Tom LaPille - he's at it again

[hjalte]

the whole point of the mechanics of magic is to break the rules.

This!

I really enjoy playing against many different strategies, including what some people might not call Magic (dredge). The fun part about Magic, and especially Legacy, is the sheer number of cards available, which enables such a vast amount of interactions between new and old cards. The whole challenge of playing Magic is, in my view, winning against all these strategies. It is of course intellectually chalenging, but that is the whole point. If we can't have that in Magic, I'll play Go or Chess instead.

[Admiral_Arzar]

Seriously, I'm not sure I can handle any more of Tom Lapille's wisdom. The internet might just explode from the singularity of stupidity that emanates from anything he posts.

[RogueMTG]

I agree. If you look at the cards that get played, they all do something inherently broken or 'above the curve' for their mana cost.

-Tarmogoyf gets played over Leatherback Baloth because a 2cmc 4/5 > 3cmc 4/5.
-Even if Mind Twist were unbanned, Hymn to Tourach would still be better due to its mana-cost-to-effect ratio.
-Natural Order was a relatively fair card before the printing of Progenitus.
-Reanimator gets Iona (or some other game-winning creature) into play with a simple 1 or 2 mana spell.

Different formats have a different feel. If you want to enjoy MtG as someone like LaPille thinks it should be played, I think limited/draft is where you want to be focusing your attention. Every constructed format is going to build decks with the intention of breaking the game.

Also, from a flavor point of view, I think decks like Dredge, Storm, and Workshops are incredibly flavorful. You have the necromancer from a foreign land using bizarre forms of magic to summon a horde of the undead; you have a Lich-wizard using fantastic artifacts and blue/black magic to conjure up a lethal storm; you have the artificer who uses 'anti-magical' relics to defeat the more 'mundane' type of mages.

It's a bit more interesting that beating each other over the head with vanilla creatures and the occasional removal spell, don't you think?

This!

[DragoFireheart]

It's a bit more interesting that beating each other over the head with vanilla creatures and the occasional removal spell, don't you think?

-Aggro beats control due to too many threats.
- Control beats combo due to having enough answers to stop the combo players combo.
-Combo beats aggro due to being faster.

This is balance through variety. Wizards supported this view:

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazin...com/academy/22

There are also subtypes, but the basic three are combo, control, and aggro.

Modern is a demonstration of what WotC currently wants magic to look like. Frankly, we are seeing why their vision won't work. Variety ensures balance. Trying to force everyone to play a certain play style (play dudes, turn sides, cast Doom Blade) is why Modern is unbalanced. For such a style to work, you must lose variety (quantity of cards in fact) for such an idea to work. Otherwise, you get what we had pre-modern bannings of cards like Ponder and Preordain. If they want to maintain balance of Modern, they must either do one of two things:

A- Print all future cards in mind of how they will unbalance Modern.

B- Ban cards deemed too powerful in Modern.

The only way for their vision to work is if they literally destroy Magic the Gathering. As the years go on, more powerful combos will be made and will be used to break Modern, resulting in WoTC to either make bland cards (ruining Standard as well) or to make a ever growing ban list for Modern (which I suspect will one day be larger than Vintages banned list). Meanwhile, Legacy will likely be fine for the most part as it has enough variety of decks to ensure that a new deck coming out can easily be kept in check.

Variety = balance.

[GGoober]

You know what's more uninteractive than Dredge?

Lapille's brain.

In all seriousness, maybe he needs to play with dredge against dredge-hate. Fighting through a turn 0 Leyline and a couple of Crypts is perhaps more un-interactive for the dredge player than him winning game 1.

[sco0ter]

From a design or deck development point of view those degenerate decks are usually the most interesting ones. It's probably the most fun and most challenging to _develop_ broken decks or strategies.
BUT from a player's point of view some decks are just plain boring to play (against).
I think that's what Tom wants to say. And he is right.

Playing these kind of decks, must feel like playing against a goldfish.
And playing against those decks is boring as hell. Whenever I play against Dredge or Storm online, I think "why I am actually wasting my time here?"

[Wereodile]

This!

