Magic The Gathering

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Polock said:
Go on, spill your spleen. If I didn't have a hate boner for Riot I probably would be playing it, it seems pretty slick. I am interested what the reality is.
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Well, I first started playing the game during Paths of Runeterra, which was their first attempt at PVE content. It was a fun little game mode that was a nice break from playing online. That was until Riot realized that people really liked this game mode, and decided to overhaul it into 2.0. Which is what they update to this day. 2.0 was trash. It's been a long ass time since then, but if memory serves, they took out a bunch of fun champs to play as and replaced them with a more balanced lineup. They also added new adventures that were a lot more difficult. That was actually nice, but to complete all the reward for each adventure you have to play as heroes from certain regions. That means leveling them up and hoping you get the right drops to upgrade that champ to 3 star. Which was tedious.

Then they added Monthly challenges. That's 70 short adventures which you can only use a single champion 3 times, win or lose. The reward for it was unlocking Aurlion Sol as a champ, but took , at minimum, 3 months to do. He was really powerful at first, so that was nice, but besides that the rewards are underwhelming at best.

It wasn't long after that they came out with news that they were cancelling support for PVP and since then they haven't released a single set. What's worse is that they changed PVE to not just being about getting a champion to LVL 30, 3 star, but changing the 3 star system to be an entire skill tree that requires three different currencies. It's awful and remains awful to this day.

They still release support for PVE, just releasing 3 new champions with their own new gimmick that I've yet to look into but appears to entail a brand new currency that no one ever asked for. The new champions are also just reskins of 3 older champs with this new gimmick and 4 limited time campaigns to play through. Most of them requiring the new champions to complete. Which you can hope to simply get lucky and acquire all the different currencies you need for them, or alternatively, spend about 50 dollars to get one partially leveled up. It's all sorts of retarded, I hate it, and can't wait for the game to go under. I simply wanted a rehash of duels of the Planeswalkers. As I had a lot of fun with those back in the day.

There's a dozen or so other things I can complain about, like half the current line up being unplayable at higher difficulties, or epic items, but I think this has become long winded enough already.
 
Flexo said:
It would not surprise me if they're going to try and do Korra MTG in 2026 so they can do series 3 in 2027.

At least the news series will inspire E;R to do some more videos.


I don't see the issue. Originally in like... the Star Trek card game they would do just THE ONE CARD of characters like Picard and Data.

Then as time went on they realized... oh we need to capture more moments with them. Especially with 2nd edition they leaned into multiple versions of characters. Because like... how do you capture the totality of say.... Worf and his journey over two series? Better to have his Enterprise version, DS9 version, klingon version, future version.... etc.

Likewise why not say, multiple zuko at different points in his journey?
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It is kind of the same issue i have with certain planeswalkers.

Quite a few of them don't really exemplify the character they are trying to show off. Sure we can have episode 1 Zuko as common draft chaff..but that wont really hype the character and tell is who he really is in terms of gameplay and flavor mixing, which is something that final fantasy hit out of the park.

I really felt lord of the rings was hurt by there being a dozen Frodos.
 
Honka Honka Burning Love said:
I really felt lord of the rings was hurt by there being a dozen Frodos
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Only a dozen?
Screenshot_20250814_170656_Brave.webp

LOL sorry, this old timer just likes to reminisce sometimes.
 
I think it would be cool if we got a Harry Potter Universes Beyond set.

Not only would it actually fit the game thematically (just take a lot of stuff from Strixhaven and reskin it), and it would make the troons in the community have a collective meltdown.
 
LolRaccoon said:
just take a lot of stuff from Strixhaven and reskin it), and it would make the troons in the community have a collective meltdown.
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I wouldn't be surprised if that was in the works, but got cancelled because Turf™.

That or a Secret Lair.
 
harmy.kook said:
I wouldn't be surprised if that was in the works, but got cancelled because Turf™.

