Press F to pay respects to Modern

Dude, chill out. Modern will be fine.

You're dumb. Go play Yu-Gi-Oh.

Development and Creative are the two real villains. The former are the ones supposedly responsible for the balancing the game, and the latter are the ones who've turned the game into Jacetice League: the Avengening. Maro is just the outwards face and as thus always defends every stupid decision the other retards at the company make.

If everyone else is to blame why is it the best sets don't have MaRo as lead of design but most worst offenders do?
He's the one that wants a game with no removal and the "pop culture experience". He clearly wishes he was back in Hollywood with his tribe.

Maro is the lead designer of like very big set these days, and he's on like every design team. And don't forget that he lead some of the best sets such as original Ravnica, Future Sight, Zendikar, and Innistrad and has been on several other teams that produced great sets such as Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Invasion.

>He's the one that wants a game with no removal
That's development.

>"pop culture experience"
He's definetly way into it, and he's certainly been pushing for making a movie based on the game for decades, but the ones ultimately responsible for this are Creative.

>He clearly wishes he was back in Hollywood with his tribe.
That is obvious.

>That's development.
Development wanted Liliana of the Veil and Damnation in Standard, Design and inbred playtesters said no because "black is tier one for the first time in 12 years, that cannot be allowed!".

You've got that completely backwards.

Design is doing a much better job than Development, especially over the last few years. MaRo fucked up BFZ big time but Design hasn't been the issue with any set after that, basically.

Honestly, though, reading between the lines, the biggest culprit is probably Corporate. The fucked-up rotation stinks of something that was imposed from above, and I get the sense it completely screwed up everything on Wizards' end - for instance, it's a lot of the reason there are so many Jacetice league walkers, because they were printing them under the assumption they'd be rotating much more frequently. Of course, that's not to say Development, and even MaRo, don't deserve a lot of blame themselves.

I am fairly certain MaRo is not the one who decided there should be no removal. That shit goes way deeper than MaRo. Don't attribute everything R&D does to MaRo just because he's the only person there who's remotely capable of and interested in communicating openly with the public.

LotV and Damnation in Standard would have been retarded as hell.

So is this game gonna be walls of creatures against other walls of creatures with nobody swinging because they would solve nothing and instead winning exclusively through planeswalkers from now on?

I don't think that's been an accurate stereotype of Standard for a while now

f

Go jump off a bridge

>draft
Sealed formats can go fuck themselves. Everything gets balanced around draft. Draft even gets exclusive sets now, while still fucking up rarities in the Masters sets and arguably causing everything in standard to be too weak because it has to be fair for people who play limited.

Christ.

>because it has to be fair for people who play limited.
Wrong, they do it because they want draft to be "open a mythic and you win" format. It's a shit design and it's hurting limited as well.

the majority of problems at wizard currently can be summed up as a bit of bad design philosophy and A LOT of problems with the time between development cycles and release

basically they get these new ideas, which isn't a bad thing, and then they want to try them
then when the ideas turn out to be shit we have to wait 2 years before they are fixed and by the time those bad decisions are fixed we have no idea if more mistakes were made along the way that will be need to fixed another 2 years in the future

they need some way of fixing the problems with their bad design decisions quickly that isn't just a banlist

that and they need to start bringing in playtesters for new sets that aren't incompetent kitchen table fucks because you can print dogshit and those players will still be happy no matter what

they need to bring in retired pros or pros that are looking to take a break form the circuit to playtest for around 2 years
they aim stricktly to break every new set and go through systematically with every card in the set and attempt to just destroy the standard environment as much as possible
then RnD and Development actually listen to these people as the ultimate authority on if a card is ok for the standard environment or not

so to shorten it up
WotC are incompetent on multiple fronts, 1. they are bad at their own game and cannot recognize powerful and bad cards and 2. they need to be faster to adapt to their own bad decisions in some way that isn't banning cards

this would help immensely

>they need to bring in retired pros or pros that are looking to take a break form the circuit to playtest for around 2 years
They already do that. Pretty much the entire Development team consists of retired pro players.

Putting Maro front and center for magic is SUCH a fucking brilliant move on WoTC's part.