I really enjoy playing against many different strategies, including what some people might not call Magic (dredge). The fun part about Magic, and especially Legacy, is the sheer number of cards available, which enables such a vast amount of interactions between new and old cards. The whole challenge of playing Magic is, in my view, winning against all these strategies. It is of course intellectually chalenging, but that is the whole point. If we can't have that in Magic, I'll play Go or Chess instead.

I fully agree!

I am not going to pout just because I lost to Dredge or Storm, you adapt and come back stronger. Knowing the meta is as much a part of the game as building decks.

[Aggro_zombies]

Guys, I think we're all forgetting here that dredge and storm can't beat a Great Sable Stag.

Problem solved.

[GGoober]

Just be careful, Tom seems to be a guy who could chance upon this thread and get a nerdrage and perma-ban this format, because you know, it's the only format left that is actually fun/diverse/interactive. Too bad too many n00bs want to get into this format and then QQ about banning everything.

[nayon]

LaPille retweets MTGComedian: "I was about to write a joke about storm, but I just got Tendrils'd for 22 before I could type the first word."

[Zombie]

because you know, it's the only format left that is actually fun/diverse/interactive.

Pauper exists. It's not as widely played as Legacy, but the MTGO format is defined, diverse and fast. It's the last one that feels like what Magic used to feel like, probably because mana is an actual gameplay concern, not a wallet one, and game-changing cards are rare. You really have to work to turn tempo around.

[GGoober]

Wow, lol, that guy is SO bitter it's not even funny.

I actually fully support pauper (I have 4 decks built myself), but no one plays it at my region. Pauper is actually much more diverse and deck-building/meta-game planning than Legacy (at the moment, thanks to SCG circuits making people just play flavor decks of the week.)

[Zombie]

Not really bitter at Magic, I'm comfortable with Pauper and Highlander. It's a pity the other formats are boring or too expensive but not terribly bothersome.

You want bitterness, you look at videogames. The whole industry is going to hell and is blissfully unwaware of it. I'm lucky I still have my cardboard crack ^^

What Pauper decks do you play, btw?

[UnderwaterGuy]

Pauper is definitely one of the top 3 formats, I'll agree with that. It's biggest problem is similar to Legacy's, it is hard to find people that play it. If it starts to get more popular in paper magic I'd be really happy. I play UR Post which is a fun deck and the meta is diverse enough, even with its own cute Dredge-like deck that runs Golgari Brownscale :D.

[Wereodile]

I actually fully support pauper (I have 4 decks built myself), but no one plays it at my region. Pauper is actually much more diverse and deck-building/meta-game planning than Legacy (at the moment, thanks to SCG circuits making people just play flavor decks of the week.)

I Love Pauper as well (I also have 4 decks built) but it's hard to convince my friends to play as they don't get to use all of their expensive toys.

Back on topic I do like the back and forth style of play or "Proper Magic" as LaPille would call it but the game is built around 10,000+ unique pieces and with that comes almost endless possibilities. Sometimes those interactions end up being Dredge or Storm but hey that's the nature of the beast and people like LaPille should be applauding the players who never cease innovating and moving the game forward.

[TheCramp]

I think we have to dial it back to one of Toms assertions. Saying "Such and such is not magic," demands that we define magic. Which he does, "playing lands and playing spells, no sitting back and not doing anything for turns." Ok fine. Lets look at the examples: Dredge; plays lands, Plays spells, In the early turns. Right off the bat, the definition has fallen apart. As much as a spike as I am, I still like to think of magic as a wizard dual. To wizards locked in combat. As long as the game still resembles that I can get with it. Even in a tournament setting I like this. You meet, fight, someone wins, you think about how your leveraging your abilities, adjust your approach (sideboard) and fly back into the fray. Dredge is some fucking oddball swamp necromancer launching a zombie assault out of the muck, sometimes sacrificing sky-bound squids and little imps to unearth some long dead Ent (woodfall primus) from the mire who fills in your moat for the zombies to swarm over. Awesome.

