Magic The Gathering

[macrodegenerate]

Unlike God or Deity which are fine to stay in.
Or that recent set where they parodied the Norse pantheon. Or Egyptian gods. Or Japanese mythology

Tbh, I'm quite tired of the parodies of culture or literature sets. I find that the best planes aren't really based off of anything except for lore, themes and gameplay mechanics.

Zendikar is still revisited today as a plane highlighting the struggle between nature and those willing to brave it and the unnatural which seeks to subjugate them.

Ravnica was an amazing experiment in showing the subtitles of color interactions in lore. The different guilds representing some play styles or themes for color combinations. With these styles or themes being represented in flavor.

Innistrad is a representation of gothic horror combined with some original elements. The original elements are what made the plane special though, and the lack of those has really screwed over the last set.

Then there is shandlar, lorwyn, tarkir and the list goes on and on. Makes it look like WOTC is just calling it in.

Somebody needs to hammer Rosewater about how black being the color of evil / death is racist. I wanna see the faggot break the color pie more.

The saddest thing about the censorship in magic is that it comes from a fear to comply with bigoted and ignorant people, instead of compassion and a genuine desire to do good.
Black colored creatures are often White people, Yawgmoth the biggest bad of them all, whose final form was described as a murderous plague cloud of all of the evils of the world, was originally a White man centered in Black. By contrast One of the most popular planeswalkers is Teferri, a selfless and heroic Black man with secondary colors in White. The colors have always had a clear set of ideologies, principles and play styles associated with each. WOTC continues to miss an opportunity to highlight he diversity of their characters ideologies(represented in a cards color) and how they transcend racial, gender and ethnic identity.

 

[Ebonic Tutor]

The saddest thing about the censorship in magic is that it comes from a fear to comply with bigoted and ignorant people, instead of compassion and a genuine desire to do good.
Black colored creatures are often White people, Yawgmoth the biggest bad of them all, whose final form was described as a murderous plague cloud of all of the evils of the world, was originally a White man centered in Black. By contrast One of the most popular planeswalkers is Teferri, a selfless and heroic Black man with secondary colors in White. The colors have always had a clear set of ideologies, principles and play styles associated with each. WOTC continues to miss an opportunity to highlight he diversity of their characters ideologies(represented in a cards color) and how they transcend racial, gender and ethnic identity.

You're pretty right on the money with that assessment. Stuff like retconning Nissa's Elf-supremacism and shit like that is dumb, they should have a nice long arc of her just learning not all other races are all that bad. Still showing the tendancies here and there but just growing as a person. Like there are ways to write an intresting story and enviorment with woke themes and make it not suck ass, just none of these people are capable of it.

It's cause ideology trumps all and having a sympethtic villian is dangerous to them. Like showing why a villain does what they do or why a person has their beliefs scares them, They hate it when people second guess ideology.

 

[Noebel]

FYI article posted on A&H, did everybody see?

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/wizard...om-mtg-over-real-religion-comparisons.173033/

Basically WotC now gonna remove "shaman" and "druid" from the game just like they did with "witch" since there are "real" religions that use that term nowadays.

Honestly, seems like a clickbait. Somebody asked him on tumblr, got standart PR non-answer, aka "we are looking into it" "thanks for the input, we will definetly take it into consideration", etc. And then somebody, who didn't even manage to become a game journalist, thought that it has enough subsance to warrant an article.

I am not saying it is impossible. Just mostly impossible. I can imagine shaman being dropped. It doesn't have much tribal synergies anyway. But not druid. Druid is wypypo shite, and ain't nobody care 'bout whypypo 'ere, m8. Witch was dropped, most likely, because they've made warlock and it became redundant. They are, once again, a big corporation, and all dat viccan balooney is, once again, wypypo shite, and nobody cares 'bout whypypo, m8.

 

[Ebonic Tutor]

Honestly, seems like a clickbait. Somebody asked him on tumblr, got standart PR non-answer, aka "we are looking into it" "thanks for the input, we will definetly take it into consideration", etc. And then somebody, who didn't even manage to become a game journalist, thought that it has enough subsance to warrant an article.

I am not saying it is impossible. Just mostly impossible. I can imagine shaman being dropped. It doesn't have much tribal synergies anyway. But not druid. Druid is wypypo shite, and ain't nobody care 'bout whypypo 'ere, m8. Witch was dropped, most likely, because they've made warlock and it became redundant. They are, once again, a big corporation, and all dat viccan balooney is, once again, wypypo shite, and nobody cares 'bout whypypo, m8.

