Well, it was bound to happen; someone's started a petition to keep combat damage stacking. Does/can it make a difference? Who knows, but if you oppose the changes, might as well take the two seconds to sign this - it's far more likely to have an effect than any number of forum posts anyways.
Link:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/giv...amage-a-chance
Even if I thought such a thing would mean anything to WotC, and I don't, surely people who share this opinion can find something better written than the following:
"These new rules in M2010 making the game harder to teach, killin' allknown classical mechanic everyone used to.
Don't turn MTG to Soliter!"
Man, I hate when things turn to Soliter...
It would be better to just open up another petition, but seeing that that already has few thousand names, I don't think that's really a relevant option anymore.
I find it amusing that it's titled "Give stacked damage a chance", when clearly nobody's had the time to give the new rules a chance.
I'm pretty sure these changes are going through no matter what.
The Archangel Gabriel could appear and strongly suggest that the combat changes are unnecessary, Aaron Forsythe will fail to notice.
Sexy
This.Originally Posted by FakeSpam
I'm already regretting having put my name on a petition after I first heard about the rules- I'm siding with the "Wizards knows good enough" camp as of now.
True. I am also pretty confident the combat damage rules will get changed again with the next core set.
It seems like if they cared a damn about Limited they wouldn't fuck with "Damage On?"
Seriously, of all the putative Constructive plays that go away, drafters are going to be sad at this.
I know it won't make a different, but that slight chance it might, is the reason I signed.
Co-Founder of Team Awesome - I heard Randy Buehler say a while back that good players give themselves the most number of turns to find the answer.
The Source on MTGO - Predator8785 and RockOut
This is a real Quote from the DOJO I thought it was funny as hell considering.
A bunch of people bitching about 6th edition rules changes and starting a petition to save magic from the change
adding creature combat to the stack killed Magic back in 6th edition...
Join Team Short bus We have all the special People, We allow helmets at our tables.
I wrote my own letter to Wizards today reflecting on the changes in M10. A decade from now I too hope to look back at my words and realize how wrong I was and how much Wizards was in the right.
Dear Wizards,
I've known Magic for over a decade now. I started in Tempest when my older brother handed me a pile of cards and no rule book. I remember Craw Wurm being my favorite creature. I was attracted more to the artwork and the flavor than what the actual cards did. When I showed my friends the game they acted uninterested and preferred to go to the mall instead.
In college I was reintroduced to Magic by some friends on our dorm floor. Since then I've slowly developed into a competent player with a good understanding of the rules. I still consider myself a casual player, having never attended a sanctioned tournament. Through the years, I've invested countless hours into Magic. I introduced Magic to other friends as well – many of whom are still playing today.
Today was the day I gave up on Magic. Let me clarify myself. I won't stop playing Magic or give my decks away. But I will no longer be buying your product.
As you probably surmised, my actions were bought on by the recent changes in M10. When I first read the article "Magic 2010 Rule Changes" by Mr. Forsythe and Mr. Gottlieb, many of the changes made sense. The new rules regarding Mulligans, Lifelink, and the End Step were sensible and a welcome change. I didn't care much for the change in terminology, but I reasoned it would grow on me after time.
I was initially displeased Wizards did away with Mana Burn, as I felt it was important for players - new players especially - to plan each move correctly. Thanks to debit cards we no longer have to worry about balancing a checkbook. But I thought teaching players how to manage a Mana Pool would breed good habits. Admittedly, Mana Burn was never an issue in 99.8% of the games we've played. I don't think it's ever costed me a game. It makes sense for you guys to remove it, if only because new players don't have to learn a rule that often doesn't account for anything.
What turned me off to Magic were the changes to the Combat Phase. By removing combat damage from the stack and forcing players to assign damage in a specific order, Wizards has removed a layer of tactical depth from the game. I use to believe Magic was a skill based game. With these changes the pendulum has swung more towards deck building and luck. If I wanted to play a dumbed down version of Magic I would pick up Yu-Gi-Oh or something.
By making Magic a less intricate game, once filled with wonderful nuances and 'gotcha!' type moments, Wizards has done its fans a disservice. The combat phase has lost its luster – the uncertainty and excitement that abounds in combat. You use to be able to play your "moment of truth" cards (Bounce Spells, Damage Redirection, Sacrifice..., etc.) in the nick of time to rescue your creatures and deliver the coup de grāce to your opponent. Now we're forced to regenerate our creatures before combat occurs. What sense is there in preventing damage before damage is even dealt? The new rules have not proven easier to explain to players. Truthfully, I had to read the article a few times to understand the changes.
