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Thread: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

  1. #101

    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Personally I am concerned with the fact that he is willing to make the claim that something is or isn't magic. I think of magic as a whole to be more of a (game)engine than a game. The only rules that decide what is magic and what isn't are the rules of the game. These simply create the framework of how a game is played(starting life, turn steps, combat, spell speed ect), anyone that done in these parameters is magic. Like many have already said, what makes magic fun is the approaches different people take to try and win.

    In recent sets, it seems like they are reducing magic to casting creatures and answers to creatures. There are relatively few playable cards that 'do other stuff', it seems like these cards are relegated to the crappy mythic that costs 10 million mana spot, for fear that they will change standard into crazy storm/dredge town. Transform, multi kicker, landfall, and level up felt incredibly underdeveloped because they were afraid to try something, which then just makes them unplayable cards (except for a few). I thought the most interesting concept recently was valakut, which technically wasn't even a landfall card.

    The other day I was thinking about how we are in the golden age of fatties. Prior to conflux, it was pretty much just darksteel colossus, but now we are prog, inkwell, terastodon, eldrazi, iona, blightsteel all in 4-5 sets (not even getting into just how powerful creatures have been in the past couple blocks). Its a lot harder to think of notable unique spells that were printed in the same time. Jace, preordain, spell pierce, hive mind, green suns zenith are the only main ones I can think of off the top of my head. Just look at the dtb section, all the decks are comprised of creatures from newer sets, spells from older sets.

  2. #102
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by phonics View Post
    all the decks are comprised of creatures from newer sets, spells from older sets.
    It's been like that in legacy since around Ravnica. Since before that wizards is clearly pushing for a creature centered game so it's not surprising to see one of them saying that non-creature based decks are not magic. Very sad.
    "Want all, lose all."

  3. #103

    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by Bardo View Post
    Forsythe is the Director of R&D and Bill Rose is VP. Both LaPille and Rosewater work for Forsythe who reports to Bill Rose. If there's "blame" to be assigned for R&D's "mistakes," it's with Bill Rose and Aaron Forsythe (in that order), not LaPille. Jeez, get your corporate hierarchy right. ;)

    Development is not one guy, it's a team of dudes, so calling out LaPille singularly is pretty misinformed here.

    Overall, this seems like an insanely difficult game to develop and I think they're doing it as good as can be expected: focusing on the money-making side of the thing (block, standard, draft) and banning anything that's too nutty in the deeper formats.
    They've specifically said that don't test for Legacy so in that respect you could say they are doing pretty good. :P

    I agree Bardo; Magic has so many moving pieces it's impossible to try and predict the metagame with the introduction of any new cards or strategies.
    "We are goblinkind, heirs to the mountain empires of chieftains past. Rest is death to us, and arson is our call to war."

  4. #104

    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by tsabo_tavoc View Post
    +1.

    The best Rare, the best Uncommon, and the best Common are blue.
    Richard Garfield made sinkhole a common, and that is what Magic is all about (?).

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Personally I thought he moved through the ranks way too quickly and I think he tries too hard to push the envelope, much like Rosewater... which is prob why he moved up the ladder so quickly

    They don't seem to have their pulse on older formats at all right now. Seems like they just invite up some pros before they do a b&r announcement and that's their main voices.

    The modern bannings are just ridiculous with little consistency. Half the cards on there I think wouldn't be on there if they just unbanned Mental Misstep.

    I still think banning mental misstep was a mistake in legacy as well, but it's a little early to be certain. If they want more interactivity, shouldn't you allow the #1 card that disrupts non-interactive decks to be legal?

    And transform cards... don't get me started. This isn't duel masters. I run 20-30 person drafts every week at my store and every single Inni draft we've done (a bunch already), there are new players (good) just completely lost when they see checklist cards (not so good :p). I patiently explain transform cards and checklists every single draft, but every time I do, I know somewhere Lapille is laughing maniacally.

    Anyway he's right on this one particular issue, Dredge isn't how Magic is supposed to be... but you can say the same about any non-interactive deck that breeds upon giant card pools in older formats.

    The problem with how they approach legacy is that Blue is just going to be the best color no matter what you do, because that's how they designed blue cards for years. By Rosewater's own admission, the color pie was out of whack for a long time and that caused alot of blue control decks to be just better than everything else.

    They banned Mental Misstep in the hope that non-blue decks could be more competitive... so now they empowered have a bunch of non-interactive decks or near non-interactive decks. Again, too early to tell, but already with a SCG in the bag you had a top 8 with 2 reanimator, 2 tendrils and 2 merfolk. Not exactly the sea of mid-range and aggro they were looking for, is it?

