I guess I’m an exception, then. I played my first Legacy event last week with a proxy deck, and I can’t wait to play again tonight. I’ve been spending the past week obsessively watching videos, reading primers, on discord, and thinking about how to buy into the format, and also converted my Modern Burn to Legacy.
I also had the incredibly good fortune to go undefeated, but I was fully prepared and expecting to go 0-x.
What is it with reddit and the constant attack on WotC? Do they even like the game?
I think it's really intersting how a lot of people "anthropomorphize" WotC as if it was a thinking entity. They are also obsessed with Mark Rosewater, Verhey and then you also have hundreds of youtube personalities, pros, twitch etc.
I feel like the last time I played before I stopped (RtR) this was not so... pronounced. Sure, you had ChannelFireball, SCG and other big sites but it all felt more calm. Less drama somehow.
Imagine you go to the store to buy some milk and you see that there's a new Mars bar with a real gold wrapper!!1! Let's immediately go to the Mars Inc subreddit and tell them how they are destroying their brand, ruining flavor, gatekeeping those of us that can only afford plastic wrappers (which are getting worse every year am I right guys???), make me want to quit I WILL NEVER BUY MARS BARS AGAIN.
UMA is expensive but so what?
Sums up toxic gaming communities, magic is no different.
https://www.gamespot.com/forums/game...nero-33401306/
https://www.ranker.com/list/video-ga...melissa-brinks
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ch-development
and a billion other links that address this issue
Nice, good to know I'm not imagining things. Thanks for the links, I'll look into it.
I think the thing is that it is sooo easy to be negative about things overall on the internet. You dislike something and you immediately get 10 people agreeing with you and if someone disagrees you shoot them down quickly with a one liner or a meme, the hive laughs. I don't know why it's so much harder to be enthusiastic about something. Well i guess it's because if you are, someone is going to point out something bad with a one liner and a meme and the hive laughs.
I would love more enthusiasm!
I don't! Just accept it, think about buying it, ask your friends "hey, what do you think about UMA?". Have a conversation. I also don't get the hype for sets, especially as the reality is most of the time worse than the hype expected. Maybe reddit is just a bunch of 14 year olds (no offence, I am serious here).
People blame MaRo because he's the closest thing to a face that WotC has. A number of issues that people have with the game itself stem from the "New World Order" design philosophy that he championed in several articles and online posts. Reading through asks on his tumblr page there also is an apparent disconnect between his vision for for the game and what some players like (guaranteed shitshow any time Pongify, Delver of Secrets, Imprisoned in the Moon, or white card draw comes up).
And for better or worse WotC as a company seems more interested in establishing Magic as a brand than making the best card game on the market.
WOTC never misses
"You either die a Onesto-Player, or live long enough to see yourself become a Dredger"
So does this guy make it a habit to bring new Magic packs into his light-tight bathroom with a flashlight?
This reminds me of when I learned that one could search Unlimited packs (any of the old plastic packaging). I think Revised was easy because the rare was the 4th card in the pack.
Listen up shitizens! http://www.noagendashow.com/
Be a part of the magic! OBDM https://ourbigdumbmouth.com/
All Spells Primer under construction: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...Tl7utWpLo0/pub
PM me if you want to contribute!
The fact Standard has been pretty awful for the last 2-3 years probably did a lot to make people like the company less. It's managed to improve a lot recently (and for the first time in a long time, there's a legitimately competitive deck that costs less than $100), but there was a long stretch of really bad Standard formats. There's just something fundamentally screwed up when you've made a format that somehow necessitates the banning of Rampaging Ferocidon.
Wow. That's some collection of winning cards. Hard to imagine a bad pack.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
Eh, I think the anger is justified, but also meaningless.
Masters sets aren't marketed at regular players. No one looks at them and thinks, "Man, if I spent three times as much on a draft of this format as I do on a regular draft, surely I'll have three times as much fun!" Masters sets are aimed at the growing segment of the community who view Magic as an investment vehicle where the bonds you're buying also happen to be game pieces.
People are tilted because the MSRP on these packs is frankly kind of insane but you have a very real chance of opening sub-$2 chaff like Lavaclaw Reaches in your rare slot and getting blown the fuck out. People were pissed at the last two Masters sets rubbing your face in what bad EV pack-cracking is, and this set takes that and cranks it to eleven.
A lot of this strikes me as fallout from Toys-R-Us going under. That was Hasbro's big sales arena and now that it's gone, they're flailing around a bit. I imagine they took a bunch of partially-finished products at WotC and are shoving them onto the market at maximum price to see what sticks under the assumption that Magic is a cash cow and the piles of 30-something collectors with shitloads of cash that drive Reserved List prices will snap up $300+ booster boxes because that's what rich Gen X and Millennial nerds do. You couldn't get away with this shit in a game like Pokemon where your average player is 12.