>Give the community a front-figure who is high up in the company
>Divide decision-making internally so that if the playerbase is pissed off about something, even if they go to the front figure you put out there he will just be able to shrug and say "I don't have any control over that aspect of the game"
>Having no other avenue of complaint, the playerbase will shout at him anyway, thus making the loudest complainers seems rude and irrational

Fucking brilliant.

>Pretty much the entire Development team consists of retired pro players.

The people who playtest shouldn't be the same people who make the game you dum-dum.

but aparently they don't actually playtest what they develop
they leave that to the "future future team" which consists of a bunch of mentally challenged, overweight, pink hair dyed, numales and women

then they listen to these idiots on if a set is ok or not

so basically we have fucks like this actual chimps that only play complete casual formats and are a waste of atoms, fresh air, and water determining how we are going to play in a competitive environment

we NEED a team of players whoes only job is to be as hyper competitive Spike as possible and not give a shit about anything other than the competitive viability of a card
if the card doesn't rank above a certain competitive threshold from this team it is sent back to development to make the card better until we have a set of nothing but fun semi competitive playable cards

as a secondary objective the team should also go out of their way every few sets or so to shit on timmys just because timmy can blow me

>they leave that to the "future future team"
The playtesting team consists of developers, designers, and other staff members of the company that don't work directly on the game.

mtg.gamepedia.com/Future_Future_League

this team has been interviewed before and is made up of absolutely terrible, casual players

they are given the new set and they "attempt" to figure out the metagame but in reality they just make shitty casual decks and try to make sure draft is fun but could give less than a shit about constructed competitive formats

then RnD listens to them
it is things like this on top of the fact that we have no way to adjust these idiots decisions in a reasonable window

wotc should really have something akin to the core set made up of a bunch of powerful removal and answer cards but use it for internal purposes only most of the time. Then if Standard gets out of control they can selectively mark cards on that list that would help fix standard as legal for standard play
now rather than having to ban things we just make some cards that help kill stupid decks in the format legal and bam we have the ability to adapt much faster to development and design decisions without having to actually speed up the process

also stop listening to casual players about anything
take the video game approach and balance ar ound the top 5%-1% of players
fuck everyone else
if you suck you can git gud
if you kitchen table you will buy the shit they make no matter what
if you EDH you will buy the shit no matter what

Timmies and Johnnies are going to spend their money on a set no matter how terrible it is
Spike is the only one that is going to sit a format out if it sucks
and when Spike sits the format out Timmy and Johnny leave as well because there is no one to play against

so maybe instead of designing cards for Timmy and Johnny you should instead design the vast majority of cards exclusively for Spike

This, the vast majority of people plays competitively while Wizards thinks that the majority is casual players and childrens.

I enjoyed Theros. Even though he fucked up the last 2 sets in the block, the first set just makes me giddy.

Also, gods in Theros block seem better than Amonkhet's.

>if the card doesn't rank above a certain competitive threshold from this team it is sent back to development to make the card better until we have a set of nothing but fun semi competitive playable cards
>adding 1000~ competitively viable cards to the card pool every year

Not only is that fucking impossible, it would be a terrible, awful idea.

>the vast majority of people plays competitively

[citation needed]

>you should instead design the vast majority of cards exclusively for Spike
They already do.

it is very possible

you are probably misunderstanding what I said though

competitive viable in this case means competitively viable for Standard or for the set
the card could be awful from a modern or vintage or any other format standpoint but the card needs to have at least some kind of niche playability in standard or it is sent back
no more god awful cards that aren't even played in draft decks and are only there to fill packs with crap
even if the card is explictely in the set for the draft environment it had better be playable and functional at what it does and some deck is going to want it or need it

as it stands now though we get cards that serve absolutely no purpose and are sometimes even powercreeped by cards in the exact same set
this needs to stop

I don't know if that is true
in fact I kind of doubt it
I would bet the majority of players are casual

but as someone who has been playing games my whole life and I can tell you from experience that when the competitive scene leaves a game the game starts to die no matter how many casuals it had

the casual audience is fickle and will change their desires on a whim
that whim is usually driven by trend setters and competitive players
so when the comp players level the casuals leave with them
many businesses see that casuals make up the majority of the players and start to market to them when in reality they are only there because the competitive players and trend setters guided them there and keep them there
if you want to keep the casuals you absolutely have to keep the interest of the competitive players or you are digging your own shortsighted grave

I will cite pretty much every set released after M15 as a counter argument to this
if you are gonna tell me that Kaladesh, SOI, and this new set were designed pretty much exclusively for Spike and not for Timmy, Johnny, and EDH man you are just plain wrong

>this team has been interviewed before and is made up of absolutely terrible, casual players
You're getting things backwards again. The FFL playtests Standard and attempts to predict the metagame at the highest levels. Development uses these results to balance the cards in the set.

