Was the tumblr post complaining about "India" representation in Kaladesh ever posted?
It'd be worth looking at, because I assure you it has merit. Yeah, yeah, I get it, people with zero interest in history know about street shitters and DANK YOU SIR, and that shit is funny, but the subcontinent has some seriously interesting ancestry with constantly-warring civilizations, an absurd amount of crazy-ass motherfucking cults and sectarian violence between them all over the place, bizarre-ass geography and infrastructure, and tons of different cultural bodies beating the shit out of each other juuuuuuuust subtly enough to avoid state-level intervention. Its history before the British occupation is absolutely crazy - and fuck me, you have the British occupation to draw from, too.
Instead, Kaladesh was shitty, boring, generic fantasy land... with Saris and bright colors. Wow, great job, wizards!
-morph but better, with disguise giving your 2/2 for 3 ‘ward 2’.
Well, in reality, it's morph-but-worse, because in the modern limited environment a 2/2 for 3 ward 2 is effectively unplayable. I really don't like Lost Caverns, as it feels like a format where the second you lose the tempo, you really have no way to get it back - and I have a feeling this format is going to be one in which half of the archetypes are completely unplayable, and Boros shitstomps because it has something functionally simple and straightforward. (And not designed in the last five years.)
-suspect, granting menace and can’t block.
But not with counters, which seems like design forgot that people play paper limited. Consider that Ikoria had stupid shit like Menace counters, and there's probably going to be in-pack "suspect" punchout cards... but it's not a counter that can be interacted with.
-collect evidence X, which requires exiling things with combined mana cost X from your graveyard to add an extra effect to a spell
I hope you like cycling, because the values for these cards are completely ridiculous for their payoff most of the time without cycling expensive cards. The design space on the commons and uncommons revealed thusfar suggests "playable enough early, payoff late," but what I'm confused about is when you're supposed to be cycling to stock the graveyard. The idea of stocking it through milling seems kindof absurd, when there's some cards that are like "collect 8 - stun a creature on ETB"
We also got a new card type: Case
Quests, but shittier. Seriously, people have wanted quests back for a long time (because they're a neat, simple, succinct design space), and they... roll out this retarded shit?
Oh, because it looks like a Saga, people will think it's cool!!
Why do so many of the legendary creatures now have keywords stacked to the rafters?
Let me give you their legendary template:
CMC>=3: {Keyword/s, Ability 1, Ability 2 that works with Ability 1} with guaranteed card draw on one of those abilities
CMC<3: {Keyword OR Ability 1, Ability 2 that works with Keyword or Ability 1} with conditional card draw
It's obviously not all of them but it describes so much modern design it's depressing
I honestly think that the wording is just getting way to messy because they keep coming up with mechanics that are harder to explain succinctly.
It's because they suck at mechanics and archetypes. Half of these fail miserably and bomb out - just look at LCI. Descend/Descended bombed, making Black like the shittiest color. Whatever the fuck GW was supposed to be just wasn't a thing. GU has failed in every single set this year, including somehow in LCI, where it was just explore. The jeskai pairs, which are just dumb value or "play artifacts," all work because there's nothing complicated in them.
So they make them more and more complicated, with more and more words, because they somehow think this will let them sneak their way into a good mechanic. The basics are beyond them.
I’m also convinced that MAKM was initially designed to be a Streets follow up, but when the set didn’t preform as well, Design looked at avalible planes and said ‘do one players always love that we can’t shit up even if we try.’ There shouldn’t have been any noir themes, this should have just been a murder mystery theme if that’s what they wanted, and it wouldn’t have been an issue. It feels like they made everyone a detective to make the mechanics of having one work, but that just makes a shitty set design an even more noticeable shitty set design.
I'm in total agreement with this, especially since I would assume most of the art is digital. Swap out the backgrounds with Capenna aesthetics (of which, half of these cards just look like they're in Capenna), and it would work better. And it would be cheaper to say, "hey, take this art you made before, but just change these layers to look loosely like ravnica architecture." Every character looks like a goofy cartoon character, and it's so out of character for the plane for literally fucking everyone to suddenly become a detective.
