Back at the beginning spells were powerful, but creatures were mostly shit by todays standarts, since they were a permanent source of damage, and there wasn't really a balanced approach to removal. They've tuned big effect spells down, but made creatures better, which commanded better removal, which commanded more creatures with ETBs and so on.
I disagree because it didn't have prolonged, extreme power creep until the mid-late 2010s: Historically broken blocks (Urza, Mirrodin) would be followed by a deliberately underpowered one (Masques, Kamigawa) and players tended to dislike both extremes - they wanted good flavor and a balanced meta, not a turn-2 Ravager win or a stalemate/draw because the cards were too weak to do anything.
That all started right around the time they went off the three set block model.
Really depends more on what you want to play. If you want to do a simple mono color aggro deck or midrange you can get away with like one or two channel lands and the rest basics for a mana base. That really limits how wildcard intensive your deck is. Now if you wanted to play a dual color deck and actually have it optimized in standard that is instantly 8 rare cards down the shitter just in manabase. And yeah, there are shitty taplands and fetches in standard you can use instead but you will lose a certain number of games because of them. If will suck when you die to getting manascrewed by a tap land that should have been a slowland or painland and you'll be mad about it.
Oh, right. For some reason I figured it was a separate policy but it would make sense if it was on the same page.
The decks I'm running are a mono red I just slapped together from what I had and an Esper build that's similar and built from whatever I had laying around from drafts.
It's even more annoying because they are making removal and counters weaker, while at the same time they're making ETBs more common as well as ways to recur things from your graveyard. You'd think removal would be stronger with everything having some protection from it, but nope.
Yeah, that's part of the problem. If you have a choice of building around Invoke Despair or something janky like Bard Class you spend the same amount of rares either way so you pick the straightforward card every time. Whereas IRL cards like Bard Class are sub 50 cents because way more people open them then want them.
Black removal is as strong as it's ever been. It's really just the other colors that are in shit city, except maybe green (1 mana fight spells are mostly interchangeable) and blue (almost never has a real answer to resolved permanents anyway).
umm sweatie, you aren't allowed to have good cards in standard
Some counters do see play, and I run things like Make Disappear as well as Ertai. The problem is they kind of janky and slow, which makes them feel like dead cards way too often as the conditions just don't line up or they can outvalue them.
The other thing is I just won't pay money into Arena, whereas I didn't mind buying real cards. Even if a card loses it's value post rotation, I still have it and can do whatever I want with it, but if Arena just fucks with a format, such as forcing Alchemy into something, there's nothing you can do about it. Hell if they just decide to ban you for some retarded reason, then fuck you, no refunds.
Black removal is strong, but it's been made weaker because of how much recursion there is. There are just so many cards that pop out of the graveyard, or bring things back from the graveyard, have ward, or simply negate removal spells that even something like the 2 mana kill any creature and lose 2 life feels clunky. Then there's the Planeswalker issue, that a lot of the time if you want something that answers those things you have to have a really inefficient spell.
You say that but Make Disappear was actually a big upgrade in Pioneer to Quench which was still seeing play.
Just to be autistic but it wasn't secret lair, it was this guy:
www.reddit.com
That was part of it, but it was also a From the Vault (their first attempt at Secret Lairs) that went hard on it and printed a bunch of reserved list cards. Prior to that Negator got the duel deck printing and Survival of the Fittest and Wheel of Fortune had judge promos, but those weren't as big as a product stuffed with them as 4 of the 15 cards were RL reprints:Just to be autistic but it wasn't secret lair, it was this guy:
View attachment 3903045
Alt art and foiled for the Phyrexian vs Coalition duel deck.
Reddit - Dive into anything
I can not wait for the SL: Dual Lands drawn in crayon for $800.
"An artist's depiction of a child's depiction of Akira Toriyama's depiction of Tropical Island"
Just print a Gotsee Door to Nothing at this point.
I'm still not ok with the Universes Beyond content. It started with Walking Dead, and I joked we would have MTG include Frodo Baggins shooting a lazgun at Galactus. We are sadly 2/3 of the way there, as Optimus Prime isn't exactly a great Galactus swap. We might even get enough references to build an Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny EDH deck before WW3. I miss when Magic was Magic, but it's at least got me working on a cube.