Lot of the dumb shit you've seen in MTG as of late has origins in stuff like this from maro's blog. Don't be surprised when it comes to pass.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Lot of the dumb shit you've seen in MTG as of late has origins in stuff like this from maro's blog. Don't be surprised when it comes to pass.

If he does then someone should make a troll account and ask why the company endorses KK by being Called Wizards of the Coast.

 

[Polock]

Meanwhile in MTG Community land

"PARTY IS SO COOL THEY JUST DIDN'T MAKE ENOUGH POWERFUL CARDS FOR IT" - Thing I was actually told.

Fuck you, party was awesome in standard even if R&D basically aborted it by making Base Camp ETB tapped.

 

[Oddjob OTP]

Fuck you, party was awesome in standard even if R&D basically aborted it by making Base Camp ETB tapped.

Didn't feature Emergent Ultimatum, Drown in the Loch+Cringe Crab or Winota so it literally didn't exist.

And I say that as someone who spent that time fucking around with cycling, naya fury, and that standard's izzet dragons

 

[Polock]

Didn't feature Emergent Ultimatum, Drown in the Loch+Cringe Crab or Winota so it literally didn't exist.

And I say that as someone who spent that time fucking around with cycling, naya fury, and that standard's izzet dragons

Azorius party was a very solid tempo deck in my experience. I think the main reason was because no one knew Concerted Defense even existed so I'd blindside people with it constantly. You'd mostly die from stuff like mono green snow, which was very popular at the time but you can't beat em all.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Fuck you, party was awesome in standard even if R&D basically aborted it by making Base Camp ETB tapped.

Be mad, Devoid is a better designed mechanic than party.

 

[Logistical Nightmare]

Be mad, Devoid is a better designed mechanic than party.

I’ve always felt Party should have been a mechanic in the DND set. I think it’s a fine design concept, but it sucks ass on zendikar. They really wanted to make it like ally, which was a horrible mechanic, but at least it would have been a flavor win in DND.

 

[Flexo]

MaRo posted another "lessons learned" article.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/lessons-learned-part-6

Always fun to see what he'll admit to screwing up in these.

Companion was a mechanic we'd come up with in a hackathon. It tapped into some of the fun of the Commander format where you have a creature that you're more likely to play every game. The concept worked well with the idea of bonding, so we added it to the set. Companion was playing in a dangerous space as the variance of the deck is a huge part of what makes Magic work. We'd tried similar things in the past always to abandon them because of play-balance issues. This time, though, we thought we could make it work.

The big lesson of Ikoria isn't that we did mutate or companion, but that we did both. The whole point of vision design is to work out the basic vision and structure of the set, enabling the teams downstream to focus their energy on making it the best that it can be. An important part of this, though, is that we have to be careful that what we hand off can be reasonably accomplished by the teams downstream of us. Ikoria's design stumbled because vision design handed off too much. Both mutate and companion are what we now refer to as a "high maintenance" component, meaning it's something that's going to take extra time and care to properly execute and balance. A vision design should only have one high-maintenance component.

I was most excited by the idea that party cared about creature types in a different way than Magic normally did. Usually, typal themes are about playing a lot of the same creature type. Party wanted the player to diversify. The mechanic seemed very flavorful and pushed in new mechanical direction. I was all aboard with using it.

My big lesson from Zendikar Rising is understanding that mechanics must live outside conceptual space. It's very easy to build something inside the biosphere of your set environment and forget that Magic mechanics have to interact with everything around it. Party is a perfect example of this issue. For starters, it requires a certain mix of creature types. At the time, I thought we were okay because we were using class creature types that show up in most sets. It turns out that we have to be a bit more forward-thinking than that. We can't just have random cards with the creature type. We need to have cards that specifically slot into the decks that the future set is going to make. The fact that these four creature types were more influenced by flavor than mechanics made this trickier than you might assume.

The other big problem is that the mechanic fought the general nature of Constructed formats. I play creatures as threats. My opponent removes the threats. There's back-and-forth. Party doesn't ask the player to get one creature on the board, it asks for four, each of a different creature type. That's just a big ask, bigger than Play Design could easily address. Yes, we made designs where you didn't have to get to four to have them be worth playing, but the mere structure of the format was asking a lot of a player, too much to do consistently, which is key to making viable Constructed designs.

It is entertaining here to see how much he avoids naming "Harry Potter."

