Why is R always getting the short end of the stick?

Why is R always getting the short end of the stick?
What's with WotC and MaRo's hateboner for it?

We've been at this for almost two decades.
What gives?

red is the worst color philosophically hth

Well, for the sake of the argument(And I mean for the sake of starting one) doesn't Red have its Artificer and Artifact niche nowadays... which does not help this argument any as that basically means that Red has to be supported by a not!color just to compete.

It's hard to balance number-based removal with either making it pitifully weak or making creatures with toughness less than X unplayable.
Until recently, Wizards were unwilling to explore aspects of red outside of goblins, dragons, fire/lightning and anger due to 'not fitting the theme of a battle.'
R&D is currently of the opinion that every game should last at least five turns without a decisive winner, making aggro - the strategy that red is built around - completely worthless.
Its creatures are designed around being fast but ultimately inefficient, meaning that the colors designed to have more efficient creatures (white, green and sometimes black) are ultimately better than red creatures.

So the result is a color with worse creatures with white and green, a color with worse removal than white and black and a color with worse card draw than blue, green and black that is built around a strategy that the game designers consider problematic, while possessing a very boring flavor.

Red also gets the "exile a card and play it this turn" mechanic, which is ironically not very red since playing on curve means you don't have any fucking mana to cast your use-or-lose spell.

user is right in that without good removal/damage and fast efficient creatures red is kind of useless. I like the looting and scrying and exile-play style of play, and the artifact synergy, but taking red's speed and force and efficiency (this is the important one) away gimps it thematically and mechanically.

Give us Incinerate! Give us Flame Slash! (Or at least R for 3 to a creature.)

Because it's not blue
/thread

>Red also gets the "exile a card and play it this turn" mechanic, which is ironically not very red since playing on curve means you don't have any fucking mana to cast your use-or-lose spell.
This. It is extremely frustrating to use those spells to pull a huge bomb out of your library that you can't even fucking cast. The person who made that concept should have thought a little harder when designing cards. Pic related for example of bad design.

The problem is that Magic is a game about thinking and Red is the philosophy of not thinking. Red's philosophy is to have things quick and simple, and that often doesn't mesh well with a game based around making many tactical decisions; efficient red cards are often 'unfun'. Red at its best, power-wise and flavor-wise, is just mindlessly dumping your hand on the table and attacking for the kill; this is hard to make both interactive and efficient.

(The opposite is also the reason blue gets (or at least used to get) so many broken cards. Blue gets all kinds of tricky cards that require a lot of thought or hard decisions to use properly, which often enough turn out to be very powerful when used optimally.)

No, the reason blue got so much broken shit back on the day was because it was the default dumping ground for effects that they couldn't easily find a home for and a couple other equally stupid reasons

That guy, the Bombat thing, the Orge girl from Tarkir (Dragons I think). All 1-2 drops, mostly not optional triggers. It's a nice bonus turn four when you've not got a land, or could use the extra card, but printing his ability on aggro creatures is awkward.

Chandra, Pyromaster's +0 has that problem, but at least her +1 Ping is good enough to use first.

This is an issue that needs to be addressed, but I'm not sure how it would be done. Red has some fun cards you can build up and hit with, but they're only useful in casual play. Red gets good Scry and Flashback support, as well as Prowess, but Scry adds 1-2 CMC, Flashback spells are in efficient on both castings generally, and Prowess needs some good burn.

An equivalent of Seeker of the Way in red (first strike or an optional exile trigger?), or maybe some creatures that shock as they come into play? Maybe some mechanic tribal, +1/+1 to first strike or evasion to haste creature... I'm scraping at shit ideas now. How about
>Not Totally Shit Burn
>RR
>3 damage to a player or walker, or
>4 damage to a creature

...

Haven't played for ages. Loved red.

Is my card playable?

Red deserves to be shit desu.

>exile it and play it this turn
Has anyone ever actually used that effect? Why does wizards keep printing that fucking garbage effect? More over, where's my Red enchantments that punish players?

I don't really know what Standard looks like right now.
Before Amonkhet, red was a major part of the infinite cats deck.
Also a major part of Mardu Vehicles.
Reminder that after Grixis Control won the PT right after Kaladesh's release it was all anyone played for weeks.
There was also the RG energy one-shot deck. Which now has Fling, so maybe it'll make a comeback.
Battle and Khans being together meant everything was 3-5 colors, but we can just disregard all that.
I don't even remember what was going on in Theros.
INN-RTR being together meant everything was 3-5 colors, but we can just disregard all that.
Oh, except BR Vamps. That was a major part of Standard for all of Innistrad. And while Zendikar was in Standard, too.
Kuldotha Red was one of the top decks before Caw Blade was figured out. As was Valakut, which was still the #2 deck after Caw Blade was figured out.