I can get behind that. I think if some effort was made in getting people to understand the games in these terms, we might have an easier time including people into the format. When the format warps around a card, or a strategy, by all means manage it with bannings. But to come at it saying an entire approach that compels many players, and brings them into the game and into this format, is somehow bad... Well that concerns me.

What I don't want to see is Magic become World of Warcraft, where is you find some interesting interaction within the game, you may very well be punished for it. For example, currently people progressing in heroic Fireland's that play enhancement shaman figured out that Caster Gear- stuff with Intelligence, rather than Agility as Blizzard Had intended for enhancement Shaman, is better for their characters. Blizz had not intended this, but the theory crafters and curious among the players figured this out. All the more cool because Shaman have long stood behind other classes in the same rolls in the game. Blizz can just be like, that's not what we intended, and bamn, hotfix, doesn't work that way anymore. Now that's fine they have their reasons.

Wizards, however, have been billing Magic as a first person thinker (for the Xbox game) and say that legacy is where you can play all your old cards. I like that. But to say that we, the players, when we explore the bizarre interactions of cards they print, are doing something bad. I take exception to that. I really don't want wizards to mediate my engagement with their game in that way.

[SpikeyMikey]

[B]-
Modern is a demonstration of what WotC currently wants magic to look like. Frankly, we are seeing why their vision won't work.

I agree that Modern doesn't work. I disagree as to the why.

It's not that they don't have balance (although they don't) between the 3 pillars. Legacy has no balance between pillars either; the bulk of any tournament and the bulk of the decks that perform well are some flavor of aggro control. Whether it's Merfolk or Bant or Rock or any other deck, you're probably playing, from a strategy point of view, the same thing. A little disruption, a little removal, some efficient creatures and some way to generate incremental advantage in the midgame. The disruption varies, from Force to Wasteland to Thoughtseize. The removal varies from Dismember to Swords to Vindicate. The creatures vary from Lord of Atlantis to Tarmogoyf to Knight of the Reliquary. The incremental advantage varies from Standstill/Silvergill to Stoneforge to Dark Confidant. But the decks are very formulaic in their actual strategy.

The reason that Modern is the clusterfuck that it is is because of Wizards obsession with turning creatures sideways. They don't have good balance between spells, creatures and non-creature permanents. Not in terms of power level, anyway. Without good counterspells and without broad hosers to keep extremely narrow strategies in check, the format is going to bounce from 1 combo deck to another until they've banned enough things to turn it into Zoo mirrors. Because Wizards has been printing creatures and creature-related cards that are leagues ahead of what they're printing in categories like countermagic or land destruction or hosers, they've created a format that is incapable of being reactive; the only legitimate strategies are basically all-in because the tools do not exist to sufficiently interfere with your opponents game to go long. The threats are so much stronger than the answers that the only answers worth playing are the ones you use to guard your threats.

I would also like to point out that this can't all be planted on Tom's shoulders. The players are to blame too. Jimmy Casual wants to go to Friday Night Magic and play his Craw Giant.dec. We all wanted to when we first started. You want to put that Lure on that Craw Giant and swing and laugh as it decimates your opponent's board. Damn that asshole with his Counterspell or his Icy Manipulator! Damn the Ice Storm or Sinkhole that kept you from getting to Craw Giant mana. If your opponent couldn't play these cards, this Craw Giant thing would kick ass! So you bitch. And you bitch some more. That's not FUN, you say, that's not MAGIC.

And let's be honest. No one likes getting locked out of the game. No one likes losing a game they were never in. It doesn't matter whether it's because your opponent is playing an LD deck or a prison deck or a 20+ counterspell control deck or just because you got mana screwed. It's not fun. It sucks. But those LD tools, those prison tools, those counter tools need to exist because even if Counterspell and Icy Manipulator and Ice Storm and Sinkhole are banned, your Craw Giant deck still sucks. But what people are playing instead is Dark Ritual into Black Vise or Channel into Fireball.