To make sure I wasn't being stubborn or fixated in my ways, I played some games of Magic under the new rules. I was saddened by what I saw. Magic has become a sterile, stagnant game, devoid of lifelessness. When I entered the combat step, it was like going through the motions. My friends felt the same way. It was more than one woman could take. Causalities of our games included: Echoing Truth, Pyroclasm, Morphling, Goblin Legionnaire, Loxodon Hierarch, and a plethora of others. No doubt many other cards will be affected that have yet to see play. At least when Wizards redid Artifacts in Sixth Edition (Always 'On'), they errata'ed a few of the older artifacts to retain their original functionality (i.e. Winter Orb). Will Wizards grant an errata to these cards? I doubt it.
Wizards has taken a joyful experience and made it unfun. How can I support that? Do you reward a pup for bad behavior? By continuing to buy your product I would be sending a message that what you're doing is okay. Since it's not okay - no matter how much I cherish you guys - we're through.
Sincerely,
Amber VII
As Magic Fanatic alluded to, all of this happened when the Sixth Edition rules came out. WoTC didn't listen to the vocal players then; they won't listen now. Give it up. The new rules don't actually change very much if you test them out, even in Limited.
They won't listen, but that doesn't mean they're not wrong and they're not making poor decisions.
We actually had a sort of replicated situation, similar to the Token situation, come up in a game of Pile this evening. Pile is a game of Magic with one big shared deck and graveyard everyone plays from, singleton with a lot of Timmy crap (hence, "Pile").
Our friend Nick cast Exhume. I put Weatherseed Treefolk into play. Matt Evangelize'd it and then I killed it. The question became;
Whose hand does Weatherseed Treefolk return to? Everyone has the same deck so the usual standard for "owner" doesn't apply. Matt's the controller now, and I was the original controller, but we all agreed that what made the most sense was for it to return to Nick's hand. Why? Because he was the one who cast Exhume, the spell that put it into play originally.
I only mention this because it's the same argument with the tokens and this was SpatulaOfTheAges Matt, the same Matt that tried to defend this stupid decision in this thread.
These changes are minor, but that's half of what's annoying. This isn't like 6th Edition where they needed to overhaul the game. This is just Gottlieb and crew getting the greenlight to tinker and fucking with the rules just because they could.
Ditto to the changes to combat damage. They've been trying since Alpha to get the rules to work to accomdoate damage prevention like it's supposed to work. The existing rules worked pretty well for that, and if they hated Mogg Fanatic and crew working the way they did they could have, as Nihil notes, changed the rules to say that dead creatures can't deal combat damage, which is actually pretty intuitive. Instead they created a bunch of complicated new rules that they immediately have to contradict to preserve the mechanics they want.
It demonstrates a really unhealthy mentality towards the structure of the game. This is just fucking with things to fuck with them.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
There was a shit-ton more outcry regarding the Mirrodin card frame change than this, too.
Did you see the thread on the official site? It's actually 3 threads long because the first two got too long and had to be locked due to the limitations of vbuliten. Neither the new card frames nor the 6th edition rules changes got near as much negative feedback as these announced changes are getting. This is unprecedented and is a sure sign that they are doing something wrong.
Wait, if everyone uses a shared graveyard, how did you determine who gets to return which creature? Turn order?
YOU'RE GIVING ME A TIME MACHINE IN ORDER TO TREAT MY SLEEP DISORDER.
I still don't understand the frame change explanation: I didn't play when the change happened (and thus had no angst), but from all the backlog of wizard's archives I've read (and I've probably read 95% of mothership articles), I STILL can't figure out what clarity or functional utility we were missing out on back in the day.There was a shit-ton more outcry regarding the Mirrodin card frame change than this, too.
OK, colored artifacts are easier to do now (and hybrid cards look cool, although the blend would have worked with old cards, too, just as the artifacts could have been given colored text boxes on the old frame), but aside from that, I still can't see what's more legible about the new format, especially given Wizard's excitement about their "innovation" at the time when colored artifacts were years away (and not something players cared much about anyway).
This one paragraph actually has something to stand on its own, so there is something to discuss.
The first point is that you do recognize that the "Mogg fanatic trick" is counterintuitive (that is, as long as you've not been told for years that it's possible) and there. So I'm understanding that you're criticizing the execution of their solution to the problem, not the intent, and thus I'm going to assume from now on we agree on the usefulness of restoring this functionality (if not at the cost of doing so). Otherwise, please object quickly or there's no point.
The problem with the solution you mentioned, ie "just changing the rules to say dead creatures can't do damage" is that it's simply messy. You're actually just introducing a hack to a system (the stack) to forcefully make it work the way you want (continue linking the effect with the source) when this way is actually the opposite of what the stack has been designed to do.
This is exactly defeating the purpose of using the stack in the first place. At this point, the cleaner (and arguably only reasonable) way is to simply get rid of the stack for combat damage. Please also note that this change, by itself, is mechanically similar (if not identical, depending on the implementation that would have been adopted for "removing the damage from the stack", but that's not the point) to the change you mentioned, so once again by itself it's quite irreproachable.