    You can't just make blue not the best color in older formats. You might as well just ban the color at that point. If you try to balance the pie in Vintage/Legacy when they spent years just making blue better than everything else, then you're basically going to kill those older formats.

    It's not like people don't want to play Legacy even though they know going in Blue is just the best color. They will stop playing if you make non-interactive decks the best deck.

    Quit while you're behind, Tom.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    I guess I'm weird, because I don't see anything he said that's really out of line.

    From a business perspective, WotC (and by extension the people who work for WotC) will like things that get people excited to play Magic, and dislike things that turn people off. And, well, "mulligan until I hit a piece of hate, hope that it sticks and that I get a second turn" is something that turns off many more people than it excites.

    In Legacy, fast (mostly-)non-interactive combo decks exist, yes. And they can exist there, and probably always will exist there, just as they can and probably always will exist in Vintage. Those formats work because they have Force of Will and very high barrier to entry; FoW keeps some of the worst excesses in check, and the barrier to entry means people really only get into the eternal formats when they're strongly committed to the game and past the point of being turned off the game by watching someone play solitaire for ten minutes before delivering the kill.

    Of course, Modern is a different story. It doesn't have Force, and is apparently meant to be the "eternal" format anyone can get into (and might become that format if a few key cards ever see reprints). This means there's the possibility of fast non-interactive combo that won't be held back by free countermagic, plus the possibility that players who aren't that strongly committed to the game would try it and get turned off hard by opponents pulling off turn-2 storm kills.

    That's why Modern has the "be safe and nuke it from orbit" ban list; that's why WotC's frequently stated that one of the guiding philosophies of the ban list is slowing down combo by a couple turns to let other archetypes have a chance.

    And yes, people -- even smart people who have influential positions -- are occasionally going to complain about certain types of decks. That's always been the case, and probably always will be the case. If you like those decks, this doesn't mean those people are stupid or that they're not as good at Magic as you are, just that they have a different opinion than you do.

  7. #107

    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin View Post
    It's not true. Archetypes don't beat decks. Decks beat decks. And they do so based on the cards they contain. Archetypes are only vaguely useful as a classification scheme, but nothing more than that.
    - Semantics.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    ^"mulligan until I hit a piece of hate, hope that it sticks and that I get a second turn"

    It's this distillation of the Eternal formats that what irks so many people about him. Hell, anyone who [doesn't like] Legacy or Vintage often cites examples of losing on turn two, and how no one likes to do that. Know what else really sucks? The Top player forcing a draw because of time when all you had was one more turn to get the win. The Burn deck that knocks you out of Top 8 contention. Thoughtseize into Hymn into Hymn.

    I know those weren't your words, but they're the words of people who don't have a firm grasp on the subjects of which they openly speak.

    They should unban Mystical Tutor and Mental Misstep. Now both are gone because it's easier to whine than build a sick deck.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by jandax View Post
    It's this distillation of the Eternal formats that what irks so many people about him. Hell, anyone who [doesn't like] Legacy or Vintage often cites examples of losing on turn two, and how no one likes to do that. Know what else really sucks? The Top player forcing a draw because of time when all you had was one more turn to get the win. The Burn deck that knocks you out of Top 8 contention. Thoughtseize into Hymn into Hymn.

    I know those weren't your words, but they're the words of people who don't have a firm grasp on the subjects of which they openly speak.
    Personally I'd draw a distinction between annoying decks in Legacy.

    On the one hand, there are decks that are incredibly annoying to play against, but where you at least feel like you had a chance to do stuff before they locked the game down and started playing solitaire. Enchantress, Lands and most Top-based control strategies call into this category.

    On the other hand, there are decks that reach the "one player doing stuff for ten minutes at a time" phase so quickly that you feel like you were never in the game to begin with. That's where Dredge, storm combo and a few others end up.

    Of the two, the latter are more dangerous to a newcomer's perspective, because you can easily walk away feeling like there was literally nothing you could have done, short of playing the same style of deck and going off a turn earlier than he did.

