Maybe I'm just an old fart, but what's with all of these new mechanics that dump stuff into some game zone that can't be interacted with by 99% of cards? Emblems, experience counters, Eminence, The Monarch, Energy, and now the City Blessing.
One of the best things about Magic was how players could interact with just about everything, whether it was the board, hands, lands, or even phases of the turn. But in just the past few years, there's been a flood of stuff that just materializes and has an effect on the game, but doesn't actually exist within it.
Seems like sloppy design.
I was fine with Emblems, since they were part of a new card type that significantly affected MtG in major ways. They felt significantly epic to go along with the flavor of planeswalkers.
But yeah, I agree with the notion that the recent introduction of all these newer emblem-esque mechanics is kind of dumb. It seems like they could have figured out an alternative way of incorporating these mechanics without having to introduce things that can't be interacted with.
I actually don't mind the existence of Monarch cards, but it feels like they misstepped a bit with them. It felt like they were trying to establish a sub-variant to regular Magic revolving around the mechanic, but the fact that Monarch stuff was printed in Conspiracy made those cards (and the Monarch business) legal in Legacy by accident.
I don't have a particular problem with the other stuff you mentioned (though Energy feels dangerously close to retreading the Snow mana bungle) with the exception of emblems and Eminence. I always thought Indestructible and "can't be countered" were really stupid, but this is next-level weirdness. Why make something that has literally no answers except winning the game faster? Why introduce another card type when tokens have existed for ages? Why make a card that you don't actually have to play to win the game?
(As an aside, the thing that bothers me most about energy counters—and a number of other things you mentioned—is less that they now exist and more that I'd be willing to bet it'll be a decade or more before they're revisited, if ever. It's rather like the new approach to tribal mechanics: print one block that focuses on Brushwaggs and Evil Eyes, then don't ever print another Brushwagg or Evil Eye.)
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What was there reason for doing away with tribal spells? I liked tribal spells - thought there could be a lot of potential there.
Probably thought of as too complicated for newer players, considering cards like Ancient Zigguraut and Cavern of Souls that add mana for creature spells. Could be easily confused when your Caverns on Goblins doesn't make mana for your goblin spell Tarfire.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/article...t-1-2011-09-19
"So what happened? Let's flashback to Innistrad*design. As I was doing a set with a tribal theme, I used the tribal card type wherever I could. Moan of the Unhallowed, for example,*was*a tribal sorcery – Zombie. The problem was that it's very hard to draw the line. If a set uses tribal then it wants to go on any card that has a definable flavor. As this set is top-down, that meant that a majority of the noncreature cards were using the tribal card type.
The end result was that the cards were getting wordier but it seldom mattered. Most tribal (theme) cards cared about creatures and so weren't applicable to be tribal (type) cards. The one big exception was Zombies as there are multiple ways to get Zombie cards out of the graveyard, thus I believe the reason that I keep getting asked the question on this card.
We playtested with tribal, and I kept getting the same note that it seldom seemed to matter. In the end, we made the call that it wasn't adding enough to the game play to offset its inclusion, which both made the cards wordier and caused more confusion."
To a layperson like me I would think the solution would have been to make it matter, right? Like if you see that tribal cards only care about creatures, you make them care about non-creatures too. Maybe "whenever you cast [tribe]" instead of "if you control X [tribe] creatures".
Rules-wise tribal is unintuitive since it's a type, rather than a supertype. Basically, the way the subtype system works doesn't accommodate sharing subtypes between types, tribal is a crufty patch for that.
Mostly, I think it's that they decided that they just didn't like the way it works mechanically. They had to redo a bunch of old cards like Goblin Lackey to have "[subtype] permanent card" and newer cards like Warren Instigator all get the anti-tribal template of "[subtype] creature card." It's disingenuous for MaRo to turn around and say "it doesn't matter" when they're clearly deliberately not making it matter.
Last edited by rufus; 12-21-2017 at 01:13 PM.
I heard the also canceld tribal lands! And thats a good thing.
“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Monarch is great for edh players. For competitive magic, they are all meh.
Tell that to Gideon of the Trials/Gideon, Ally of Zendikar...
Last edited by Jander78; 12-27-2017 at 02:24 PM. Reason: Fixed card typo
Sneaky Pirates of Doom - Not really a Legacy Team anymore.
Last edited by Jander78; 12-27-2017 at 02:25 PM. Reason: Fixed card typo
I disagree. Outside of blocks with major tribal components, it really doesn't matter for either Standard or Limited that your card is "Tribal Instant - Wizard" or whatever, because cards that interact with creature types basically won't exist in those environments. The issue arises from player expectations: once you open that can of worms, every time you don't put the tribal label on a spell that clearly seems to be associated with some kind of homogeneous faction, players will bitch about it. I think they realized that tribal, while it was a great way to push you to play non-creatures in the clusterfuck of Lorwyn, also committed them to doing a bunch of other things for the rest of the game's life that they didn't necessarily want to do.
I agree. I've long wondered why a bunch of cards aren't Tribal, and though not retconning cards like Goblin Warrens or Elvish Fury makes sense from a design perspective, it certainly doesn't from a flavor perspective (for what it's worth).
I'm curious as to why they made "Tribal" a card type instead of a supertype like "Legendary" or (ughh) "Snow."
All Spells Primer under construction: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...Tl7utWpLo0/pub
PM me if you want to contribute!
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