Magic the Gathering Boners

Magic has been around since 1993 and during that period there's been good things and bad things.

What were the absolute worst and most stupid things WotC did for Magic during its history? Let's have a thread with some discussion.

I'll start off with the blatantly obvious one. A set constructed fully top-down by people who did not know the gameplay element of the game very well, also hampered by heavy restraints from management. Homelands was such a disaster they implemented a special tournament rule to FORCE people to include Homelands cards in their decks and push sales. Despite some small references to Ulgrotha in today's products like Planechase and Duels of the Planeswalkers, Homelands remains maligned to this day.

So what are your favorite MtG boners? It can be a single card, an expansion, a mechanic, or anything. It can be art, mechanics or flavor.

Top down is concept first, mechanics designed to match concept right?

I'm not a MtG player, but gimme a couple examples of bad top down Homelands cards, I understand the game and have played casually enough to understand if you show me.

That's just buzzwords. The real reason is Homelands was a weak set.

Yeah, it means that they sat down and constructed a story, then came up with ideas for cards which would be "flavorful" and then tacked on game mechanics onto those cards. That approach need not be bad by necessity, it's just that with Homelands the people making most of the cards (some were made by the playtest group that would later fill out R&D) didn't know enough about the mechanics aspect to make them work.

To grab just one example, they started out with the idea of a giant oyster which a creature would get trapped in and slowly suffocate under water. All well and good, but the way the card is costed combined with its 0/3 stats and the agonizingly slow way it kills makes it a mechanically terrible card. And this sort of thing is all over Homelands.

Fallen Empires
Dark
Kamigawa
Legions
Return to Ravnica

In other words OP is a fucking retard sage

Mythic rares.

Try to make all 5 colors evenly matched for every set. In doing so it was no longer magic to me, WotC turning it into 5 point rock/paper/scissors.

Somebody has to win and force player to play all colors. No picking "your color" and sticking with it for 20 years.

A creature that also "arrests' an opponents creature?

> I have all early sets ones of similar card type.

Also, who here knows of Starter 1994 (sp)?

When was this ever NOT the case? Even in Alpha/Beta the colors were relatively balanced.

Reserved List while there are formats where the cards on it are still legal.

It's funny because there are cards in Homelands that would actually see play in Modern format right now.

Primal Order, Memory Lapse, Merchant Scroll, Koskun Falls, Leeches. Well I dunno about Leeches anymore, seems like Infect dropped off the radar hard after the Git Probe ban.

They had a black centric set in either odyssey or torment but it fucked up the limited enviroment.

>What were the absolute worst and most stupid things WotC did for Magic during its history?
>Homelands
>The Resserved List
>Hiring Mark Rosewater
>Mirrodin
>Kamigawa
>Chasing off Guay, Brom and RK Post.
>MTGO
>Their website, everything about it
>The Jacetice League
>Hiring SJWs to write ther stories
>"We hired an African American Culture Consultant to teach us how to write coloreds, aren't we so prog?!"
And that's just the tip.

Personally it was letting EDH get big. Sure it's more people playing, but it quickly turned a lot of the metas I participated in into Legacy 100 Singleton format and I was priced out.

But on a whole I'd say their kneejerk reactions when they make too strong a set/card. Mirrodin was pretty busted, but that didn't mean Kamigawa had to be as neutered as it was.

Reeeeeeee stop talking shit about Kamigawa reeeeeeee

It was Torment, widely marketed as "the black set".

I liked how spirits and some other cards looked, and a couple mechanics were cool.

But it was a very insular set and for dumb reasons some mechanics they didn't expand on going into the rest of the block. ("It didn't make sense to put ninjutsu into Saviors!" and gave no actual answer).

Would you really have a "casuals spike pls go" format if EDH didn't exist?
Modern is turbo wannabe Pro Tour shit, Standard is "the pro format", Legacy is Legacy, Pauper is Legacy lite.