Thus the only part of the change that does appear to be debatable is how they switched damage dealing mechanisms to make damage prevention work, which main and seemingly only consequence is that you can't separate the damage to finish both (or more) blockers later with a pyroclasm or the like.
Well... I agree you can't really argue it's better than before, I mean, the possibility was there without flavorfully weird or counter intuitive. Still, I guess you could argue that a creature wouldn't really be able to divide its damage exactly as ordered to between different opponents (also, imagine explaining it to your critter : "hey Tarmo, be careful kay ? Don't just rush killing those boosted Cursecatcher and Slivergill Adept. Just make sure you divide your damage 2 on the first and 3 on the second hmmkay ? I'm the one going to finish them off afterwards"). Joke aside, it doesn't really feel weirder than before.
So the question is, how much does it matter to lose this opportunity ? Well, how often does it actually matter ? If you try to recall, you'll realize that the answer is "probably not that often at all". It certainly does happen, sure. But certainly not every match, not even every other match, and probably not more than one out of every four or five matches. While combat damage not using the stack is something that will improve the natural feel of the game basically every time.
Actually, it demonstrates very healthy mentality towards the structure of the game, and a true long term vision for Magic...
...and their jobs. I think everyone complaining (not specifically directed at you) should start by remembering they're putting their full-time job on the line there, so that at least the facepalm-worthy comments like "they don't give a shit, waaa waa waa, wtf are those morons thinking, it's obvious they're wrong, and this is actually a random poster on an internet forum telling you so" might at least vanish.
And thanks a lot for reminding people of it. Hopefully perspective might be gained here and there (yeah, let's dream about that).This is a real Quote from the DOJO I thought it was funny as hell considering.
A bunch of people bitching about 6th edition rules changes and starting a petition to save magic from the change
adding creature combat to the stack killed Magic back in 6th edition...
Last edited by ParkerLewis; 06-14-2009 at 05:10 PM. Reason: spelling mistake.
That's correct, and I've been thinking quite a bit about the issue in the last few days, as I became more and more convinced that a system like the one I suggested could be better than both M10 and 6E.
Here's the way I currently see it:
There is absolutely no good reason why the 6E combat system had to store combat damage on the stack.
In every other situation in the game the stack can only contain one of two types of objects: spells and activated or triggered abilities. These objects all have some characteristics: an owner, a controller, some number of colours. Most importantly, they can be interacted with in several ways.
Combat damage has none of these properties: it's an oddball item that was put there as a hack to separate declaring and dealing damage. This separation is clearly vital to modern Magic, in order to give an interval during which any sort of trick can be used, regardless of what future designers come up with (as opposed to 5E rules, which short-sightedly made a special exception only for damage prevention).
But you can separate declaring and dealing damage without using the stack. You just need to make them into two special actions, just like declaring attackers and blockers.
So, here's the combat phase structure I propose:And here's what I consider my key observation:
- Beginning of Combat. Each player gets priority.
- Declare Attackers. The attacking player declares his attackers; then each player gets priority.
- Declare Blockers. The defending player announces his blockers; then each player gets priority.
- Declare Damage. Each player announces what amount of damage his fighting creatures will deal, and to what; then each player gets priority.
- Damage Resolution. Each fighting creature deals the announced amounts of damage; then each player gets priority.
- End of Combat. Each player gets priority (actually superfluous now, just like in M10, but needed for some older triggers).
The 6E system was forced to allow absent creatures to deal damage because it put combat damage on the stack, thus making it an object independent from its source.
It had to adopt the counter-intuitive rule that combat damage worked like an activated ability solely to remain consistent with the way spells and abilities work.
Once you adopt a Declare/Deal damage system independent from the stack, an example of which I have given above, it becomes obvious that only creatures still fighting will deal damage.
That is in fact identical to how, under the 6E system, only creatures still fighting get to put their damage on the stack in the Combat Damage step. If you declare a blocker, and it gets killed/bounced during the Declare Blockers step, it won't put damage on the stack (6E) / assign damage (NC). Under "NC rules", this is paralleled in how if you declare a certain damage from your creature, and it gets killed/bounced during the Declare Damage step, it won't deal its damage.
The game is perfectly capable of retaining a piece of information from one step to another, without using the stack: it already does so with the list of creatures that are attacking or blocking. I merely propose to do the same thing with the amount of damage they are going to deal.
And once you have resolved the issue of absent creatures dealing damage, you no longer need any of the changes in M10, with all the other problems they bring (Deathtouch insanity, Pyroclasm nerfing, etc.)
So, what do you say we put forth this system as a candidate for M11?
YOU'RE GIVING ME A TIME MACHINE IN ORDER TO TREAT MY SLEEP DISORDER.
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