Your ten year estimate is as bogus as you are and I'm inclined to believe that comes from a line of thought that I will satirize as:
>but it's not MY kind of red!

Direct damage makes people salty and there is little else in red's portfolio.

>red as a support color
That's the issue

>mono red rushdown aggro/burn strong enough to be a major factor in a meta
>people inevitably complain about games being too short, "i'm not even getting to play", "no skill", "no options," "no interactivity"

>monored rushdown/burn in a meta where it's consistently stonewalled by stall/cheap answers
>why does MaRo hate red every other color can play mono why doesn't red 20 years never viable remove gobbab

Pick one, assholes.

Exiliing a card from your library has next to no downside unless you're gonna mill out, so Abbot is at worst a piker with prowess (not terrible in a Standard RDW build on its own), plus it nets you a card when you're low on gas.

I guess it feels bad if you're bad, but that doesn't make it a bad design.

New chandra is the first time the effect has been good, so the suggested mana cost for impulse draw is 0.

That extra turn card red got recently is actually extremely "baller".

how about we brainstorm ways to make red better without just reprinting broken burn spells?

themes we could play up: chaos, swarms, recklessness.

1RR
arc-spawn marauder
creature - elemental knight
first strike, haste
whenever ~this~ deals combat damage flip a coin: if you win the flip create two 1/1 elemental creature tokens. if you lose the flip have ~this~ deals 2 damage to a creature you control.
4/2

if you win the flip you can start to make an army. if you lose the flip it dies unless you control another creature.

Red is freedom
MaRo is an east coast jew.

>just make it op that will replace burn
kys custom cardfags

Red should expand into breaking the fundamental game rules as a design space. It fits the anarchic dimension of red's color philosophy.

That's completely wrong though. The majority of OP blue cards are completely braindead.
Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, Show and Tell, Omniscience, Dream Halls, Tinker, Treasure Cruise, Ponder, Preordain, Dig Through Time, Bribery, Mental Misstep, Force of Will, Mana Drain... These are all cards with very powerful effects that require almost no thinking. You simply cast them and reap a ton of value.

>force of will
>no thinking
The bait is too good I cant resist

>a 4/2 for 1RR that kills itself sometimes is op
I don't know about that. Definitely good but the fact that you need to already control creatures to reliably go off makes it not as crazy.

Red has creatures that can survive that 2 damage "downside" easy. A 4/2 with haste and first strike with its only downside after you get the damage is too good. There is no reason to print a spark elemental with only upsides.

spark elemental only costs 1?

>not liking hedonism

You started strong, at least.

wow I have to exile a card from hand to cast this jesus this is so hard what do I do

> It's hard to balance number-based removal with either making it pitifully weak or making creatures with toughness less than X unplayable.

Wouldn't copying Hearthstone's "Spell Damage" mechanic pretty much solve this?

>Wouldn't copying Hearthstone's "Spell Damage" mechanic pretty much solve this?

the what

Hedonism is black. Autistic screeching is red.

>I have never played legacy the post

Legacy is the format I play the most and FoW is not a skill intensive card. Not saying the card is braindead, but I'd never call it hard to use.

Fuck you, Abbot is fantastic. Early Aggression, but it's not dead late game. Fine to drop ahead, behind or at parity.
You don't play a land out of your hand first unless you're an idiot, so it can hit your land drop too.

This.

Have you completely forgotten Origins and mono-red and Atarka Red decks?!

And do you honestly think a standard player could choose the right pitch between stifle, jtms and brainstorm or even correctly assess when its ok to 2 for 1 yourself to get on the right path for that win?

MaRo is scared of lightning and doesn't have any other way to express his feelings.

"Every time you deal damage with a spell, increase that damage by X" is an evergreen, keyworded mechanic found on creatures in Hearthstone.

This muddies the toughness threshold where damage-based removal shafts a creature, because a +1 Spell Damage creature isn't always in play.

They already have that effect in red, it got printed in origins most recently.

Seems like design space worth exploring in MtG, anyway. There's been a trend of red creatures that feed on burn spells, but always in more indirect ways (mostly having some separate benefit triggered by casting any sorcery or instant, as in Prowess, Young Pyromancer, etc). Perhaps because WotC wants those sorts of things to work with spells besides just burn...but then, if that's the aim, you could easily do something along the lines of "Whenever you cast a sorcery or instant spell, you may have ~ deal 1 damage to target creature." Or maybe something like "Whenever you cast a sorcery or instant spell, if it deals damage to a creature, it deals that much damage +X instead. If it does not deal damage, ."