Strixhaven started as a top-down genre set. Magical school, as a theme, has appeared in movies, TV shows, books, etc. But as we were designing it, we realized we had stumbled on a brand-new type of resonance, what I'll call "real-world resonance." Yes, players were familiar with the magical school genre, but more so than that, they were familiar with school. Most players have attended a school at some point. This meant that we could make designs that played into that knowledge. In fact, we leaned our factioning heavily into this. We built our colleges around subjects. Quandrix was about math. Lorehold was about history. These are universal things that (almost) everyone could relate to.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

I’ve always felt Party should have been a mechanic in the DND set. I think it’s a fine design concept, but it sucks ass on zendikar. They really wanted to make it like ally, which was a horrible mechanic, but at least it would have been a flavor win in DND.

Party should have been in the DND set just to show off how fucking awful it actually is, it would be great to have a set that shows off that Drizzit and Minsc can't be in a Party despite being famous DND characters.

Edit : Or an even better example

Hey you remember that big DND movie that came out and was considered better than it had any right to be? If they did a secret lair for that movie...not a single one of them would qualify to trigger Party. The mechanic was created by a literal retard.

 

[Logistical Nightmare]

Party should have been in the DND set just to show off how fucking awful it actually is, it would be great to have a set that shows off that Drizzit and Minsc can't be in a Party despite being famous DND characters.

Edit : Or an even better example

Hey you remember that big DND movie that came out and was considered better than it had any right to be? If they did a secret lair for that movie...not a single one of them would qualify to trigger Party. The mechanic was created by a literal retard.

Maybe still a little horrible, but if I were to try redesigning the mechanic, I might change it to remove the creature type and just make it so you’re party must consist of four creatures that don’t share a creature type? This isn’t much better, and means your party could consist of some stupid compositions, but it makes the mechanic into one that players might have actually wanted to use and made the third visit to zendikar more memorable.

 

[Morethanabitfoolish]

Party is one of those mechanics dedicated to morons like me, who look at terrible cards or mechanics and am compelled to try to force something worthwhile out of them. Given how many humans have "I can fix them" mentality for romantic relationships it's unsurprising to see similar idiots for CCG shit.

It's arduous, annoying and difficult. But the seething faces on people's face when you beat them with shitty decks is great.

 

[Polock]

Party should have been in the DND set just to show off how fucking awful it actually is, it would be great to have a set that shows off that Drizzit and Minsc can't be in a Party despite being famous DND characters.

Edit : Or an even better example

Hey you remember that big DND movie that came out and was considered better than it had any right to be? If they did a secret lair for that movie...not a single one of them would qualify to trigger Party. The mechanic was created by a literal retard.

The dual class cards that were in Baldurs Gate were a good start but party suffered the fate of all non-pushed mechanics (Adamant, Kicker, Enlist) in the current standard set format - there was no follow up support. And yeah they really missed the boat with the D&D set.

 

[Noebel]

If they did a secret lair for that movie

Hoo, boy. Do I have some bad news for you.

not a single one of them would qualify to trigger Party

Akchshually, one does

Spoiler: Checkmate, chud

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Hoo, boy. Do I have some bad news for you.

Akchshually, one does
View attachment 5401618

Spoiler: Checkmate, chud

View attachment 5401626

>Secondary Antagonist

Also known as the Cuck.

 

[Oddjob OTP]

Party should have been in the DND set just to show off how fucking awful it actually is, it would be great to have a set that shows off that Drizzit and Minsc can't be in a Party despite being famous DND characters.

You just have to have 3 subtypes, Minsc is a Human Warrior Barbarian, Drizzt is an Elf Warrior Ranger (and in 3e at least he was more of a fighter than a ranger anyway) and you can probably just drag that around the set to most of the characters.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

You just have to have 3 subtypes, Minsc is a Human Warrior Barbarian, Drizzt is an Elf Warrior Ranger (and in 3e at least he was more of a fighter than a ranger anyway) and you can probably just drag that around the set to most of the characters.

Or you just let Party be based on Each Creature with a unique Type.

Like sure that means an Elf Shaman and a Human Shaman will both contribute, but in a party those would be different builds anyways because Elves and Humans have different base stat-lines

 

[DOUBLE_WHEEL]

you just let Party be based on Each Creature with a unique Type.

We here at MTG R&D have found those kinds of mechanics have too much to keep track of and magic players are too dumb. Now here's a mechanic where you make several different kinds of counters and tokens that you have to keep track of.