    (Also, I've been involved in Magic long enough to remember when a lot of these cards were legal in Type II, as we used to call it. Urza block was the one that drove me to quit the first time around, for largely this reason; I cut my teeth playing classic Erhnamgeddon, survived the Black Summer, and then promptly got fed up with the endless stream of dumb combo. So I can at least say I've held this position consistently for a decade)

    Quote Originally Posted by jandax View Post
    They should unban Mystical Tutor and Mental Misstep. Now both are gone because it's easier to whine than build a sick deck.
    I think both are better off banned; Mystical makes combo just a bit too fast and consistent, and Misstep holds down combo but also makes everything else a bit too homogeneous.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    If I didn't want to play with, and against, combo decks that can potentially win on turn 1 or 2 I wouldn't be playing Legacy. Its that simple. If you want to play the same 3 aggro decks against eachother for 10 rounds go play standard. Modern seems relatively combo free now if that's more your thing.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by TheArchitect View Post
    If I didn't want to play with, and against, combo decks that can potentially win on turn 1 or 2 I wouldn't be playing Legacy. Its that simple. If you want to play the same 3 aggro decks against eachother for 10 rounds go play standard. Modern seems relatively combo free now if that's more your thing.
    QFT.

    This is my response to anyone who whines about combo in ETERNAL formats. If you don't like fast combo and powerful U/x decks, you shouldn't be in this format, as they are pillars here.
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    Spikes are supposed to enjoy winning by leveraging their talents, but this card can't fetch the most SKILL INTENSIVE card in all of Magic?

    Clearly aimed at Modern plebs, not gonna be a pillar of our format.
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    I don't mind the occasional combo deck. However, I don't think that combo should ever be the defacto best strategy. Ironically, I think we have reached this point because of the banning of Mystical Tutor splintering combo into a thousand different decks instead of just a couple of streamlined onese, and the printing of Vengevine forcing a ban on SotF. Two things they did to try and push creature-centric formats only caused combo decks to explode in this one.

    I think the best solution would be to unban Mystical Tutor and Survival of the Fittest (because Survival decks actually were one of the things keeping Mystical Tutor decks in check alongside CBTop), and ban Vengevine. Oozes will still be around, but they're pretty easy to disrupt, especially now that everyone gets a free Extirpate.
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  13. #113
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by phonics View Post
    Personally I am concerned with the fact that he is willing to make the claim that something is or isn't magic. I think of magic as a whole to be more of a (game)engine than a game. The only rules that decide what is magic and what isn't are the rules of the game. These simply create the framework of how a game is played(starting life, turn steps, combat, spell speed ect), anyone that done in these parameters is magic. Like many have already said, what makes magic fun is the approaches different people take to try and win.
    I'm not defending the guy and don't want to appear as a WotC apologist, though I'm happy to appear as a voice of reason here.

    I get where LaPille's coming from on Dredge. Imagine it's your job to make the game “fun” for the most amount of people. While you can create cards that cater to certain subsets of your customer base, you ultimately need be sort of utilitarian about how the game gets created and keep your primary customer happy, which are not hard-core spikes, they’re the kitchen table players that are as interested in having a good time with friends, rather than simply winning. It’s a testament to the greatness of the game that it can be played in so many different ways by different types of people, but after all, it’s a card game. The reason games exist is to have a fun time, a distraction from the annoying demands of life.

    If that’s your filter when you sit down to play a game of Magic (i.e., you’re on staff to make it “fun”) it’s reasonable to have some assumptions on how the game “should” be played. Remember too that LaPille had twittered that just after returning from a local tournament where he played Dredge.

    Having played against storm and Dredge many times, it’s really a different kind of game. If you know what you’re doing and have a tuned list, these games are more like solitaire than an interactive two-player game. I remember playing against High Tide for the first time (a Grand Prix Trial for GP Philly in 2005). I was playing U/W fish and remember being bored watching my opponent fap off with his cards. It looked kinda fun on his end, a puzzle of sorts, but not exactly an engaging gaming experience.

    Same is true with Dredge. I hate playing against it, not because I’ll usually lose to it, just based on how uninteresting it is to sit on the other side of the table. Game 1 is usually a rout, then the hate comes in. If I get lucky and find my hate, I win; if I don’t, you win. Yippee. If you want to play Dredge and storm, go right ahead. They printed those cards, you’ve acquired them, have fun (or whatever) the way to you want to. It’s your right. But I wouldn’t slight the guy for having an opinion on how the game “should” be played.

    Quote Originally Posted by joemauer View Post
    Aaaahh, so Tom came at about the time Mythic rares popped up?

