How come modern MTG card designs are so inferior to the old cards?

How come modern MTG card designs are so inferior to the old cards?

How come you keep making the same b8 thread?

I love Lightning Bolts original design, but unfortunately those black border cards were few and far between and are now extremely expensive
Original Black Border>Modern Border>Nu Border>White Modern Border>>>White Old Border

Can't have contrast anymore because "it looks weird if a blue card has another strong color in the art other than its own". Have to make everything too wordy to cover the blandness of the nex settings. Etc etc.

Because you touch yourself at night

While that's a pretty big generalization, I still agree with it.
NuWizards, especially after Hasbro boguht them, is trying to make the game more widely "accessible" to more people. That has meant that cards by design have been simplified in mechanics and flavor, art has been "standardized" by and large, and things like the Jacetice Leauge exist for "story".
If you looked at the percentage of cards being played (I haven't) in eternal formats, I'm willing to bet most are older than 5 years. It's very rare now that any new cards have a power level high enough to be played in eternal formats. They don't want to take risks anymore, plus appealing to as many people as possible, makes new sets bland.
Wizards is going to have problems with turnover and retention as new players (usually playing standard) find out that their super "cool" dinasaur deck is going to be worthless come rotation becuase all the cards are objectively shit outside of standard. Or that the fat pack he bought contains 1-3 playable cards and the rest are shite.
Magic needs to die before it gets better, sold by Hasbro to some billionaire who loves Magic, who doesn't give two ducks about what players want. It happens all the fucking time, you give players (of any game) what they "want" and they always end up unhappy. Just focus on making a fun and good card game like they did in the early days.

Quit posting this shitty bait.

>who doesn't give two ducks about what players want. It happens all the fucking time, you give players (of any game) what they "want" and they always end up unhappy. Just focus on making a fun and good card game like they did in the early days.

I disagree. I think Magic is better today than it has been for years. The new sets remind me of the 90s glory days. They've really been upping their game, no pun intended.

Rules are too tight now for their art commissions. I remember some old timers showing the new kids binders of old sets like Odyssey, Scourge, etc. The kids eyes would go wide looking at the crazy beautiful art, and then they would read some crazy jank (but "overpowered" by today's standard.) and they'd by like "Ohhh so cool this would be good with X, or maybe this Y" usually followed by "Why can't new cards be this cool?".

Shitposter, wherefore dost thou shitpost?

>oldfags

How dude? Ill admit that Kaladesh some cool cards, but they keep overcosting everything to the point of unplayability. There hasn't been much card art that's are me go "whoa that's cool/beautiful/crazy". All the normalized CG touched art is bland to me. In terms of design, most of the new sets have been like "Oh this is a good card, you just jam it in X with Y. Obvious synergy with B, still not good enough though". When was the last time a card was printed that spawned its own archytype? Jeskai Acendency? Mentor? Even those are simple "Jam good spells to win". I'm only talking about Eternal formats, and the reason I'm doing that is because cards good there generally have some value after standard rotation. If Wizards keeps printing worthless cards people get burned out.

I actually started playing around Ravnica , I've just been introduced to Legacy and have looked through the old sets on Gatherer.

it's a mixed bag. the art will be yugioh tier in a few years both because it's cheaper and speaks to younger generations who grew up watching terribly drawn/rendered cartoons.

the mechanics are getting too diluted and set specific. i think they need a huge scope for moving forward. the color pie will get stale pretty soon with all of the functional reprints, and fuck all of these mediocre planeswalkers. old and new magic will be completely different games pretty soon.

I find it hard to see because I'm curating my cube right now, but, some new cards are great yet only work at their own level. aetherworks marvel comes to mind. but so did stoneforge mystic back in the day. legendary planeswalkers are cancer.
if commander product is any indication they will reprint the shit out of rares for a quick buck.

I'm calling pony tribe and un-set scheduled releases every couple years. just like invocations and shit. all full art lands always. extreme foil for ultra super duper mythic shit. and ultimate crash of the markets some time soon after. mtg wil become beanie babies and this comes from someone playing for over 20 years. the culture is super toxic atm.

>the culture is super toxic atm
The actual player culture? How so?

The old borders looked horrible to me because the text blended in with the background

By appealing to the "wider" auidience you invariably get people who get salty at everything, poor kids who want to make dinosaur decks that then get shit on and then go home crying, and jaded assholes like me who want to play Lantern to make these scrubs miserable.

They got their playerbase of retards set that will buy any garbage they put out, they don't need quality anymore.