When Maro says, "our playtesters didn't get what the card did" or "our playtesters didn't understand the point of this mechanic" he's not talking about the FFL, but a group of WotC employees that technically work on entirely different games but playtest new MtG sets to help determine what new and casual players will think of the set.

>Not Pauper & EDH master race

Kys you're self in irl my man.

>Pauper

Solved format/10

MTG isn't designed to be an ultra competitive game you halfwit. The casual formats is exactly what type of players they WANT buying and playing the game.

no I know what I am talking about
let me see if I can find some of the "competitive decks" that the FFL team built to playtest some of the recent sets

I think it is this article but it isn't loading for me
magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/latest-developments/ffl-faq-2016-04-22
or
magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/latest-developments/days-future-future-eldritch-moon-2016-08-26
basically when testing for Eldritch Moon they had some mono white crap that was completely unplayable from even a medium skilled players perspective and in their version of G/B delirium they weren't even playing Emrakul and instead we messing around with the crap commons and uncommon just because they had the keyword "Delirium" on them
then also made a bunch of god awful control decks if I remember that they really half assed but thought performed well because they were playing against horribly optimized casual garbage
the FFL literally doesn't understand their own game and are so horrible at the game that they miss things like Cat Combo that a pro player noticed after 15 min of the card being spoiled
they have around a whole year to work with these cards and the fact that they can't get things right is actually embarrassing
higher some higher quality players for your testing team ffs

From 15-20 years ago.
They need people who actually play Magic at a competitive level NOW.

You do realize that it will often look like decks used in the FFL are subpar simply because cards were different for most of the playtesting period, right?

this is a bunch of completely fucking insane bullshit with no relation to reality

Development is bad and the FFL is pretty obviously fucking up, but beyond that, this is the crazy goddamn shit

correct
but like I have stated before
casuals will play with the cards NO MATTER WHAT
and the only reason the casuals stick around and play formats is because the competitive players do as well
when the competitive players leave the casuals leave with them
so instead of being shortsighted and trying to market the majority of your product to people who change hobbies every few months maybe you should market to your core audience who are going to stick around only if you print things that keep them interested
because when they are interested and having fun they draw in more players and keep the casuals around

competitive players are the backbone of any game and should be the target audience even if they make up a minority of players because they are the ones that draw in new customers and keep old ones

they are the start of the chain not the weight at the end and I wouldn't want to flatten myself so best keep the chain happy

you do realize that they miss things that are so blatantly obvious that high caliber players catch them within the hour of the card being spoiled right?

FFL is playing the game for fun
they are making casual fun decks that they think are cool and then playteseting them against one another
they are taking broad strokes, thinking of archtypes and then trying to build decks with those themes and thinking they are doing a good job

they are not systematically going through every single card in the new set and doing everything they possibly can to break the card, like they should. If they did that then we probably wouldn't have such god awful formats dominated by poorly designed cards like Emrakul, or Gideon, or Copy Cat because they would have been caught within 20 min of the card rolling off of RnDs table

You don't need to keep making Doom Blade better. Just print Victim of Night with different limitations.
Instead of making better Elves, print Nantuko, Centaus, Satyrs and Dryads from time to time.
And yes, keep some essentials like Lightning Strike, Remove Soul and Rampanth Growth always in Standard.

That way you always get a good Standard but it's always different, Modern and Legacy don't get fucked because even when you can have 12 copies of a decent card it's better to make broader decks to face the continuously growing metagame, and Limited will feel fresh but always welcoming.
Only possible negative is Commander one day far in the future being 60 Watchwolfs vs 60 Mana Leaks.