    Also, he arrived while I was getting out of standard. Hmm.
    That was far more likely a directive from marketing / brand, rather than R&D.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by majikal View Post
    I think the best solution would be to unban Mystical Tutor and Survival of the Fittest (because Survival decks actually were one of the things keeping Mystical Tutor decks in check alongside CBTop), and ban Vengevine. Oozes will still be around, but they're pretty easy to disrupt, especially now that everyone gets a free Extirpate.
    This doesn't exactly make sense seeing how Vengevine Survival didn't exist until after Mystical Tutor was banned, and Survival wasn't exactly an upper-tier strategy before Vengevine lists showed up.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by Bardo View Post
    I'm not defending the guy and don't want to appear as a WotC apologist, though I'm happy to appear as a voice of reason here.

    I get where LaPille's coming from on Dredge. Imagine it's your job to make the game “fun” for the most amount of people.
    I've played Magic for over a decade now. The first pack I ever bought was from Revised, but that was just to sell cards to kids at school. I didn't start playing until Urza's Legacy. I started going to tournaments during Prophecy (I was in boot camp in the middle there for a while). And I didn't actually play well until around Apocalypse. But I started playing a dozen years ago. And for a while there, I was incredibly involved in the game. I used to judge FNM's at a WotC store in San Diego (back when they still had them). I wrote bad articles on Brainburst and Starcity (for the love of god, please don't go looking for them). I organized local tournaments, played Type II religiously (and later Type I just as religiously) and bought more product than I probably should have.

    Today, I don't judge. I don't write articles. I don't give a fuck about local tournaments and I don't play any Magic whatsoever except for MWS and occasionally Cockatrice. I certainly don't buy product.

    I don't get involved in physical Magic for two reasons. One, the prices are ridiculous. There's this mindset everyone else has of what is an acceptable price to play this game and it's very different from mine. If I'm paying more than $20 for a card, it had goddamn well better have the word "Mox" at the start of its name. I bought a deck last December and went to a couple of SCG Opens over the course of this year, before having a friend sell it off for me. I cringed at the prices I had to pay on these cards. I could pay for a WoW account for the next decade for the cost of that 1 deck. Two, modern Magic sucks.

    I don't like dredge or storm. I play dredge every now and again when I get the itch. Same with Tendrils. But neither one is my favorite. I play them only when I get irritated at the stupid untuned bullshit I end up facing on MWS. It's my way of trying to force people to play real decks, not convoluted 5 card bullshit combos with a million ways to interact with the red zone and no way to interact with the stack. And that's what Wizards has been all about for the last half-dozen years. It's all about interacting with the red zone. And usually not at instant speed.

    And that's the thing. It's not that dredge is any more or less interactive, in the objective, than Goblins. If your deck is centered around interacting with the play zone, then no, you can't interact well with dredge. But if your deck is centered around interacting with the stack, you can't interact well with Goblins. The only reason that one is considered interactive and the other is considered uninteractive is because we're *used* to interacting with the play zone. And people are stubbornly sticking to that.

    Even when Vengevival was legal and dominating, people flat out refused to main graveyard hate. It's good against almost every fucking deck in the format, but they wouldn't main it. And then complained, when they lost, that Survival was impossible to interact with because their opponent can use it before they could destroy it. Fuck destroying it. Just Extirpate the Vengevines. Problem solved. Congratulations, your opponent has a terrible U/G Madness deck that wouldn't have been viable in 2006, let alone 2011. Why is Extirpate a horrible card to have to main and Swords to Plowshares is the second motherfucking coming of Christ? Because one has a longer history?

    But in order to market to the mewling masses of morons, they push this Starter version of the game, this fucking Portal version of the game. No good instants. Make all draw sorcery speed. No good unconditional counters. Make everything about board interactions, not stack interactions. And players like myself, players who have been there and been loyal all along, we get pushed aside. Fuck us, because there's more money to be made marketing the game as Candy Land than there is marketing it as Chess. When they talked about the transform cards, they said they felt it was a good idea because it worked in a game they had that was marketed at small childern in Japan. That's their vision for you. For us. To get us to play Magic-flavored Pokemon. Magic-flavored Yu-gi-Oh.

    To whoever said on the last page that the combat damage on the stack change didn't simplify things, here's the problem. You're right. It was almost always the correct play to put damage on the stack and then use the ability. But a number of cards were designed and their power level based around that. Those cards became useless with the change. The biggest thing, however, has nothing to do with the cards themselves and whether it's a correct play to use an ability pre-damage on the stack or post-damage on the stack (hi, Morphling!). The biggest thing is how it changed the game as a whole. It furthered the shift in advantage from defensive strategies to offensive strategies. While in theory, sacrificing a creature or using an ability could be done on the offensive (block my Legionnaire? I'll throw it at you), it was generally used while blocking. It's not that it simplified the act of using an ability, it's that it simplified the ENTIRE GAME. It simplified deck construction, it simplified aggressive strategies. It pushed the game towards all-in strategies and weakened reactive strategies, removing a lot of the thought process from the game as a whole.

