Magic The Gathering

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Are the cards at least fun and interesting in like... the bubble of +1/+1 gameplay? Or is it just the same stuff over and over?
It... can be.

Like once or twice. Then it starts getting old.

I did a G/W deck with this commander;
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I didn't even have doubling season or anything like that in it. IIRC. Just "additional +1 counters" stuff and then everything else added counters (and proliferate). Yeah it was kind of interesting to see how big I could get stuff. Heck I even tried some light energy fun just to see if I could. But it was... boring as I usually just ran people over if they didn't pull off some infinite loop beforehand.
 
It... can be.

Like once or twice. Then it starts getting old.

I did a G/W deck with this commander;
View attachment 7860635View attachment 7860633

I didn't even have doubling season or anything like that in it. IIRC. Just "additional +1 counters" stuff and then everything else added counters (and proliferate). Yeah it was kind of interesting to see how big I could get stuff. Heck I even tried some light energy fun just to see if I could. But it was... boring as I usually just ran people over if they didn't pull off some infinite loop beforehand.
How are the set exclusive mechanics like speed and time of day or whatever. My guy reaction are they are gay and suck, but I could just be a h8r.
 
How are the set exclusive mechanics like speed and time of day or whatever. My guy reaction are they are gay and suck, but I could just be a h8r.
Stuff like Speed and Ascend (the latter especially) are fine because they exist independently, never go away, and don't add much to your cognitive load. Stuff like Night/Day, The Monarch, and Initiative are things you need to constantly keep track of and so should probably not be played (and should DEFINATELY not be splashed.)
 
Stuff like Speed and Ascend (the latter especially) are fine because they exist independently, never go away, and don't add much to your cognitive load. Stuff like Night/Day, The Monarch, and Initiative are things you need to constantly keep track of and so should probably not be played (and should DEFINATELY not be splashed.)
The initiative and monarch aren't that bad to keep up with. I don't think anyone will groan at you for bringing them up. What will happen is people will just forget they are there and you may end up keeping track of it for everyone if you care about the triggers. At least with the initiative.
 
Stuff like Speed and Ascend (the latter especially) are fine because they exist independently, never go away, and don't add much to your cognitive load. Stuff like Night/Day, The Monarch, and Initiative are things you need to constantly keep track of and so should probably not be played (and should DEFINATELY not be splashed.)
I prefer the latter 3 due to at least being interactive. Speed and Ascend being one time quests and then permanently buffing cards, while not hard to keep track of, means you get one chance to prevent it and then otherwise its just enabled. Reminds me of energy, which had been a major problem in both standard and recently modern in part because there's really only 2 cards that can interact with it.

Day/Night is annoying, makes sense to keep all werewolves synced, but is especially annoying if there's only one card with the mechanic. Monarch and initiative are fine where they were made for (commander) due to being a good politics tool/anti-turtling measure, but of course legacy and pauper have felt the negative effects. I guess that's a pretty common problem - focus on one thing ruining another, which happened to Pauper because of Modern Horizons and somewhat Legacy with commander/crossovers.
 
The initiative and monarch aren't that bad to keep up with. I don't think anyone will groan at you for bringing them up. What will happen is people will just forget they are there and you may end up keeping track of it for everyone if you care about the triggers. At least with the initiative.
I have the nuclear take that i think initiative is more fun than monarch because making a choice in a dungeon is more interesting than drawing a card
 
The initiative and monarch aren't that bad to keep up with. I don't think anyone will groan at you for bringing them up. What will happen is people will just forget they are there and you may end up keeping track of it for everyone if you care about the triggers. At least with the initiative.
I have the nuclear take that i think initiative is more fun than monarch because making a choice in a dungeon is more interesting than drawing a card
Initiative is a fucking headache. Yeah it's more interesting, it's also a ton of bookkeeping as everyone has to have their own dungeon AND then you've got to keep track of the fact that you get to move when you take initiative (even if you have it), as well as during the upkeep. I have a freakin' dungeon deck for the lulz and it's still a headache.

Yeah monarch is simple, it's also much easier to keep track of. You have it at the end of the turn? Congrats! You get a card. (other things may care about it) Monarch you can keep track of with a burger king crown if you want. Initiative you better have the card on hand because nobody is going to retain what all you get to do with it while also trying to keep track of the dungeon. You may as well break out the Explorers of Ixalan board game and play with hexes while you're doing all that bookkeeping.
 
Archenemy is a weird thing, the Scheme cards are..wildly inconsistent in power sometimes. We used to do Archenemy in my group and there were times where it felt that the Archenemy was overpowered and times it felt that the archenemy was under powered.
 
Archenemy seems like fun but I have never seen anyone play it or sell the cards for it
Most people don't concern themselves with the weird variants because despite their insistence that they just want a casual game they're really there to tryhard.

Archenemy also suffers from the problem that the product it's aping (the WoW TCG's Raid Decks) had much cooler villains to choose from and were designed from the ground up as standalone challenge decks. The earlier Archenemies are flavor-agnostic, which is means you get to theater kid it up as a Bond villain, but I don't think that has repeat appeal. The newer ones have a half-assed theme, but most people probably don't even know who Nicol Bolas is, and the ones that do usually think he's kind of a dipshit. Who wants to play as that guy? Who wants to play as the retarded moth from Duskmourn?

For Archenemy to make it big Wizards would need to A) give it regular support and B) make villains people actually think are cool.

Archenemy is a weird thing, the Scheme cards are..wildly inconsistent in power sometimes. We used to do Archenemy in my group and there were times where it felt that the Archenemy was overpowered and times it felt that the archenemy was under powered.
There's also this. Wizards can't even balance Standard, let alone supplemental products.
 
Archenemy also suffers from the problem that the product it's aping (the WoW TCG's Raid Decks) had much cooler villains to choose from and were designed from the ground up as standalone challenge decks. The earlier Archenemies are flavor-agnostic, which is means you get to theater kid it up as a Bond villain, but I don't think that has repeat appeal. The newer ones have a half-assed theme, but most people probably don't even know who Nicol Bolas is, and the ones that do usually think he's kind of a dipshit. Who wants to play as that guy? Who wants to play as the retarded moth from Duskmourn?
Not exactly. The original archenemy had decks paired with them that were flavorful. Like an artifact deck or a dragon deck. Even the schemes that came with were sort of on theme - but not entirely, meaning you could mix and match them to make either one giga-scheme deck or customize one. They even had some promo schemes.

The bolas box was HEAVY on the theme. Be Bolas etc.

The latest release are definitely flavor-agnostic. Especially when they came with EACH duskmourn deck, and 3/4ths of those were supposed to be heroes story-wise.
 
It seems like homebrewing your own Scheme cards and introducing it as a somewhat more involved party game might be the way. Maybe those chink proxies print oversized cards too
 
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