Magic just isn't casual friendly because you often don't lose because you're a worse player but because your deck is worse, and that's easily fixed by throwing more money at it until all decks are at peak performance and you actually start losing because you still suck at the game.

Sophic centaur gave me a pretty big boner

Banding

Holy shit if there was ever a mechanic that spawned more rules text and explanation I'd love to hear it

-Overprinting Fallen Empires
-Homelands
-Overprinting Chronicles
-The Reserved List
-Urza's Saga and Combo Winter
-Lin Sivvi under the original legend rule
-Affinity in Mirrodin
-The design process for Kamigawa
-Motherfucking Sprout Swarm in TPF draft
-Phyrexian Mana
-Dragon's Maze is literally nothing
-Jace Team fatigue souring people on the characters we're supposed to root for.

The game is also more than just how fast/well can I win. Don't ignore a Johnny's desire for interesting games.

>leeches
You'd use Melira if you cared.

Ultra mythics.

Are we claiming magic waifus?

Unmarked secret rarities like fatal push or that 101st common Marcucko talks about sometimes.

>Overprinting Fallen Empires
One of my friends owns an LGS and was heavy into Magic at that time. Crazy stories about Wizards trying to offload entire crates of Fallen Empires on him because IT PRINTS MONEY DO IT BRO. By the time they realized Homarids were not the second coming of Christ they'd already filled multiple ships with the set.

That's kind of hot(.jpg)

I think the right word you're looking for is "blunders". I think it's the addition of Planewalker decks, and pushing Planeswalker cards in every new set now.

I had actually opened the thread just to comment on this. It's surprising to see anyone in this day and age use the term 'boner' to describe a fault or mistake. It used to be accepted slang though (see: Joker's Boners comic that gets posted on /co/ sometimes).

Elesh Norn gives me big boner because the white and red color scheme makes my pp big

I unironically want a Homelands Revisited, the same way we got Coldsnap to unfuck Ice Age. It has amazing lore and iconic as fuck characters, as well as some all-too-rare tribes that could use support.

I mean, it's not like MTG's storyline has any future. Why not revisit its past?

MtG has the best boners

Those hips did it for me.

Though Scars block had some cool advertising.

Planeswalkers, Mythic Rares, Power Creep.

Trumpeting their oh so progressive transgender, ethnic, whatever SJW bullshit in the media.

Can't use Melira in D&T.

the gatewatch completely killed all interest I had in the lore. I still have a bunch of the old novels but as soon as Jace showed up I dropped it and have not regretted it. The game is still great and I think they finally realized that people are sick of seeing the same 5 boring people over and over again.

>implying D&T needs help with infect

Everything since Innistrad, it feels like.

Just focusing on five or so jackoffs with no real connection to the plane was uninteresting.

Agrus Kos was great to follow through as his perspective was tied to knowing only Ravnica and its customs. So you got to learn a lot about the world.

Jace bumbling in and saying "no, you're wrong!" at everyone till people ran a maze it didn't even feel like they went back.

its miserable
Theros, Kaladesh, Ahmonket all look super interesting but instead of really learning about them or the people who live there we just get these shitty stories of the gatewatch showing up and saving the day every time.

Theros was a mistake.

Got a couple packs on my way home from work today. ended up unpacking this, Kefnet the Mindful and As Foretold

nice, bestlooking new art imo

what was the mistake?

Theros

Take your pick.
>forced Greek theme. Nothing original except the constellations coming down as creatures (reverse Orion scenario). Otherwise it's just hoplites and minotaurs and centaurs oh my.
>there's actually no plane-specific story occurring. It's just planeswalker drama that happens to link into some nonsense with the gods
>also Standard babies got mad about a Thoughtseize reprint

NIGGERS IN MY GREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECCCCEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Also they killed best walkerfu

>garruk is insane and missing
>elsbeth is in the underworld
>sorin is in a rock
>meanwhile a group of chucklefucks jumps from plane to plane ruining everything but think they're fixing everything, like an awful satire of US foreign policy