And just like that, we have a new yardstick for bad flavor text

the thing is that no one gives a shit about liliana's intentions on amonkhet, and they will give even less of a shit about 2 years from now. flavor text should more or less be timeless. having read that flavor text, i have no idea who the fuck razaleth is, nor have i been made feel anything relevant to him, like fear, respect or admiration. it's just a big clump of text that says nothing relevant to the creature itself, except that he's a demon

We've actually been getting stuff like this for a while. Somebody on the team is the most boring person alive, yet they keep giving them work.

We Yugioh now

Post other bad flavortext

that's only 1 line and is actually related to thing it depicts

Flavor text isn't easy.

Could you write better text for that card?

"Meow."
—Watchers of the Dead

>Could you write better text for that card?

No but that's why it isn't my job and I am not being paid to do so.

>Loyal beyond death

>In life they guard the dream lands, in death the halls of rebirth

>Corner Report"Died of natural causes, cat scratch fever"

>WOTC makes a card that is almost as good as Griselbrand without completely breaking it
That's the problem

"The dead rest easy, knowing their departure to the underworld is guarded."

Probably not, but I'll give it a go

>Able to peer through the darkest of catacombs. These silent watchers stand ever vigilant to ensure that none escape their final reward.

This reads like something from YGO

"When a cat stares at nothing - it's not nothing that it sees."

Older was better.

Those are night and day.

"They guard against both those that would enter and leave without permission"

Or something like that.

B-But goblins are supposed to be silly! Zip, bang, paf! Boum!

It's not that it's not bad. It's that it's not ENTERTAININGLY bad. Even if something is cringey, it's at least interesting enough to make you cringe. Bad and boring just makes something forgettable and easy to ignore.

People have given you plenty of examples, but it's not hard to write better text for it. Because anything that isn't a bland, dry definition of what their job is would be better.

Why is there no asian guys in Amonkhet? They're not going the same way as Innistrad since the focus is already on brown people and that's all that matter for the twitter fatties?

I want to complain to WotC about not having enough Asians, as a joke, but I'm afraid they'd actually start shoe-horning them in.

Stop this "Timmy is dumb" meme

Honestly I think that this flavor text is worse than text that is amusingly bad. When something is actively bad it usually means that someone at least tried.

The person that wrote the flavor text for that awful Sorin vindicate card was at least trying to be funny. Whoever did this wasn't trying at all.

Easy.
"One for those who would enter. One for those who would leave."

That's some good shit, man.

To people in the states, there are only two races.

Boston Marathon and Chicago Marathon?

EVERYONE wanks it to Liliana

>almost as good as Griselbrand
That's a good joke

A tutor-on-a-stick is more Johnny than Timmy.

>Bad and boring just makes something forgettable and easy to ignore.
So you're saying it's bad in a way that's not novel?
I can accept that and I agree. This is unexceptionally bad.

But the original comments stated that it wasn't actually bad at all, which I could not understand and did not agree with.

This. Might be fun but they're way too dense.

>Jace likes wanks, especially wanks to Liliana Vess, the symbol of MTG's fanservice.

It's not even really really bland and boring. It's just bland. I'm informed and it conveys some characterization. Definitely on the long-winded side but not bad.

No, this flavortext is crap. I hate this direction for Goblin leaders.

I'd rather have a lot of them be and act different than just a mindless dronelike personality no matter the plane.

"You understand the power of death, Liliana, but you still value life. That is why you are weak."

See, I just fixed it.

How does he feel about collars, the symbol of avacyn's church?

Fuck off, at least one goblin in the entire goddamned multiverse gets to be a battle-hardened veteran with the soul of a warrior, fuck your lolsorandumb bullshit.

>not using the TSP Ancient Grudge

>almost as good as griselbrand
Griselbrand is a t1 win if you play legacy
>ritual, entomb, shallow grave, griselbrand
>swing, pay 21 life
>lotus petal, ritual, ritual, ????, tendrils of agony

We had Khans 2 years ago.

I wonder if therell be an Unstable card referencing this flavor text.