    Because the tools to play reactively that are being printed today are so much weaker, comparatively, than the ones printed 10 years ago, the game is devolving into more "all-in" strategies and then narrow counter-strategies. In a format like T2, this means fast aggro and decks full of walls to stop fast aggro with ridiculous fatties (because that appeals to the mewling morons). And it sucks and people don't like playing it, but it works. It balances, somewhat. Get a little bit of a wider format, however, and you realize that there are too many all-in strategies for the narrow counter-strategies to work. You can build a deck that beats Zoo with a bunch of lifegain and walls and some fat ridiculous creatures, but you lose to anything that operates outside of the red zone. And since stack control has been pushed out, intentionally, by Wizards, there's nothing to keep those decks in check.

    Standard sucks. Extended is worse. There's no question there, no debate. Those formats are bad. That's why Legacy is so popular. People don't want to play that half-Magic. They want the real thing. Are there people out there that like it, people like TLP? Sure. There are also people who swear by diet sodas, but the rest of us just figure they're fucking insane and move on. But if one of those guys worked for Pepsi and was tweeting about how they hate sugary sodas and how they wish Mountain Dew had never been released, people would get a little pissed about it.
    Quote Originally Posted by Draener View Post
    You know who thinks it's sweet to play against 8 different decks in an 8 round tournament? People who don't like to win, or people that play combo. This is not EDH; Legacy is a competitive environment, and it should reward skill - more so than it does.
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by Aggro_zombies View Post
    I don't get the "stack damage removal dumbed down the game" argument.

    With damage on the stack, 99.99% of the time the correct play is to stack damage and then sac your duder for profit, regardless of the game state or matchup. The 0.01% of the time where that isn't the correct play simply serve as reinforcement for the fact that, in the vast, overwhelming majority of cases, it is correct to stack and then sacrifice.

    Without stacking combat damage, you actually have to make decisions about whether it is better to eliminate their guy or cash in yours for profit. This is especially apparent in Limited where creature combat occurs all the time and therefore these decisions are pretty routine.

    In short, we went from a universally correct way of doing things to having nuance. The only advantage for combat damage stacking was the ability to pull a fast one on someone who didn't know how those rules worked, which I guess is why people see it as "dumbing down".

    The ability to split damage at will almost never mattered except in bizarro corner-case scenarios where you could make yourself look clever with a Pyroclasm.

    EDIT: Sorry to get off-topic, but QQing about the M10 changes is just meh. They were nowhere near as wrenching as the 6E changes and have been fine over the long run.
    Eh, in my view they just traded weirdness for weirdness. As a newb I can understand not getting why you can sacrifice Mogg Fanatic before damage is dealt and still have him deal his damage. However they hardly traded simplicity for simplicity; deathtouch operates under its own definition of "lethal damage" which lets you assign the same weird combat damage, and blocking order is just as "wtf" as sac'ing a critter with damage on the stack; why do I, as an attacker, get to assign the order in which YOUR creatures block? And why should I be required to assign creatures with damage prevention/regeneration any damage at all? If you've got 3 1/1s and I attack with a 3/4, and you Giant Growth the first guy in the blocking order, I can't just kill the other 1/1s - you forced me to 0-for-1 myself. I can't make that work for me at all. There's plenty of plays lost and played gained by changing the rules.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by SpikeyMikey
    The first pack I ever bought was from Revised,
    Me too. Well, it was a starter of Revised and a couple of packs of Fallen Empires. (I quit playing from Mirage to Mirrodin, due to most of my friends drifting away / selling out of it).

    Quote Originally Posted by SpikeyMikey
    But in order to market to the mewling masses of morons, they push this Starter version of the game, this fucking Portal version of the game. No good instants. Make all draw sorcery speed. No good unconditional counters. Make everything about board interactions, not stack interactions. And players like myself, players who have been there and been loyal all along, we get pushed aside.
    You have to admit though, the art on the lands is awesome. :)

    And here I go as a WotC apologist again, ugh. Portal was for newbs -- a simplified version of the game that first time players could get into and not get too lost in the minutae of the rules. Back then, the Core Set wasn't built as it is today, with newcomers in mind. And can you blame WotC for that? They need new players to make up for losses due to attrition, which inevitably happens to most people who start playing the game. So, I don't fault them for their simpler sets, since they're not designed and sold with longtime players in mind.

