- Joined
- Jul 30, 2017
Finally got some time to respond and @cuddle striker asked nicely to stop. I will just say 2 quick things.
Not really defending as much as pointing out that "fixing" it can easily go worse. Probably because I've been helping a buddy work on designing a game (I'm one of his test players) and have seen more than once an "easy" fix go bonkers or splat. In games, super OP and super pathetic are both really really easy to hit in design. Balance is like the cliche zen masters describe: very difficult to obtain.
TL;DR - I find party an entertaining mental exercise in line with recent personal hobbies.
I do find it interesting also that they seem to be doing tribal again in this set, only rather than using changeling as a "greaser" for the mechanic, they're instead going with a blender approach in party. It will be fascinating to compare Zendi3 limited to old fashioned Lorwyn.
Sure they're just promos.... for now. EDIT: I just now realized Optimus is legendary frame - WITHOUT the supertype.
So it seems I'm one of the few here (or at least - will admit) to keep up with Rosewater's articles. He mentioned something interesting yesterday.
Or to sum up the above, the dual faced cards we've seen in Zendikar? Yeah that's merely the first INSTANCE of them. They are going to run through the entire rest of the year in Kaldheim and Strixhaven as well.
(It seems almost too obvious that Strixhaven would have modal spells as it's main feature - but that's almost too cumbersome for what is essentially just a split card with a few slight differences in rule interactions. How wordy are those text boxes going to be?)
Not really defending as much as pointing out that "fixing" it can easily go worse. Probably because I've been helping a buddy work on designing a game (I'm one of his test players) and have seen more than once an "easy" fix go bonkers or splat. In games, super OP and super pathetic are both really really easy to hit in design. Balance is like the cliche zen masters describe: very difficult to obtain.
TL;DR - I find party an entertaining mental exercise in line with recent personal hobbies.
I do find it interesting also that they seem to be doing tribal again in this set, only rather than using changeling as a "greaser" for the mechanic, they're instead going with a blender approach in party. It will be fascinating to compare Zendi3 limited to old fashioned Lorwyn.
Well I got bad news for you...
Sure they're just promos.... for now. EDIT: I just now realized Optimus is legendary frame - WITHOUT the supertype.
So it seems I'm one of the few here (or at least - will admit) to keep up with Rosewater's articles. He mentioned something interesting yesterday.
About a year before Strixhaven: School of Mages exploratory design was about to start, Aaron Forsythe, my boss, came to me and said that there was some concern about MDFCs. Some of R&D felt it wasn't a good idea to do them, and when that happens, upper management will enquire about it. ("Why are people against it?") I said they were a cross between transforming double-faced cards, which the majority of the players loved, and split cards, which the majority of the players loved. Yes, there's always a chance that you can combine two beloved things and make something unbeloved, but we take chances all the time on new mechanics, and this seemed well above any bar of risk we had to clear. Aaron said he agreed, that he wouldn't have greenlit the set if he didn't believe in it. He just wanted me to start a mini design team to design some MDFCs so that he had something tangible to show people. It's one thing to argue for an unrealized concept and another to show tangible proof of the execution. Also, having real cards would allow us to playtest them and do market research on them to get data. Data is the best way to quiet skeptics in R&D.
. . .
A separate issue that I'd been wrestling with is that I've been trying to find more ways to tie together the three non-core premier sets in a single Magic "year" (aka the fall, winter, and spring sets—using northern hemisphere seasons). For decades, we'd had the block model, which always tied them together, but since we'd stopped doing it, the sense of a Magic year has started to drift away (except for the shared rotation). I've been looking for different ways to tie the three sets together, and the MDFCs gave me an idea. There was a lot of design space available. What if each set used MDFCs, but in a slightly different way, using the mechanic to play up the theme of that set?
For example, Zendikar Rising was a land-themed set. What if all of its MDFCs had a land on at least one side? You could have this spell or a land of the appropriate color? Or you could choose between two lands? There was plenty of designs to fill up the set. I can't yet say what we're doing with the MDFCs in Kaldheim or Strixhaven: School of Mages, but each set has found cool designs to use the new mechanic in a way that enhances what it's about.
. . .
A separate issue that I'd been wrestling with is that I've been trying to find more ways to tie together the three non-core premier sets in a single Magic "year" (aka the fall, winter, and spring sets—using northern hemisphere seasons). For decades, we'd had the block model, which always tied them together, but since we'd stopped doing it, the sense of a Magic year has started to drift away (except for the shared rotation). I've been looking for different ways to tie the three sets together, and the MDFCs gave me an idea. There was a lot of design space available. What if each set used MDFCs, but in a slightly different way, using the mechanic to play up the theme of that set?
For example, Zendikar Rising was a land-themed set. What if all of its MDFCs had a land on at least one side? You could have this spell or a land of the appropriate color? Or you could choose between two lands? There was plenty of designs to fill up the set. I can't yet say what we're doing with the MDFCs in Kaldheim or Strixhaven: School of Mages, but each set has found cool designs to use the new mechanic in a way that enhances what it's about.
Or to sum up the above, the dual faced cards we've seen in Zendikar? Yeah that's merely the first INSTANCE of them. They are going to run through the entire rest of the year in Kaldheim and Strixhaven as well.
(It seems almost too obvious that Strixhaven would have modal spells as it's main feature - but that's almost too cumbersome for what is essentially just a split card with a few slight differences in rule interactions. How wordy are those text boxes going to be?)
lol (probably why I liked Lorwyn)