You forgot Children of the Kolis (or whatever it is) to gain 21, draw more, and make them discard their hand before Tendrils. :^)

The Gatewatch hates baddies, especially Bolas, the pushed Super-Villain of MTG.

Children of Korlis
I swear I used to have one
But can they SSG into runeflare trap?

>playing SSG in Legacy
Yeah, no.

There aren't, it's just that blacks act like there are, and you're not allowed to call them out on it.

No.

Asians and Arabs just don't give a fuck and know there are more important matters than representation in a card game

Diversity means african americans.
Everyone else, including actual africans, is opressive and evil.

I didn't know this was /pol/, but I'd rather have Arabs than the idiotic blacks we have in the US.

So how are you distinguishing the two on fantasy worlds? Why are people responding to this shit, in a thread that has nothing to do with it?

...

Flavor text? Flavor text

Johnny has no use for an 8 mana 8/8

...

Will use in Kaalia.

The number of black cards that animate a single creature beg to differ.

You're in black, the thing costs 4 mana at most.

heh

>[Unintelligible beatboxing]
>-Jace
Gets me every time.

thats great

Veeky Forums confirmed for better writers than WotC

Not that we didn't already know that

Wizards doesn't pay their employees my dude.

If there's anything Veeky Forums hates, it's bad flavor text. Especially overly expository flavor text, the symbol of bad storytelling.

Sphinx hype anyone?

Liliana insisted on coming to Amonkhet, a plane populated by gods and their worshipers, who compete for a chance to best the Trial of the Five Gods, to confront one of the two remaining demons--incredibly fearsome demons of near-limitless power--to whom she is bound. Liliana, granted near-immortality and near-limitless power by actually four demons, was in a bind, so she has been hunting these four demons, of which only two remain, but only one will remain after this one, Razaketh, a fearsome demon, is defeated. Once she defeats this demon, Razaketh, and also the final demon to which she is bound, she will not be bound to any demons anymore. Thus, her powerful magic, like herself, will no longer be bound - it, like her, would be boundless. As of now though, both Razaketh and the final demon remain--binding her and her magic. Black lives matter.

It's going in my Isperia Flying Tribal.

When your goal in life is to create as many KANGZ as you can, you don't allow yourself to be distracted by details.

These are gold.

underappreciated comment

The quality of Wizards' writing in regards to Magic tells me one or two of many possibilities.
- they are hiring people straight out of school with no actual experience but willing to do anything for a (low) salary
- someone with an education does not necessarily mean they are good at their job
- maybe the people they hire have credible job experience but they are still desperate enough for a low paycheque
- hiring someone who is actually good at their job just inflates operating costs, and we all know Wizards has overseers who love keeping that shit down
- they're blowing their writing budget on trend analysts who are more interested in pushing a trendy political position or social justice position based off real life than writing good far-reaching fantasy

People fresh out of college deserve an abundance of opportunities and yes, they are often stuck doing mediocre work to build themselves up. But there needs to be a core group of senior and experienced people around to teach them how to grow and there is an absolute certainty that there is NOBODY at Wizards showing anybody the ropes when it comes to competent writing.

In all seriousness I'm surprised they're not trying to impose a 50/50 gender quota within the design team. I'm even more surprised that the retards complaining about the game aren't coming out and exclaiming that a game developed entirely by men in the past and present cannot possibly be healthy for people to play especially when art of a woman getting (deservedly) chokeslammed caused enough of a ruckus to illicit an official apology.

>they're not trying to impose a 50/50 gender quota within the design team
God, I'd love this to catch on, if only to see Rosewater going under the tide of PC tumblrinas screeching about how his team is white cock dominated and how he should relinquish his position to a POC woman who diserves it.

you're reading waaaay too much into it. They have gone from publishing entire books written by established (pulp) authors to short stories that would fit into the lore sections of rulebooks written by professional bloggers. There is clear theme of that kind of cutbacks extending to the flavor text. There's probably 1 or 2 "flavor text" guys in the design team and probably 75% of the stuff they write gets thrown straight in the garbage and replaced by whatever soulless marketing husk they employ who writes the shit we see on cards like Razaketh after it's been shown to a committee on grey powerpoint slides.