I don't remember seeing such an effect, and searching for rules text it might employ is turning up nada.

They don't even really get much of that anymore. They only got some in Kaladesh because Kaladesh was an artifact plane. And even then, they got Gremlins which were all about destroying artifacts.

Just reprint Lightning Strike and Searing Spear.

I already have. I picked the former.

Its called embermaw hellion. He increases all red sources you controls' damage to a player or permenant by 1 on jis 4/5 trampler body. The only other version was a kamaigawa goblin that makes all red do 1 more damage. The effect is hard to search because the wording is bad compared to hearthstone. It also makes cards like rakdos charm deal double damage to you.

There was a Hellion that increased the damage of all other red sources you control by 1. Embermaw Hellion.

Ah. I sort of assumed there'd be an instance of the mechanic somewhere in Magic (I mean, what isn't) but don't really keep up Magic so I didn't know where.

That's a big creature for what should be a spammable effect though. I'd be trying to get that onto the cheapest creatures possible.

Its weird that the effect isnt on anything smaller than a 4 drop but it honestly combines nicely with the body to make a decent finisher. Id love to see a wizard or shaman that did the effect though.

>spammable effect
There's a shitton of plink effects that become disgustingly powerful if this is spammable. Creatures are a lot harder to kill in mtg than hearthstone, and a simple 2 mana creature that halves your clock sounds disgusting

>Red should expand into breaking the fundamental game rules
That's what every card in the game does.

>does anyone use this
Probably not nearly as much as they print it. I imagine in sealed getting one of those cards late game is akin to having "draw a card" in red.

It should either exile the card and save it, let 1-2cmc cards be cast for free, or be on things that trigger it as an ability. NOT on your 2-drop as an etb effect.

>Why is U always getting the short end of the stick?
>What's with WotC and MaRo's hateboner for it?

>We've been at this for almost two decades.
>What gives?

I would think if they were to turn this into a more common keyword, it would only apply to spells, not creature abilities, for that very reason.

Hence why I wasn't able to find anything in my search earlier: I was specifically looking for "spell" or "sorcery" or "instant", not just any source.

Certainly, Embermaw Hellkite's ability would be crazy to put on a lot of cheap creatures. That's definitely a bomb/finisher ability. But making it apply only to sorceries and instants, would make it a lot more valid as a spammable ability. And if the goal specifically is to let red removal stretch to hit creatures an opponent might think "safe", you could restrict it even further to only boost sorcery and instant damage dealt to creatures (or permanents, if you also want it to apply to planeswalkers), which would make it even more likely to fit on spammable, cheap bodies.

Another thought for helping red removal would be high-damage effects that only work on creatures that have been dealt damage already this turn. Ideally on cantrips or repeatable abilities, since the last thing red needs with its existing propensity to run out of gas is card disadvantage.

Aren't all the colors philosophical aspects dead ends, though?

What are you talking about? Red is one of the best colors in modern, and it isn't bad in standard.

What about origins? They got some nice artifact cards in there

I was thinking of sticking it on a weenie with "Must attack when able" to make it less permanent (and still very red).

How about a red keyword called 'Revenge'?

Real simple, when it dies you plink target creature or player for 1.

Effects like this do exist in magic, but Im saying make the more common. It allows red to reap some amount of reward back from losing creatures, and makes boardwipes slightly dangerous for others to play.

Stacks well with effects like Earthquake too.

>how about we brainstorm ways to make red better

R
Instant
Deal 20 damage to target player. Spells or abilities which target this spell cost 1 additional colorless mana to play. You may have any number of this card in your deck.

It should delay the effect one turn.
So you get "at the beginning of your next turn exile", that way you actually get mana to cast shit.

>Green's thing is creatures
>White's main thing is life gain
>Blue's main thing is card draw
>Black's main thing is creature destruction
>Red's main thing is direct damage.

Of the 5 colors of magic, Red and green are the only two colors whose main "things" can directly cause you to win the game, and red's is nominally faster and harder to deal with. That makes it hard to balance cards around.

>Another thought for helping red removal would be high-damage effects that only work on creatures
Nigga figuratively all red burn spells in standard only hit creatures. There's a lot of good options already, the problem is that none of them can hit face

Yes.

Colorless mana stands for existential/cosmic terror, the realization that the blind eternities on the whole are indiferent to the planes and these planes' inhabitants.

I loved that concept when they printed on devil tokens in SOI. They could explore that more, for sure.

Are you gonna be so shameless as to pretend U isn't the teacher's pet?