That or a Secret Lair.
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My personal belief is that the reason we got the ukiyo-e treatment of the bonus sheet for Strixhaven - which has nothing whatsoever to do with the themes of the set and was out of left field - is that they were originally planning to do a Harry Potter tie-in the same way they'd done a Godzilla tie-in for Ikoria, but then JKR started giving progressives the vapors and that had to get tossed. At that point, they switched to anime to test the waters for adding it into the game on a regular basis and of course the weebs lapped it up.
 
is it just me or do none of the bending abilities feel intuitive at all?
Not that they're especially uninteresting abilities, but once again they're interesting mechanics locked behind a retarded name.
Add it all to the list below start your engines, spaceships, cases, webslinging, and 99% of all future mechanics
 
Just saw this thread, me and my friends used to be hugely into mtg back in highschool. I had an infect deck i adored. but then i think we just all kinda realized mtg was turning to shit, creatively at least. The last time i remember playing magic was those 40k precons, I don't give a rats ass about warhammer but my friends do, so we played it once, and then i haven't touched it since. I check up on magic sometimes but it doesn't even seem like they really make magic cards anymore. i saw one set that was about phyrexia and had the praetors in it, that almost got me back in as i adore phyrexia and infect. but from everything i've seen it's just crossover, after crossover, after crossover and i hate it. Has wotc made anything good since i've left? Or is it all just... crossover of the week slop?
 
Cryptosporidium 138 said:
Just saw this thread, me and my friends used to be hugely into mtg back in highschool. I had an infect deck i adored. but then i think we just all kinda realized mtg was turning to shit, creatively at least. The last time i remember playing magic was those 40k precons, I don't give a rats ass about warhammer but my friends do, so we played it once, and then i haven't touched it since. I check up on magic sometimes but it doesn't even seem like they really make magic cards anymore. i saw one set that was about phyrexia and had the praetors in it, that almost got me back in as i adore phyrexia and infect. but from everything i've seen it's just crossover, after crossover, after crossover and i hate it. Has wotc made anything good since i've left? Or is it all just... crossover of the week slop?
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Short answer, no. Long answer, also no, but an hour rant to explain it all.
 
alogatog said:
is it just me or do none of the bending abilities feel intuitive at all?
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Fire is Radha, Air is a riff on Release to the Wind, Earth is Awaken, and Water is convoke-improvise for activated-abilities.

Firebending is the one that seems the most unusual, but a look at this chaff Zuko suggests its use: you dump it into activated abilities, so there's natural synergy with Waterbending. Also works with Airbending on anything that has flash.

While I'm doubtful that this set will be on the level of FF for draft, I'm getting an impression that it will nevertheless be a good format. There's a lot of interesting interactions between the color pairs and sub-themes that it looks like they're threading between some of the mechanics, which was the secret-sauce to FF's incredible color-balance and varied drafts. There's also just a lot of tell-tale marks here of the competent designers working on this one, whereas the spiderman set (for which no-one really seems to give a shit) has the same marks as all the in-universe sets: "what if we printed a bunch of cards that are effectively strict upgrades and do a bunch of random, incoherent shit?" "What if we made a bunch of cards that have blocks of texts stapled to them in order to do incredibly limited things, as if everyone just played arena?"
 
Cryptosporidium 138 said:
God that's depressing, was the phyrexian set cool at least? Or was it also shit?
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ONE was one of the worst limited formats of all time and shit all over absolutely everything about Scars-block's art style (and original Mirrodin, for that matter). Its story was pants-on-head retarded and would be one of the worst things they ever produced, if not for the fact that they continued to write after the set's release and plumbed new depths of finding YA-lit washouts. It was the set where I gave up on their in-universe team altogether, because it was abundantly clear that no-one had any idea - not the art director, not the designers, not the creative team.
Cryptosporidium 138 said:
I bet the power creep's insane too?
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Worse than power creep is complexity creep. Yes, the power has creeped up - but it was 2019's Throne of Eldraine which was the biggest offender there in living memory (unless, of course, you play Modern - in which case every Modern Horizons is).

Cards have so much text and do such a myriad of things, it becomes impossible for most people to remember what anything does. Many also just randomly have upsides stapled on, because often-enough it's the case that those paragraphs don't actually turn out to achieve very much.

I wouldn't say that the game is unplayable, but outside of casual EDH pods with friends and limited formats I don't really understand why people aren't abandoning ship.
 
Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
ONE was one of the worst limited formats of all time and shit all over absolutely everything about Scars-block's art style (and original Mirrodin, for that matter). Its story was pants-on-head retarded and would be one of the worst things they ever produced
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One of the worst they ever produced? that breaks my heart, i fucking adore the Phyrexians and Mirrodin. Unfortunately i'm not too shocked, it IS wotc, the diversity hire shit writers from dnd had to worm their way in at some point i guess. They fucked up the art style too? Is it just like cartoony now or something? Jesus H Christ what the fuck happened? did wotc just shit the bed all at once? or was it a gradual bed shitting?
Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
Cards have so much text and do such a myriad of things, it becomes impossible for most people to remember what anything does. Many also just randomly have upsides stapled on, because often-enough it's the case that those paragraphs don't actually turn out to achieve very much.
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That sounds fucking awful. So all the cards have the issue Yu-Ghi-Oh always had now? where they have three paragraph's of text and you still have no fucking clue what the card does? isn't that the whole goddamn reason we have evergreen keywords? so people know at a glance what something does instead of lines and lines of text for each and every goddamn card? I don't think i could tell you with certainty what a single card in eldraine did, everything did 10 different things and they all were boring and forgettable too somehow. Now the entire game is like that? Fuck me, i'm glad i stopped then. if they can't get the phyrexians right i have no reason to care about the game anymore.

i also saw one of the newest sets, maybe the newest, is just star trek? but, it's not a crossover that i could see, so it's canon? Spaceships are now canon in the FANTASY game? Are they actively just shitting on mtg as an IP at this point? Not just polluting it with shit crossovers?
 
Cryptosporidium 138 said:
Is it just like cartoony now or something?
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Well, take a look.
Cryptosporidium 138 said:
so people know at a glance what something does instead of lines and lines of text for each and every goddamn card?
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The reason is that Arena handles everything, and the designers for in-universe sets are pretty-obviously refuse that they picked up from other digital card-games. You need paragraphs of text to explain incredibly simplistic things in paper, some of which wind up working out.

For example, creature-sagas have a lot of words but wind up being fairly intuitive and easy to track. That's because, even though this is doing 4 things, each of those 4 things is easy. Now look at Kellan the Kid. It flies, it has lifelink randomly, it can conditionally let you cheat on mana and if you don't cheat on mana it acts like a sakura-tribe scout. Arena handles all of this automatically for you, but in paper you have to remember multiple pressure points: "other than your hand" means exile, the library, the graveyard; "equal or lesser" for the MV; "and if you don't, you get the land-drop."

This card is also complete trash and has seen zero play anywhere, whereas the mirror-breaker saga had to be banned because it was such a powerhouse. That's complexity-creep over power-creep.
Cryptosporidium 138 said:
Not just polluting it with shit crossovers?
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You missed the cowboy set, the detective set, the 1980s slasher-horror set, the race car set, and the one where they ripped off that comic with tiny woodland critters dressed up as knights. In-universe has been dead for a long time and is never coming back - and when they traipse out its corpse, you really wish they hadn't.

Final Fantasy, the set right before SPACE SHIPS! had an actual fantasy aesthetic and fairly simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand cards. And that fantasy aesthetic was, unlike Return to Tarkir, not just shitty WoW concept art rejects. It sold like complete mad and is proof that the company still has good designers, they just don't touch anything in-universe.
 
Retink Retunk said:
Just do the movie trilogy for the big set, The Hobbit for the small set, then The Silmarillion for the third set.
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The decipher game did that for... 19 sets.

But the rights on LOTR are pretty strict. Amazon just has the rights to the appendices. They don't even have the rights to hobbit, simiaril, or even the term "hobbit."

No telling what WOTC would have to do to get those rights.
 
Flexo said:
The decipher game did that for... 19 sets.

But the rights on LOTR are pretty strict. Amazon just has the rights to the appendices. They don't even have the rights to hobbit, simiaril, or even the term "hobbit."

No telling what WOTC would have to do to get those rights.
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Well clearly Wizards has more rights licensed than Amazon, and I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon took the license that they did because they didn't want to make a LOTR property but figured it was better marketing if they stapled it onto whatever fantasy story they wanted to make. It's similar to how the Velma show wasn't supposed to be a Scooby Doo show but the studio wanted it to be linked to an existing IP, so they picked one they thought might somewhat fit.
 
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