It's actually a known issue with internet communication and not unique to TheSource.Originally Posted by Finn
Face to face interaction conveys much more of the intended meaning because you can hear sarcasm and see someone rolling their eyes.
Emojis are the bastard children of :-) ;-) and so on and are unfortunately necessary to convey the missing tone even though it makes the poster look like a 5 year old.
I think that was exactly the point of the Wizards quote... they absolutely did not sit around the office considering the effect on Eternal. They saw a broken creature that was tempered by it's invulnerability to only 1 player in a multiplayer game.
If they balanced out the decks properly in terms of chase cards, this wouldn't be a problem. I predict that the BG is going to sell like hotcakes while nobody is going to want the RW one.
It never ceases to amaze me how Wizards intentionally gimps their product. But it's the same with MTGO.
Just like they could have made strictly better duals with some minor Commander-only advantage to get around the RL and sell a bazillion precons this AND next year.
Maybe I just have a different read on things - I don't think they intentionally gimp their product, I think they hamstring their design process, and it leads to product that's tilted n power level but it "comes by it honestly", as it were.
Like look at how they setup the color pie such that Black lost so much of its actual identity to concerns that started by trying to reinforce boundaries (and partially to make creatures matter, but w/e). I can dig the notion that Black can't just pay life to do WUBRG effects but... the fuck happened to tutoring, card draw, LD? Design's oversight made development really fucking hard, and now Black is sort of in this weird "I'm just like Green but I kill stuff" place.
The Blue confluence being "the good one" is just another pointer to Eternal disconnect, though given the product it's hard to understand how that can actually happen.
Black still gets "cards for life". Cheap tutoring is considered too powerful and LD as "unfun". Black also lost a good chunk of "efficient, cheap creatures with drawback" because it stepped too much into red's territory - instead, they make now fatter creatures with higher toughness than power (because that totally isn't white's territory.
I agree that Black suffers from its identity crisis for a while.
Yes, I got this. I was fooling around myself. It is just a matter of perspective: if you like broken stuff like Dark Depths or not. I don't like it (Marit Lage as 20/20 Token is fine, but getting it for almost free is just broken within the meaning of faulty game design (the counters should go up not down)) so in that fictional situation of your joke I would rather hope that there were really no simpler options to remove those counters from Dark Depths than this new 6cc vampire. :)
And I liked your joke about killing opponent twice! Nothing better than hyperdeath! :D
Well, they want to sell packs, don't they?
I don't really see the problem. Serum Visions does not compare well to a format-destroying abomination like True Name Nemesis.
I'm sure they could have wasted one small thought on 1-vs-1 formats in general, then they would have known how stupid that design was.I think that was exactly the point of the Wizards quote... they absolutely did not sit around the office considering the effect on Eternal. They saw a broken creature that was tempered by it's invulnerability to only 1 player in a multiplayer game.
And it would have been so easy to fix by wording it to only work in multiplayer situations. WotC are sometimes so @§#&%!
I agree, though I get it. It's hard to get players to like mechanics that are like "sacrifice a land, play a 5/3 for 3" or similar; because it feels bad when it doesn't work. It's also hard to differentiate the calculating nature of Black "win at any cost" from the reckless nature of red's "go get 'em!"Black still gets "cards for life". Cheap tutoring is considered too powerful and LD as "unfun". Black also lost a good chunk of "efficient, cheap creatures with drawback" because it stepped too much into red's territory - instead, they make now fatter creatures with higher toughness than power (because that totally isn't white's territory.
I agree that Black suffers from its identity crisis for a while.
Black still always felt different though. "Discard a creature and you get a 4/4 for 2" or whatever felt like it made sense. As do thoughtseize penalties "this will hurt you much more than it will hurt me" kind of thing or the old "I don't need to kill black/artifact creatures" dichotomy of black kill spells, swampwalk, and fear. Calculated risks and restrictions
Red should get efficient creatures with the "no blocking" drawback rather than Black or both; as that's the reckless side. Sell all of your armor for guns and go crazy. Red's spells should be powerful, but limited in application (Bolt being a good example; as there are a lot of things it can't get you out of.) A lack of control, but power oozing from your fingers.
They've gotten better about Red, but the longer we go, the more Red eats Black's color pie and black just becomes "Draws cards or gets stuff from the graveyard." This in fine and good to a degree, but it makes things super predictable.
Most of Black's "pay life to do xyz" stuff ended up tossed aside though, right -- cards-for-life is a thing but it typically is unplayable. They are horrible at really pushing "greatness at any cost", which I get because it used to bend the color pie butnow it's assy
It's not intentional: "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence." Also, it's really, really hard to make five separate decks that are all equally desirable to all the different varieties of Commander player. The RW deck is pretty Timmy-tastic, for example, and has Gisela to entice players looking to go ham with natively fat creatures. It has reasonable board control as well and will give control players an option. I think its biggest sin is that neither of its new commanders are particularly interesting.