>commander turns to shit because they print to many variants of a good card

we can only wish

it seems like you're basically just assuming that Magic works the same way as a MOBA or other vidya game

I don't think this is an accurate model for how Magic actually works and it's weird how insistent you are that it is. it's different in a bunch of ways.

Which is bad for business.
No game without a notable competitive scene stays fresh in people's minds.
It's why YGO!, Pokemon and Magic are popular but Netrunner and other LCGs arent.
It's why more people play Warhammer and Heroclix than Infinity or Malifaux despite being inferior games.
It's why everyone at the LGS has heard of Catan but Ticket to Ride draws blanks.

The game needs to appease competitive players because if they go away, the game's popularity and hype goes away.

>FFL is playing the game for fun
Dude, the articles you linked youself contradict you on this.

>they are not systematically going through every single card
There's a finite amount of time during which they can playtest, and a very finite amount of developers that can playtest. Not to mention that cards are constantly tweaked, changed, aqnd replaced in the FFL. There's simply no way they actually could do what you're suggesting.

Magic needs a competitive scene and it needs to appease competitive players, and it's not doing a good job of that right now

That does not mean that it needs to literally design every card around whether it's playable in standard

there is a huge excluded middle here

that is how games work on a near fundamental level
hell that is how mass appeal works on a fundamental level

Trend Setters like things before they become popular, they put money into said thing and it starts to gain momentum and appeal due to gaining money and a solid fanbase who spreads the word about said thing.
this attracts more and more people who are interested in the thing but are not as interested as the initial core audience

then this splits into one of two pretty repetitive scenarios
1. the things creators keep making their thing so that it appeals to the original demographic with maybe some things for the new people in order to draw in an even wider audience but always remembering to keep the core audience satisfied

or
2. they ditch the core audience recognizing them as a minority of their audience and instead attempt to appeal to the mass demographic and gain a massive following that is no longer reliant on the core audience

both of these routes can pay off but one is far easier to maintain than the other
with secnario 1. we can maintain a fairly large but not truly massive (billions of users) audience and can keep people interested since we keep our initial trend setters happy and they in turn keep people interested
you might lose some people over time but they will mostly be made up of that secondary audience that will be replaced since your core audience will continuously draw people in
scenario 2 plays off when you hit critical mass
when you can attract hundreds of millions of billions of people to your thing then it is self perpetuating and will remain popular simply because it is popular you don't need a core audience because everyone is now the core audience and if someone isn't using your thing they are now wierd and are actively encouraged by society to use your thing (facebook, Beyonce, Microsoft, smartphoes, ect...)

MTG is not a hundreds of millions//billions of people item
they should use scenario 1

that there's a core audience does not mean that the core audience is composed of people who play competitively and are mostly concerned with the competitive scene

also everything in this post is massively simplistic to the point of uselessness

Competetive players don't buy a lot of sealed product. Many would play with artless flavorless cards if it was the only option. His decisions are all to appeal to tabletop that actually buys sealed product.

it is over simplified yes but I only have 2000 characters
it is also fairly accurate to how things become popular in a very condensed version

MTGs core audience is the competitive scene
they are the ones that draw people in at FNM
they are the ones that encourage their friends to start
they are the ones that promote the game whenever they can

but they only do this when they believe the game is good and is satisfying them

casual players are part of that secondary audience
they joined because someone drew them into the game
they can turn into a member of the primary audience when they become obsessed with the game and want to take it to a higher level but many players don't do that and remain a member of the secondary audience forever
which is fine but wotc needs to realize that the only reason those people buy things from them is because at the core of the game is a playerbase that will be there to play and without that core, competitive, playerbase everyone else will shrivel off

>MTGs core audience is the competitive scene

source?

>they are the ones that encourage their friends to start

source?

>they are the ones that promote the game whenever they can

source?

>casual players are part of that secondary audience. they joined because someone drew them into the game. they can turn into a member of the primary audience when they become obsessed with the game and want to take it to a higher level but many players don't do that and remain a member of the secondary audience forever

source?

