance bros.

I don't think it can ever go away. We've seen retailers disinvest from Magic because of the constant glut of product releases now; repealing the list now will just cause the same issue that started it since HotC's goodwill to retails is in the trash.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Commander Precons

35/100

Fair warning: I am an EDH fossil. My mind of "what the format should be" is still a bunch of us Judges jamming our shitty Invasion-era legends the night before an SCG Open that we loved from the Weatherlight Saga, and the goal wasn't winning as much as "Can you play an obscure enough card to make the greybeards at the table need to read it, yet it makes sense in your deck?" When the first Commander precons came out, I got super excited.

If only I knew what they had been harbingers of.

Commander precons pre-pandemic were poisoning the format. Not only were they fucking up Eternal formats (not that HotC gives a shit about those anymore), they were also teaching new players, either to the format or to Magic in general, that Commander was designed to be competitive solitaire. Experience counters and Eminence are design atrocities that discourage or outright punish interaction and push for linearity. They've also constantly included Sol Ring, which I've come to recognize as antithetical to the fun of any given game where it gets played early -- and because it's in every single precon, it can never be banned.

Post-pandemic, I just haven't paid attention. The well's tainted. I rarely see a Commander game that ends with more than half the table being glad they played. I genuinely believe the awful design of most early precons are to blame for a lot of it.

Lopen posted...

The original Kamigawa block

75/100

I'm glad people have largely come around on OG Kamigawa. It had the unfortunate fate of being placed between Magic's most obnoxiously broken block since Urza (Mirrodin) and Magic's most beloved block (Ravnica). So many of the mechanics just didn't work: The hand-size stuff was too finnicky, Arcane was parasitic as hell, Soulshift was too insular and required you to play overcosted cards in order to get back other overcosted cards, and Bushido did nothing but discourage blocking in general. Legends-matter was neat in theory, but the iteration of the Legend Rule at that time made it awkward as hell. Jitte broke the game. Ninjutsu remains one of the coolest mechanics ever designed, but it's a diamond in a heap of trash.

But the world, the general design, the genuine effort they took to make it as Shinto as a game company based in Seattle could do, and many of the individual cards? C'est magnifique.

It was also the first time I'd gotten invested in Magic's lore. I'd enjoyed some of the Weatherlight saga but was too young to really "get it." The actual prose of the Kamigawa novel trilogy hasn't held up compared to when 13-year-old Trdl read it, but the story beats are a fantastic picaresque adventure with a self-described scoundrel protagonist who lies, cheats, and steals his way to begrudging heroism. Having a black-aligned protagonist and white-aligned antagonist was executed brilliantly.

I was too young for it at the time, but some of my fellow greybeards have told me that Kamigawa-Ravnica was the peak of Standard, and I believe it. There was enough spice in individual card designs that mixed well with the unique stuff Ravnica brought us.

I'm so glad Neon Dynasty was good. Kamigawa deserved to have another moment in the limelight.

redrocket posted...

Banding

62/100

I know it's a meme, and it was way too complex for Magic's infancy. It's honestly a cool mechanic that isn't too hard to wrap your head around once it's explained to you in plain English, and since Magic's combat system is inherently defender-favored (one of the best parts of it), a mechanic that shakes up combat math so much is a neat treat. If we can track Mutate, clearly we can do Banding in 2024. The main problem is that modern rules wording makes the mechanic read like a nightmare.

VintageGin posted...

Universes Beyond

52/100

Ever since Lord of the Rings and Doctor Who, it's grown on me. I still dislike Doctor Who being in Magic, but as a guy who used to really be into Who, I have to recognize that the actual card designs were absolutely brilliant.

My main issue besides "Does this UB fit Magic" (LotR is the only one so far that does, though Final Fantasy might work too. 40K is borderline.) is "how relevant is this IP in Current Year." The Walking Dead will always get clowned on not just because it was handled so sloppily but also because who gave a shit about the Walking Dead in 2019? That's what I'm wondering with the current slather of incoming UB. Fallout's relevance has been pissed away after 4 was the Mid to end all Mids, and Bethesda's goodwill has gone down the drain. Assassin's Creed also remains a joke since it's stagnated as badly as FIFA and Madden games. Any collab with Marvel in 2024 is firmly in shark-jumping territory.

LotR proved that UB works well as a dessert to a hearty meal of good standard sets. Hasbro, unfortunately, would prefer to cram as many calories into its diet as possible despite the inevitable diabetes in a few years.

pyresword posted...

MTG 30th Anniversary Edition

2/100

The only good thing about it is that it was so widely repudiated in both PR and sales that it actually made Hasbro of the Coast take an L

It's been a while, B8. I need to start a new project I'll abandon halfway through.

Ratings will be out of 100 because I know I'd use decimals in a 10-point system anyway.

Please don't post again until I get your first post rated

Ratings will continue until I abandon it

Train

Hardy

storm that is approaching

So it turns out I'm actually just sick lol

I think there actually is Korean market nearby! I'll look at that tomorrow.

TomNook7 posted...

What game?

Magic. Local store is getting into content and had a $1000 tournament yesterday. This was the first one they've had commentary for and we got 35 viewers at peak -- I know it doesn't sound impressive, but it's by far the best they've ever done so I'm proud. I got PMs from locals who watched and want to come out and play in the future too.

HaRRicH posted...

Vitamin C is your friend. Honey can be good too.

Sometimes gargling can help, but don't do it with salt water like some people do because they'll hurt the vocal cords more. Warm water is probably better than cold water.

Try not to be breathless before speaking, try to breathe through your diaphragm, try not to yell, try to massage your neck muscles before beginning...just odds-enhancers, I know being an announcer means it's hard not to ever yell as a reaction to something hype. Hope this helps!

Thanks a bunch. I'll avoid salt water, and honey does sound nice.

I can also post the VOD if people want to see. I'd love feedback on presentation since we're still new at it (obviously I don't expect you to watch all 9 hours).

Until yesterday.

I woke up this morning feeling like I'd taken sandpaper to my throat. Anyone do this as a hobby and have tips to make next time easier? I was guzzling water and using the bathroom frequently so it wasn't dehydration.