This they won't do, for the same reason they didn't put enemy fetchlands in these. They want these to be bought by Commander players. If they put enemy fetches or some other expensive Constructed staple in them, it would be True-Name Nemesis all over again, except even worse because speculators, value traders, and Constructed players would be hoovering up 4+ copies of every deck. If you just wanted to pick up a deck to battle against your friends, you'd either be shit out of luck or paying out the wazoo for it. That was enough of a disaster for the actual Commander players the first time around that Wizards won't do something like that again.
So it's likely we are waiting for their next external only Booster product for our next Flusterstorm.
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?
They don't put in enemy fetchlands because they need them for a future shitty set to sell.
The problem with TNN was that it was only a single deck and the rest of the box was just junk, leaving store owners with dead weight.
If everything is desirable and sells like hotcakes, I don't see a problem. Just print properly according to demand.
But then again, Wizards couldn't even be assed to estimate the BFZ fatbox demand.
It's possible they will put out a Legacy Masters at some point, but since it won't contain duals or niche-but-expensive Legacy staples, the player dissatisfaction with such a product would be high. Well, high until people start furiously cracking packs in pursuit of foil mythic Force of Wills.
They may also put cards like this in a Conspiracy-style set, perhaps even the inevitable Conspiracy II. People will still be interested in drafting out of someone else's box even know they won't get to keep the cards.
Otherwise, there's no reason they can't sneak Eternal playables into Standard. Ad Nauseam did nothing in its Standard format but was the backbone of Legacy Storm for a long time, so it's certainly possible to create cards that are great in larger formats but still safe in small ones.
EDIT:
Barook, I like you, but I do not think this level of cynicism is justified or particularly healthy. I work at an LGS doing card and sealed product sales for Magic. There is absolutely a huge community of people who would buy this product if it contained high-value cards solely to buylist as many of those cards for profit as possible. They would not play Commander with these decks; indeed, most of them don't play Commander at all and don't care about the format except for its ability to make bulk rares and uncommons slightly less bulky at random intervals. Regular players who may or may not play Commander but who are definitely in tune with the MTG Financials scene would also buy these decks to sell or trade off the valuables and leave the rest in their collection. Some regular players looking to complete, say, a playset of fetches for Modern may decide that paying a slight premium to get four copies of a deck is worth it under the assumption that they can dump the rest to break even and would pile on. Meanwhile, players who actually play Commander as their primary format and who want a copy of the decks because they want those decks specifically are either looking at paying 150+% of MSRP prices at an LGS or doing the rounds of perpetually cleaned-out big box stores.
Unfortunately, this last group of people is the group for whom these products are made. Wizards really, really wants to avoid the feel-bad of having their decks cleaned out everywhere for months by people who couldn't give two shits about Commander while the actual Commander players are sad. They especially want to avoid that because they realize there are certain things they can only do in Commander products (like Command Tower), but enemy fetches can be dropped anywhere, to move any product. There's just zero reason to spice up a product that will already sell well to its target audience with bait for people of different audiences.
Last edited by Aggro_zombies; 11-07-2015 at 12:33 PM.
I really don't think Wizards cares about Legacy at this point. Otherwise they wouldn't have printed Cruise and Dig in the first place.
you don't have to think it, they've flat out said they don't test eternal formats...
Play 4 Card Blind!
Currently Playing
Legacy: Dark Depths
EDH: 5-Color Hermit Druid
Currently Brewing: [Deck] Sadistic Sacrament / Chalice NO Eldrazi
why cards are so expensive...hoarders
But obviously they do because they banned both...?
Baleful Strix and Strategic Planning were also in there, if memory serves. Strategic Planning was actually quite expensive before it was reprinted. Baleful Strix's price tanked as a result of people cracking the deck to get TNN and WOTC printing more copies in an attempt to answer demand.
That had nothing to do with Legacy.
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'm pretty sure their care level is just slightly above 'lets kill it.' Lets be honest here, its 2015 and they still print way more good blue cards than any other color, they only 'test' for a meta they think will exist a year down the road, and a limited environment, but still print things like pack rat. I think they've also established that they don't care about what is happening to prices, and that any actual reprint is probably just a happy accident that happens to alleviate prices. I expect nothing positive from current WOTC.
Say what you like, the fact that we did not end up with another TNN tells me that they do care and have learnt. Fine, Blue is the strongest. So we live with that. We have since the start of the game. The thing here is, they don't test for Legacy and made a mistake in standard. Forgiveable. They don't test for legacy in commander and they made a mistake. Then they learnt from it. Forgiveable. They make strong blue card, the earth still spins. Take a breath and play on.
Lands is still a fine deck and I am happy to have a new toy to try out.
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?
Wizards did something right for once. Combo gets a niche tool, we get a couple graveyard synergy creatures, and a couple cool GSZ targets. Interesting cards without breaking the format.
The lack of interesting staples (which they have been pushing hard in other supplemental constructed products) makes me wish I didn't preorder a set of decks. I guess they'll be in storage for a while now.
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