>source
the last 200 years of competitive, marketable, games
every major game that has been secucessful in the last 2 centuies of human existence has been able to identify their target demographic
and in case it wasn't obvious mtg wasn't proped up by people that wanted to play monopoly with their family
they were nerdy kids that wanted a hobby to play with their friends that has evolved over time into a global, competitive, phenomenon
the major tournaments, events, exhibitions, and themes of the game all revolve around the competitive aspect of it and glorify it
the whole of wotc, the playerbase, and the secondary market seems to understand that the game is meant to be enjoyed by competitive players
except the people that matter RnD and development

You write like a dyslectic 14-year old who has skimmed a few barely related Wikipedia articles and understood about half of what he just read.

You don't come across as particularly knowledgable or trustworthy, is what I'm saying.

sorry
I am writing from my bed and it is 3AM
if you want credentials I can tell you I work as a software developer who has made products that are used by millions of people worldwide
they are not games though
I am combining my experience from understanding basic marketing, content development, and gaming to form an argument

either way I am going to go to bed now
hope you have a good morning, night wherever you are

Starcitygames has to open aprox. 110 boosters for every Gideon the Spikes need. Cards don't materialize from nowhere.
Competitive players generate more sales for WotC than casual players because SCG, CFB, Troll & Toad, Card Kingdom, etc. BUY pallets of boxes. Wal Mart and Target are concessionaires, if the shit doesn't buy they shove it back to your storehouses where you have to pay to keep them rotting for eternity.

And Competitive players are also the ones who keep the lights on at the LGS, Timmy and friends may buy a shitload of Chimney Imps nobody else would ever touch, but the Spikes come in each friday to farm planeswalker points, pay tournament fees and a lot of them go as far as to buy new sleeves for every FNM. Not to mention they draft the most out of all players because they actually need to practice that shit to do well at PTs, GOs, Nationals, WMCs, etc.

"Competitive players don't spend money on the game" is fantasy spewed R&D because they don't want to design a competitive game. Sales numbers at stores speak a whole different story because Timmys sure as fuck didn't buy a million Devoted Druids at $5 each this weekend to test a new meme combo. Most Timmies don't even know there's a website where they can check spoilers in the first place.

>hours of devastation
>set symbol is literally Magic logo

what did they mean by this

Oh good. I can't wait for some cunt to windmill slam a damnation and go 3-0 live on twitch so everyone can see how fucking retarded foil mythic, mythic rare bullshit chase cards are in the current shit-tier power level that is mtg

>If you kitchen table you will buy the shit they make no matter what
This is the most retarded thing I've seen on Veeky Forums, ever.

People who have no understanding of Crisis phenomena should literally be executed for even looking at long-format stories in a critical light.

Damnation is Rare.

>the last 200 years of competitive, marketable, games
>last 200 years

>what is football
>what is basketball

>inb4 sports
not an argument

Obvious typo. He meant 20 years.

I would believe that notail said that in a heartbeat

He did

kitchen table magic has no problem adapting to whatever they print as long as they print janky tribals and stupid do nothing enchantments, so they are never a problem neither something that really does need compromises.

I went to a Limited GP and I saw how many packs were opened and at the end of the event how many cards were just thrown in the garbage. Mountains. Everyone could have set Cubes easily.

I cannot imagine how much metal and paper goes to waste at big stores like SCG. Imagine, there's a box, which is wrapped in plastic, and the informational insert and six boxes in another box. And this has been going on for god knows how many years.

I know it's just a drop in the pond compared to the waste that comes out of a grocery store. But it still bothers me. I look at my small collection of useful shit and easily there is at least 20-times more useless shit produced to get me what I have. It's like cooking an entire chicken only to eat the skin and throwing away the rest.

God, could you imagine if collectable card games fell into the crosshairs of the environmentalists? It's bad enough that SJW have their disgusting hooks into the game.

Nigger, competitive football is newer than competitive card games and texas hold 'em is from the very end of the 1800's, there's no competitive game being played today that was played competitively 200 years ago.

it's even worse, Magic cards are shit for recycling because there's literally a plastic layer within them and the process for getting that shit out of your pulp wastes so much water you're better off not recycling them.

Invocations aren't.

This is cringes shit to read.

You're pretty cringey.

F

ACTUAL football has been played competitively for a good long time. Since at least the late 1800. They weren't necessarily any good, but they were playing at a club level.