    Portal, which wasn't made for you, was on the shelves in 1997; Tempest was the "expert" set on the shelf along with it.

    Otherwise, I'm not disagreeing with you, just moving the conversation forward.

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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Quote Originally Posted by Di View Post
    This doesn't exactly make sense seeing how Vengevine Survival didn't exist until after Mystical Tutor was banned, and Survival wasn't exactly an upper-tier strategy before Vengevine lists showed up.
    Retainer Survival decks had an extremely favorable matchup against Mystical Tutor decks even before Vengevine was printed. The only problem is that they lost horribly to Goblins, which kept them out of the spotlight for the most part. It was, however, an integral part of the metagame that helped keep MT decks from dominating.
    Quote Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin View Post
    This isn't the game of holding hands and friendship. This is a competitive game, and if we all sit around singing kumbaya and sucking each other's dicks, then a lot of people are going to go to a tournament and lose because their pile of 61 jank isn't the special unique snowflake that everyone on the Source says it was.

  19. #119
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    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Yeah. I actually have the 6th Ed. intro decks in that little plastic bag of cards that was hidden away. I have no problem with Portal or Starter in terms of what they were meant to do. But to push the entire game that way, that's where it frustrates me. I don't want to play Starter. I like a complex, thought provoking game. Granted, stupid games are better for me since I'm not very good at thinking quickly under pressure, but I like the challenge of an involved game.

    I happen to think the core sets were more newbie friendly back then; there were a lot of mechanics they wouldn't put in the core sets because they felt they'd be too difficult for new players. I mean, talking like 5th/6th/7th here. A/B/U/R obviously had a number of difficult cards (hello mono artifacts) and 4th was still early enough that they hadn't come up with a cohesive vision for the game yet.

    The art on the lands is awesome. The art in general is good. I mean, I love me some Foglio, but there was a lot of bad art back then. I'm looking at you, Stasis.

    Back to the challenge thing. That's why I quit playing WoW. I was in a top 50 US guild. And I remember back during Burning Crusade, we beat our head in against the wall night after night wiping on M'uru. A lot of people wouldn't find that fun. But I loved it. I loved pushing myself to the very limits of what I was capable of. Pushing to the limits and then finding those limits stretching. Then Blizzard realized that they had a customer base that had stretched to 11 million people and that most of those people were mouthbreathers. They declared that they'd never make another raid instance as hard as Sunwell Plateau again. Wrath of the Lich King came out and within 8 days, we'd cleared all the content the new expansion had to offer. It took 2 more weeks before we downed 3 drake Sartherion. It was another week before I quit playing entirely.

    That's what I feel is happening with Magic. Wizards is making the game easy mode because there's more money to be gathered from the idiots than from the intelligent people. If it weren't for Legacy, I wouldn't be involved in the game at all. I mean, I play some Modern here and there, but that format is never going to be what I want it to be. Wizards is too inept to manage it properly. And I wouldn't have been in the game to even know Modern came out if Legacy wasn't still a pretty solid format.

    But I know that eventually, with the power creep, Legacy is going to look like Modern eventually. Reactive strategies will be almost impossible to build and will have to be narrow in scope where they're possible.

    But to get back on topic, LaPille is dumb. That's really what 90% of this thread boils down to. We might as well rename it "LaPilleisms" and stick it next to a thread about W. They're on the same level, intellectually. Both are (or were, in George's case) in positions to do lasting damage to things we all love. Both have some vocal defenders claiming that the person in question isn't an idiot, just misunderstood or misinterpreted. And the world would be better served if both were wrapped in chains and tossed overboard above the Marianas Trench.
    Quote Originally Posted by Draener View Post
    You know who thinks it's sweet to play against 8 different decks in an 8 round tournament? People who don't like to win, or people that play combo. This is not EDH; Legacy is a competitive environment, and it should reward skill - more so than it does.
    Quote Originally Posted by Borealis View Post
    Plow their Mom every chance you get!

  20. #120

    Re: Tom LaPille - he's at it again

    Just wanted to chime in here and say that I started the game with Portal.

    And more red zone interactions have led to better Limited formats, I feel.

    EDIT: Also, reactive strategies are already pretty bad in Legacy. MMS was the closest true control decks have been to viable in a while and that card got banned. Now, if you want "reactive," you're going to have to play some sort of tempo-oriented blue deck or try to grind out incremental advantage every round with some sort of ponderous midrange blue control monstrosity.

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