I am all with you guys. I am so long in the game, I can't even tell you what 3/4 of the mechanics printed over the years do. WotC added 3 new mechanics PER expansion at times, just to completely forget them the next block. There is so much stuff with potential just being wasted and forgotten in time like Final Hour which was printed on 7 cards only, despite being such a great comeback mechanic. I hate keywords for the sake of flavor and marketing.
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Originally Posted by Echelon
The issue with mechanics/keywords is an interesting one:
1) On the one hand, Wizards is still traumatized by the failure of Mercadian Masques block, which nearly killed Magic back then. Part of this failure is blamed on the mechanics like free mana or Rebels which weren't recognized due to the lack of keywords.
2) Yet on the other hand, too many keywords were disliked, too, since it confused the masses, which was then used to justify the failure of Time Spiral block.
So WotC is torn between keywording fucking everything and not keywording too much, which results in stuff like Chroma/Devotion and Sunburst/Converge which are essentially the same mechanic with a new paint of color for the sake of marketing alone.
And yet we get stupid shit like Tireless Tracker after a landfall block or the already mentioned Inventor's Fair.
It's not a 10 on the Storm Scale if we don't call it that.
I bet the reasoning, if you ask WotC, for not using "Affinity" here is simply that people associate the keyword with the Mirrodin BlockIt's not a 10 on the Storm Scale if we don't call it that.
For me however, them desperately trying to evade "Affinity" and "Metalcraft" as keywords despite being present through the block, is just brickheaded and childish
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The level one thinking would definitely be that if a mechanic has been named before in blocks years ago they should adhere to that name now. The level two aspect to this is asking the question whether cognitive load for new players decreases or increases when keywords they haven't seen before (that's not in the set otherwise, or in the set but on very few cards) are included. Affinity is a good example.
I don't have an answer to the level two question, it seems that sometimes wizards gets it wrong (Tireless tracker etc). But I think it is important to ponder that R&D definitely have discussed this (they know that Gearseeker Serpents mechanic is the Affinity mechanic) and arrived at the conclusion that that it is for the best not to toss in too many keywords. Probably as you say because they have data and experience from earlier sets to back up the claim that too many keywords add too much cognitive load and lowers the enjoyment and ease of new players.
Design is difficult, but fun! :)
Why keyword something if you don't plan on using that keyword with a functionally same card? You could even put the reminder text on there.
This sums up a lot of the problem with what's going on with the game. What is the point?
There needs to be a separation between card design and set design for the health of the game as discussed earlier. I think MaRo is a decent card designer, but is he a good manager of the health of Standard? I'm not sure these things live in the same space.
I would be intersted to hear what people who play a lot of Standard think. I can not comment on the health of the Standard format, last time I was playing that format Goblin Sharpshooter was legal. I think with the change in perspective, things may reveal themselves that we miss. Not that I think everything would be suddenly sunshine, but the view would be an interesting one to hear all the same.
It is better to ask and look stupid then keep your mouth shut and remain so.
I hope your afterlife is filled with eternal torment.
Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
I have not played Standard in the last year or so, but in the time from RTR up until OGW (which is where I stopped playing Standard) it was a lot more interesting to me than any of the other constructed formats. One of my favourite things about Magic is metagaming though, and that is usually pretty big in Standard - the choice between maindeck Lifebane Zombie and Nightveil Specter in Mono Black was super interesting to me, but I can see how that kind of thing is not appealing to other players.
Don't mind me, i'm just writing about Pauper these days: theweeklywars.wordpress.com
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Kind of, but a lot of the problems can be easily solved if you make your keyword obvious enough. Some added mechanics are incredibly intuitive in gaming, take colors for example. People naturally will group things into colors in their minds. If Magic added a 6th color, purple, and had a new purple symbol everyone would understand what was happening fairly quickly. If they instead made a keyword "Lavender" and made cards with Lavender need to be cast with lands that also have Lavender, it would be unnecessary complication.
Landfall is a perfect keyword example, even if only one card in the entire Standard rotation has "Landfall" on it, it's still very easy to understand what it does after 1 read through. It does X when a land falls on your side of the table. Making connections easy is key.