>flavor text tries to describe something simply
>"It's shit! Why isn't it all poetic and stuff?"
>flavor text tries to be poetic and stuff
>"Fucking Wizards, who writes this purple prose shit?"
I like ya, Veeky Forums, but you're not exactly literary connoisseurs. Some flavor texts are bad, of course, but it feels like everybody in these threads nowadays are just trying to recreate le epic Avacyn's Collar meme. It's the same shit you see on /co/, where stupid idiots will edit perfectly good webcomics, crying "words, words, words!" when the original amount of words was perfectly fine, all because of how funny it was when Buckley's comics (which really DID have too many words) got the treatment.

Honestly, it's a case of their creative team being overworked.
At this point in time, they have to create the world for each block, figure out what the fuck the plot is, commission the artists, write the flavor text, write the stories, make sure all of it fits together, and do all of this twice a year.
And soon it will be 2-3 times a year.
And they've had...maybe one person brought on board since they swapped to two-block?
While it doesn't explain Ancient Grudge itself, it does explain the notable drop in quality from the last three-set block to now in everything they're doing.
Wait, they do that shit on /co/? I only knew about it being applied to OotS here on Veeky Forums and that started solely because some chucklefuck said it took him a full minute to read six words and it devolved from there

I hope so

what a slut

>Wait, they do that shit on /co/? I only knew about it being applied to OotS here on Veeky Forums and that started solely because some chucklefuck said it took him a full minute to read six words and it devolved from there
they do it on /v too with Buckley comics claiming that they can remove up to 75% of the panels and dialog and preserve the joke.

?

It's been a long time since I regulared /co/, but I remember it happening: I may have been thinking of it happening on Veeky Forums, because I remember both the stuff you're talking about and some fucking idiots who tried to do it to Oglaf posting here.

Flavor text is actually doing fine. As I crudely sort of outlined above, one way to look at flavor text is to take one of two main tacks: expository text or evocative text. Some flavor text is evocative, which inspires an emotional reaction:
>Armageddon: A bloody dawn broke over a scabbed and tortured world.
You'll notice that this doesn't really tell us much about anything. The flavor text is appropriate for the card, and arguably kinda cool, but it's not tied to some greater story. It doesn't really tell the reader much information. So here's an example of an expository flavor text, which is:
>Feldon's Cane: Feldon found the first of these canes frozen in the Ronom Glacier.
I mean, it's not that exciting, except for the part where the cane is a hidden treasure. But it tells you something about Feldon (that he found a cane), and it tells you that there's a thing called the "Ronom glacier." It's useful information that makes you feel like a world is a bit more filled out, that gives you information on characters and locations, etc. And that's a good thing. As far as I'm concerned, Razaketh's flavor text fits into this spot, and it does its job perfectly well.
(Some flavor text, from this perspective, attempt both angles. A few, like Obliterate, actually manage it.)

Some CCGs and LCGs have more of one kind of flavor text than the other. Wizards is currently trying to make more expository flavor text because they wanted to get people more invested in the story. That doesn't make the new flavor text artistically void or whatever. It's just doing something different.

The most notable Magic books were written by dudes who also wrote Warcraft fiction, don't pretend like there's any change in the quality from then to now.

The OP image isn't "describing something simply". Feldon's flavor text describes something simply, with a succinct quote that nevertheless tells you a lot. Razaketh's flavor text reads like something you'd see in a synopsis on Sparknotes.

This, upon rereading the flavor text I just realized it doesn't even mention Razaketh. The flavor could be a complete nonsequitor if you didn't know Razaketh was one of the big three demons.

>they're blowing their writing budget on trend analysts
This.
I'm 99.99% positive the people in each of the creative writing courses I've been in could come up with better flavor text fodder in a shorter amount of time than whatever team they currently have going. And most of what we wrote was garbage. It's baffling how incompetent Wizards can be.

>not Nascar
I mean, i hate the shit, but it's the only race that matters, and i'm not even from the south
Horse races get some press locally, but that's due to us having a track

It would be like stating facts about collars, especially ones that are symbols of churches.

Bolas is one of the few times I would be ok with that.

Flavor text was thought up by the same one that did Turn to Frog?