And that's why Magic is the way it is. That's why Standard sucks and is driving people by droves into Legacy, where sure, there are decks that you can't interact with, but it's real Magic, not this red zone Pokemon game that Wizards is trying to shove down your throats now. That's why Extended was so bad they were forced to revise it's size multiple times to try and make it playable and then finally replace it with another format entirely. That's why the Modern experiment is failing. Because the players got what they wanted. They got a format where 6 mana creatures are where it's at. They got a format where the offensive tools far outstrip the defensive ones. And Craw Giant.dec still sucks. Because there's always something more broken to play, but it's never a "fun" deck.

The only way for their vision to work is if they literally destroy Magic the Gathering. As the years go on, more powerful combos will be made and will be used to break Modern, resulting in WoTC to either make bland cards (ruining Standard as well) or to make a ever growing ban list for Modern (which I suspect will one day be larger than Vintages banned list). Meanwhile, Legacy will likely be fine for the most part as it has enough variety of decks to ensure that a new deck coming out can easily be kept in check.

Variety = balance.

Nitpicking a little, but the Vintage banned list is incredibly short. Ante cards + physical dexterity cards. The Vintage restricted list is long.

From a design or deck development point of view those degenerate decks are usually the most interesting ones. It's probably the most fun and most challenging to _develop_ broken decks or strategies.
BUT from a player's point of view some decks are just plain boring to play (against).
I think that's what Tom wants to say. And he is right.

Playing these kind of decks, must feel like playing against a goldfish.
And playing against those decks is boring as hell. Whenever I play against Dredge or Storm online, I think "why I am actually wasting my time here?"

If you're a bad player, then those decks are boring to play against. I don't particularly *like* playing against storm or dredge, but I would be lying if I said those weren't the most tense, high stakes games I play. The whole game is distilled into a few turns and a mistake by either player can spell instant doom. I can't think of a time I've played against storm and felt bored. Even when they're going off, I'm looking to see if they fuck up or if there's an opportunity for me to make some last-ditch effort to fuck it up for them.

If you feel like you're wasting your time, that's because you're just autopiloting your deck instead of looking at maximizing the advancement of your goals with every play or because you're playing a deck that's so bad it has no hope of ever winning. But I've 2-0'd dredge decks and lands decks and storm decks while piloting things that should have no business even stealing a game.

[Wereodile]

Dredge is some fucking oddball swamp necromancer launching a zombie assault out of the muck, sometimes sacrificing sky-bound squids and little imps to unearth some long dead Ent (woodfall primus) from the mire who fills in your moat for the zombies to swarm over. Awesome.

That was awesome, You are the mayor of flavor town.

[GGoober]

I used to hate playing dredge and against Dredge (I still do). But when you really stand back, one cannot stop but be amazed at how the game mechanics created a monster that is Dredge. It's a scary yet beautiful thing. I'm always in awe when I read the first articles when Vintage manaless Dredge was being developed. I was just speechless that deck-building could take an entire new level.

It's sad that the people involved with designing and balancing the game don't find such beauty in the product they created. What I really love about MTG and the game is that at any point you think the game is dead and stagnating, the developers do something to create entirely new mechanics that revitalize the game, and the community/gamers experiment and put new ideas out to test. What Tom is bitching about goes very against what I find most attractive in this game. The guy either needs to grow up a little or learn to know that the game isn't just for him and his kins, but rather, for the entire community that plays the game.

[nayon]

I used to hate playing dredge and against Dredge (I still do). But when you really stand back, one cannot stop but be amazed at how the game mechanics created a monster that is Dredge. It's a scary yet beautiful thing. I'm always in awe when I read the first articles when Vintage manaless Dredge was being developed. I was just speechless that deck-building could take an entire new level.

It's sad that the people involved with designing and balancing the game don't find such beauty in the product they created. What I really love about MTG and the game is that at any point you think the game is dead and stagnating, the developers do something to create entirely new mechanics that revitalize the game, and the community/gamers experiment and put new ideas out to test. What Tom is bitching about goes very against what I find most attractive in this game. The guy either needs to grow up a little or learn to know that the game isn't just for him and his kins, but rather, for the entire community that plays the game.

WOTC's policy is "attract as many newcomers as possible to make as much $ as possible", so they want to keep the game simple and approachable. It's a very flawed strategy imo, putting potential customers over the community.