This segment of the community should not exist
It's just like the problem with housing: houses are this investment vehicle where if you buy into it you just hold and never lose value, but then over time it gradually becomes impossible for new people to enter the market and then society is fucked
Obviously a children's card game isn't as important in the grand scheme of things, and as long as the reserved list exists this situation will be somewhat unavoidable for those, but I don't understand why wizards promote this situation at basically every opportunity, even for cards that they can reprint.
They're so afraid of looking like yugioh where the 'masters sets' actually do drop the prices of cards by a lot and they put staples in precons etc. Why? Where does this fear come from?
You would think that after the success of those standard precons (with Hazoret etc) they might realise that there is demand for this kind of product in eternal formats.
Instead all we get is masters sets released on such a sparse schedule and with the MSRP jacked into the stratosphere that the prices of the cards don't even change
I wouldn't be surprised at this point that within the next 5 years we get a new replacement for modern with part of the justification being that the barrier for entry of modern is too high. I honestly believe wotc could make that decision. ("We don't want to reprint modern cards because people will be upset that we dropped the prices, oh well let's just crash the price of the whole format and start over").
WotC is so good at
1) Making/designing cards
2) Nothing else
The problems with Kaladesh standard are basically a blip. From what I can tell people think GRN standard is great and you have the whole 20+ year history of the game which has been mostly fantastic. "If you have to ban Ferocidon then you obviously fucked up" is such a stupid thing to say. The power level of cards is contextual, red was clearly looking like the best deck with an energy nerf so they took away its best tools vs control (Ruins) and go-wide/tokens (Ferocidon). If you want to argue that any standard ban shows wotc fucked up then fine, singling out the dinosaur is such a stupid nitpick though.
The problem is that all of their talent seems to be focused in that sphere of card design. It was funny listening to one of Rosewater's recent podcasts where he talked about the history of the flicker mechanic and some of the notable cards that use it. In the examples he gave:
- Astral Slide: Described it as if it only triggers when you cycle (not any player) and it only lets you target your own creatures
- Flickerwisp: Said it targets creatures
- Saheeli Rai: Apparently forgot that the tokens from the second ability have haste, and therefore suggested that you needed some kind of Scion of the Wild or Impact Tremors effect to win with the Felidar Guardian combo
I'm sure there were others. I'm not saying that these statements indicate that MaRo is incompetent or that if he was more aware of these nuances he would be able to design cards better. My point is that these mistakes are evidence that he barely interfaces with competitive mtg at all and that he therefore isn't suited to making decisions about it. (Not that this necessarily is one of his current responsibilities).
In a similar vein I once met Gavin Verhey who asked me what would be the 1 thing I would change about mtg if I had the option: after some thought I just said 'the reserved list'. His immediate response was something along the lines of "oh yeah I hate the reserved list, not being able to print functional thunder-spirit-equivalents is really annoying".
WotC seems so focused on acquiring and cultivating these teams of Rosewaters who are brilliant game designers but can't seem to do anything else (or are at least very out of touch with the other needs of the players). We have the Great Designer Search but what MTG really needs is the Great Marketer Search or the Great Tournament Organizer Search. The problem with that is Rosewater and friends are very capable of judging entrants to a designer search, but there doesn't seem to be any higher-up at WotC who has any idea of what it means to do a good job in these other roles, so we seem to be stuck in a feedback loop where these people just never get hired. It's frustrating to see the success of mtg riding solely on the strength of The Game, and then have wotc focus all its efforts on pushing that as much as possible. The marginal benefit of having somebody who can properly organize a pro tour series or recognize that the silver showcase is a dumpster fire or not treat a reprint set like an ultra-exclusive-limited-edition-collectors-item seems much greater than adding 1 more person who knows how to balance a planeswalker
Cool! Congrats, and welcome to Legacy, Lav Dafka! Post your experiences in the deck forums as you celebrate victories, and get feedback on how to approach the shifting metagame. There's also a rich history in the Source's archives that's always around to mine. It can be enlightening to see where decks started or revisit the viewpoints and contributions of former site members. If you want to watch more Legacy videos, Mox Boarding House/Card Kingdom streams Legacy weekly on Monday nights (6:30 p.m. Pacific Time) at https://www.twitch.tv/cardkingdom and does special programming on many weekends. Also, check out this thread, which is a year old but still contains many useful links to streams: http://www.mtgthesource.com/forums/s...Legacy-Streams
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