Words like Chroma or Revolt are much worse offenders of this, and I don't imagine putting those keywords on the card would help much if it were just 1 card in a whole set. Slightly tweaking the keyword (chroma/devotion for example) is a huge red flag to me as it is far too similar.
WOTC only develops for standard and limited, so if the keyword isn't evergreen, they aren't using it unless it is a core mechanic of the set. Its basically them saying 'look this mechanic is significant to the set in some way' rather than using it like a traditional/ evergreen keyword.
I do understand this. It is the reason that so far that there is no Keyword for Mill. Because Mill is not a term that you can tell someone and have them just understand. Like Flying or Trample. The issue I have is when they come out and say "There are no returning keywords in this set" and what they really mean is "We did not keyword anything in this set". Its a pain. Because while I understand new players may not know ahead of time what Metalcraft is, everyone has a bloody phone now and shit like that comes up with a google search with no effort.
Edit:
Is it not the point of keywords to be used in place of text blocks? Whats the point if your just going to write out the rules long form?
It is better to ask and look stupid then keep your mouth shut and remain so.
I hope your afterlife is filled with eternal torment.
Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
Sure, but landfall is a fake keyword in the sense that every card has to get rules text anyway, and they already have 'not quite landfall' cards like Stone-Seeder Hierophant and Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle.
In general, I dislike the "keyword as a theme" thing, and would prefer to only see keywords when they facilitate clarity or actually shorten the text on cards. For me there's little difference between keywords like chroma and landfall where every card gets its own rules text and ones like devoid, ingest, and unleash where they could have just printed the "reminder text" on the cards and did it for every card that has the ability. When you can throw away the keyword, and the card works the same way with shorter text, it's bad design.
Keywords are good for things like protection, bestow or flashback where there's rules baggage that has to go somewhere else, when the key word is relevant for interaction like flying, and when they make for simpler or clearer templates like monstrous/monstrosity.
It's like WotC R&D did a survey and, interpreted the results as "people like novel key words" instead of "people like novel mechanics."
This is fair, and you make a lot of good points. The main benefit for adding more keywords is that if they are used frequently enough then they are a lot less memory intensive when you're looking at the board. If done correctly the single word makes a lot of sense.
Problem is they don't even do that correctly. They make up keywords for the sake of doing it, making it more memory intensive rather than less, and don't standardize what things should do (chroma vs devotion, all the variations of kicker). Which like I said before leads me to not even using cards that would be fun because I don't want stupid keywords in my cube when they only show up once.
That is hilarious. And potentially true!
Marketing: "What's the new mechanics and keywords for this block to get players excited?"
Dev: "ermm... converge?"
Marketing: "Sounds great!"
Dev: "sigh"
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles...rix-2017-02-09
Kinda suprising how fast they're continously killing off support for Modern. Hopefully that heavy focus on Standard is going to bite them in the ass.
Not a Standard player, but given that Kaladesh Standard was a 3.5/10 according to the playerbase that lead to multiple bans, just to result in a PT with 6/8 Mardu Vehicles, I'd say Standard is in a pretty shitty shape right now.
What percentage of players care about results in huge tournaments, I don't know. First big tournament Top8 was half B/G, then the next week it was over half CopyCat, now it was over half Vehicles. Kinda weird. There's a balance there between at least three decks, with Control and some other role players sprinkled in. I think it's a very open and fun format right now, maybe everywhere outside of the top half of a 10-round tourney.
No more GPTs seems like a real kick in the nuts to stores. How are you supposed to hit the planeswalker points threshold without them anyway? Just PPTQs?
I don't necessarily know how good Mardu Vehicles is. Yes, it spiked the Pro Tour big time, but it wasn't really on the public radar; before the Pro Tour, it was CopyCat and BG Constrictor that were getting all the attention. So it's hard to know how much of Mardu Vehicle's performance was the particular metagame, where it had game against the decks that everyone was expecting while not many people seemed to be expecting it (well, not counting the people who actually played the deck). I don't think 6 of the Top 8 being the same deck is particularly good PR, but we're going to need to see a few more weeks before we can really figure out what Standard will be like. If it is just a Mardu Vehicles-athon, though, that will be a real issue because what's even worse than banning cards is banning cards and the format staying bad.
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