I envision Magic players as the fat mexican sunglasses baseball cap wearing tryhard world-series-of-poker wanna bees with a Tapout tshirt who never say anything positive or friendly, and always chea

I agree that the 'general aestethics' have gone down with the increase of digitally made pictures. There's just something dreamy and imaginatory about many of the older cards, like this.

Yes, it's just a fucking bird, but somehow it invokes a sense of dreamy adventure more than any digital ultra-crisp photo-thing would.

user you asked here.
it may just be the lgs I've been frequenting but there is some insane levels of snobbery and literally no sportsmanship. the people who play for fun are forever scrubs in the eyes of "serious" children game players. the saying that mtg players always think they are the smartest person in the room is too real. it's like a prison experiment in action. I try to play with new players as much as I can they are mostly just trying to have fun and learn while spike is just brooding on the corner with his other spike friends about all the moon's instead of showing cool shit to young Timmy. I've been on the scene for a while so all of this is first hand experience in my travels, shit is worse than ever.

Fun fact: That picture was originally intended for Tropical Island, but when Richard got the piece he saw this hugeass bird right in the center and realized he couldn't use it for a land. At the same time, he also couldn't afford to commission art and then not use it in the game, so he designed Birds of Paradise specifically for the art.

Another example. Not especially technically superb, not a beautiful piece of scenery, but it evokes something, a feeling. These are the kinds of cards I want, not high-fidelity warlock with a blue plasma beam from his fingers.

I'll dig up another example from Vtes to show a card that turned drastically more boring when the art was 'updated'.

Compare this emotion-filled piece, a very 90's man looks sadly at a photo and is named as a vapire hunter. Is it a photo of a lost love, whose killer he now hunts down? Is it a photo of the target he hunts? Silly facial hair aside, it is emotional and tells a story.

Compare to the newer one, which was...

Angry man with a stake attacks sleeping vampire . Nothing more.

It's a blank piece of paper, any past tragedy he mourns is false memory forced upon him by vampire manipulator that plays him like a puppet..

some of the numagic cards can be pretty sweet. I feel like scale is something that it does a lot better than before. and scale is really something i enjoy in magic art.

Good stuff, I like it.

>scale
Literally just slap some birds on it

Ain't always just getting worse.

Yeah, a lot of the newer ones were way better, that's true. Generally I prefer the new ones in vampires case.

I too enjoy scale but this card is rare in the fact that ulamog here is actually doing something instead of just posing in a photo booth like every other character in newer art.

I love art like Iona and Dan Dan, scale of power is always hit or miss tho.

pic unrelated?

>One Target
>Target creature or player

Wait, doesn't that make the older Lightning Bolt better as it isn't limited to a creature or player?

I'm sure there's some kind of bullshit MTG shenanigans by now that allows something to have health that isn't a creature or player.

>I'm sure there's some kind of bullshit MTG shenanigans by now that allows something to have health that isn't a creature or player.
There isn't. Creatures, players and planeswalkers are the only things that can be damaged. And cards that damage players can have their damage redirected to planeswalkers so both Bolt wordings function the same way.

Yet we still don't have decent art for Blood Doll. And perhaps never will.

>I try to play with new players as much as I can they are mostly just trying to have fun and learn while spike is just brooding on the corner with his other spike friends about all the moon's instead of showing cool shit to young Timmy.

I know that feeling user. I stop playing standard at magic origin when i lost interest. Almost sold my cards but for a younger friend who convinced me to start commander. Tbh, we're having alot of fun.

Long story short: a few weeks ago an older friend of mine wanted to join the "kiddie group". He slams down icy manipulator and winter orb "I'll teach you kids to play real magic". I think it would have been nice to show them old cards without being a dick about it. Instead he manage to piss off the host and not get reinvited.

>If you looked at the percentage of cards being played (I haven't) in eternal formats, I'm willing to bet most are older than 5 years. It's very rare now that any new cards have a power level high enough to be played in eternal formats.

>Fatal Push
>Baral
>Leovold
>Gideon of the Trials
>COLLECTED COMPANY
>Paradoxical Outcome

I think you're talking out of your ass.

>Gideon of the Trials
Woah is this used now?

I have a foil one.

and yet we have orange snapcaster and it was awful
while I agree that cards shouldn't hold themselves by color, some of my favorite cards use limited colors

This art is awesome. The birds really give a sense of scale

Time has given people the benefit of forgetting how much of the old art was utter shit so they only remember the good, evocative stuff.