I feel like the longer I play this game, the more reasons I find to be disappointed in it. Instead of doing regular Sealed they have to provide prerelease boxes with fucking dice and other useless shit like stickers and they're all thrown away by the end of the day.

Sometimes I look at other players and wonder how they can continue playing this game with a somewhat consistent level of enthusiasm and excitement. I really do wonder if they're just too stupid to see the problems or if they just don't care - they got theirs, nothing else matters.

Every time I see a card with Shrine in the name and it doesn't have the subtype Shrine from the Kamigawa Hondens I wonder why Wizards just doesn't care about giving people free value by putting a single word in the type line. Shrine of Burning Rage and Luxa River Shrine.

They'll do dumb shit like Cartouches which is just more parasitic horseshit to add to the pile of things we'll never see again.

>allow every bloc under the sun
>unban goddamn everything
>keep on publishing broken cards
>enjoy the resulting chaos, and rake the money in

I mean, what could go wrong ?

THIS

Look at the new set. If you open the green god, what do you think the chances are that you'll have an opponent that can do something meaningful to answer it? They pretty much have to be playing White/Black Zombies and hope they got their "remove from game" Uncommon.

Mythics are fucking /busted/ for Limited. Mythics weren't designed to make Limited better, they were designed to make Limited worse, but trick dumbasses into buying more boxes to pull the mythics they need to be competitive in constructed.

Was there prize money? Cause if there wasn't the only "games" older than hold'em where people competed with structured rules for cash were shit like cockfighting, bullfighting and range shooting. Even fistcuffs doesn't really count because the fighters were a vehicle for money lenders and scam artists, they barely made money for themselves.

Damnation isn't an invocation.
Yet.

Their sales figures and research consistently and strongly indicate that the vast majority of their sales come from people who never go to fnm or even visit the website. Granted, these players buy less product, but there are so many more of them than active, enfranchised players. This is why so much of their effort is going into shit like the story spotlights (with the url being on those cards), and having a stable cast to latch on to.
Little simon and sarah buying six boosters from kmart and making up the rules while moving cards around a carpet are, unfortunately, who Hasbro's corporate division specialise in selling to and who WotC have to pay a lot of attention to.

Kill mtg as a whole? Not a huge loss by now honestly

youtube.com/watch?v=5k6HDyUDhrY&feature=youtu.be&t=90

>standard is the format!
>showcasing the most stale format
>promo card for participation is a card you can't play in standard

TL;DR: Support your local cubers!

maybe they're hinting at a return to New Phyrexia? Right guys? Right?

in all seriousness, how is the modern format holding up?

Poison will always be a mistake, sorry guy

There's no difference between that and pulling one of the few bomb rares in the pre-mythic days though. In fact, the main issue has nothing at all to do with the mythics themselves but the lack of answers to bombs in general at lower rarities. Removal at common is either far too situational or far too expensive, and the good removal spells at uncommon come at such a premium that you're lucky if you get even one.

Well, I mean, he does have a point.

It's in an overall pretty solid place right now, aside from the fact that the format has no good control decks.

>keep on publishing broken cards
They're only broken in standard where they lack answers.

>OP has nothing to do with the magic storyline
>Ha, so Modern is in a bad spot, huh? Kinda reminds me of the FUCKING JACETICE LEAGUE I SWEAR TO GOD
>BOLAS SHOULD KILL JACE AND SKULLFUCK CHANDRA ALREADY FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
fucking autists get everywhere

did you actually read the post dude?

Well as far as the card themselves are concerned they sell them in bulks of like 100 commons for 5$ and shit like that.

>when the competitive scene leaves a game the game starts to die no matter how many casuals it had

This happens all the time in games, for honor is dead in the water because ubi wouldn't listen. Hell they had to have a blackout day of no one playing to get the devs to even pull their heads out of their asses and even then shit is still fucked.

Remember pokemon go? the game that the casuals turned into a popular phenomena for all of about two months then they got bored and went back to crossing road?

Also the argument that competitive players spend less than casuals is stupid, when someone buys a box at your LGS who is it? Someone who has never played the game before or that guy who is in every friday? Who has fully sleeved decks, mtg themed mats and deck boxes with official spin down dice? Is it the guy who just started yesterday?