UW Control in modern and meme gideon tribal decks

Going by the strictest definition of the word "eternal" here are some cards from the last 5 years that see play in Legacy and Vintage:

>Deathrite Shaman
>Abrupt Decay
>Fatal Push
>Kolaghan's Command
>Gurmag Angler
>True-name Nemesis
>Leovold, Emissary of Trest
>Containment Priest
>Thespian's Stage
>Monastery Mentor
>Thought-Knot Seer
>Monastery Swiftspear
>Reality Smasher
>Eldrazi Mimic
>Endless One
>Matter Reshaper
>Walking Ballista
>Recruiter of the Guard
>Eidolon of the Great Revel
>Sanctum Prelate
>Shardless Agent
>Toxic Deluge
>Foundry Inspector
>Paradoxical Outcome
>Treausre Cruise
>Dack Fayden
>Dig Through Time
>Hangarback Walker
>Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
>Kambal, Consul of Allocation
>Prized Amalgam
>Hollow One
>Spirit of the Labyrinth
>Thalia, Heretic Cathar
>Vryn Wingmare
>Master of the Pearl Trident
>Ramunap Excavator

Literally as a 1 of in U/W control.

CoCo is the only card that's widely used, baral just offers supbar copies 2-3 extra copies of goblin electromancer, push is great though, it basically substituted bolt as removal in all b/r/x decks.

Baral is superior to Electromancer since it's easier on the mana and also most storm lists run the full 8

NUlamog got nothing on the original

and the bone plates on him looks like baddly assembled mikumikudance clothes on an OC character

>Magic is better today than it has been for years
We just had one of the worst standard formats of all times, even if eternal formats are okay and Ixalan seems to be a step in the right direction.

>i think they need a huge scope for moving forward

Completely doing away with rigid block structures is probably the best decision they've made in quite a long time. The third-block problem was a constant thorn, but they fucked up pretty severely by instituting the two-block system right before doing two blocks where the story absolutely needed a third block, which just went to show that neither system was the correct option.

>CoCo is the only card that's widely used,
Fatal Push is overtaking Bolt as removal within a year of release. It's in the top five played cards in Modern.

The only cards not to be affected by nu-magic are the commander products. If they put a card with phasing in the set, then it's proof they at least have a fraction of old school fun left in them.

4C/BUG Leovold is extremely popular and a tier 1 legacy deck, same with paradoxical outcome decks in vintage.
Let's not forget Monastery Mentor, Walking Ballista and Gurmag Angler which all see play in every eternal format.

adding on to this, sanctum prelate and recruiter of the guard both see play in death and taxes legacy.

Because you've been blinded by nostalgia, gramps

btfo

> controlled by another Methuselah
dropped

if you want to (D) your own guys, perhaps M:tG with Olivia Voldaren would be more to your liking

This meme wasn't funny 6 years ago when the card was revealed and it hasn't gotten better

no meme does

Lazers have only gotten better with time. Because people shut the fuck up about them.

That's easily one of my favorite artworks in the game (the Homelands art also comes close, though that may have something to do with it being the one on the promo version as well). Mirage block as a whole had some really great pieces in it.

I feel like I'm probably in the minority on this, but I really don't like this art. Something about it just rubs me completely the wrong way, and not in a "this being is so alien that I just can't stand looking at it" way which would actually have been a good thing.

I don't care about the homogenization of MtG's art. I do care about the fact that the writing has gone to shit.

>Liliana insisted on coming to Amonkhet to face her demons.

There, short, simple and to the point. You can even say that it works on two levels, Liliana's vices and a literal demon, to whom she relied on in her darkest hour. Instead of Avacyn's Collar, the symbol of the church of Avacyn, whom werewolves don't like.

because nostalgia goggles.

That's some serious nitpicking bruh

Yes, because everything that is new is automatically better no matter what.

Every time anyone says that something, anything, was better before, this argument pops up.

Yes, everything that is new is automatically better than Amy Weber's art no matter what.

That's miles better. Along with more 'dreamy' and evocative art, old cards often had more 'dreamy' and evocate text as well. I wonder why.

Because it was assumed that if you wanted to know the story you'd read the books. The creative team (actually I don't think there even was a creative team back then) didn't try to force you to know every little bit of convoluted and poorly written plot point through flavor texts.

The old team was called Continuity, which meant that rather than trying to craft a story, Design basically did whatever the hell they wanted and then Continuity just tried to make sure it didn't contradict itself or other existing stuff. "Creative" as we know it now didn't really come into being until around Weatherlight.

Wow. Amy Weber's art for Magic ranges from gorgeous to absolutely trash.

High Tide looks amazing.

Then there's this. What the hell, Amy?