Magic is dying thread v2

You are linking shit, let me tell you.
MtG has overall a yearly growth in sales' value, although lately experiencing 6 months stagnation each year, but a decline in users.

Do you fucking know what does it mean?
Whales are buying lots of boxes, but participants at events are less.
That doesn't make for a thriving environment, just an adequately happy, although blind, company.

>but a decline in users

Where's your stats on that, then?

As an ex GW customer, I can assure you that it could be much much much worse.

Hasbro quarterly meetings, not the yearly ad you shared.
Stop flaunting your shit, if you do not understand what'sthe difference between financial growth in sales and actual brand growth.
Besides, that kind of report you liked, being a yearly ad to entice new investors, equates brand with finances just to bait people.

Yass...

Post a link and he'll shut up, user.

You literally won't be able to win this unless you produce a number.

>This random user joining in and doin' all the work for me
Heck, I was just going to respond with a hilarious reaction image of a cat.

Thx friend!

>Villeneuve
GOD DAMN YOU MONGOLOID FIGURE OUT HOW LIGHT WORKS I FUCKING HATE YOU

>win
But I really don't care to win this.

Yaaasss...

YAASSS...

>Hasbro quarterly meetings
Should be easy enough to cough up numbers.

YAAASSSSSS #NECROMANCY AT ANY SIZE

I think we all have to admit that MTG art nowadays is the worst it's been since Legends... it's so stale

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSS

>Hasbro
>Ever letting go of an intellectual property.

If M:tG dies, Hasbro will just sit on the IP forever. If someone is looking to buy it, it means that it's worth making.

People thought they were rivals
but in reality they clahsed their swords in bed and loved to get backstabbed

I don't entirely agree.

>Quadroons
>In MY MTG!?
Truly, this is the future.

privilege unchecked? then you'll be beheaded

I also think that occasionally a sweet mythic slips the net.

Whether or not it "counts", the fact it's turning more and more of a profit means OP's scenario is flatly out of the question.

Yeah there's a few good ones recently, but the exception is not the rule.

The biggest concern is that MTG card art has been in exactly the same style for many years now. You used to be able to tell blocks apart just by their art style/direction, but now it's just a mush of digital average with a few notable exceptions.

YYYYYAAAASSSSSSS!!!
WE
WE ARE
WE ARE THE THOUSANDS
HA HA HAHAHA YAAASSSSS KWEEEEN SLEIGH #PEESITTINGDOWN #WIFESSON #METOO

Giving +x til end of turn

I don't really think I had a point, I just wanted to talk about stuff in Magic that I like. Because it's still there, and I'm just keeping my head down and enjoying what I can.

so, are the black folk of MTG more of a civil rights style group, seeking integration and equality, or do they follow more of a pan-Africanist philosophy?

Hmm...

I am incapable of taking the word Quadroon seriously.

Primarily because of this adorable little bastard.

FUCKING POLTARDS GET OUT OF MY TG REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Well how do you like that...

Magicthegathering.com's awful flash design got rid of the monthly archive feature on wallpapers and replaced it with one of those resource-intensive "click to load more" buttons like tumblr so my browser collapsed before right as I got to the wallpapers from the last Tarkir set.

Imagine that... Years and years of classic wallpapers hand-painted in a high fantasy setting lost behind a sea of spammed soulless progressive art. Magic's history, lost because of incompetent postmodern web design.

>Primarily because of this adorable little bastard.
Wait, you could take the word "Quadroon" seriously if the Quadrone didn't exist?

Wew.

You win this time, user.

>Imagine that... Years and years of classic wallpapers hand-painted in a high fantasy setting lost behind a sea of spammed soulless progressive art. Magic's history, lost because of incompetent postmodern web design.
fuck this makes me sad...

uh sweetie i'm from tumblr #simmerdown

>Last thread
> → #
>So, the best outcome is;
>>WotC goes under/bankrupt
>>MTG purchased by some other company
>>New company isn't absolutely retarded
Pick one.

what the fuck is this post...

>out of the question
OP's scenario is the usual shitty scenario that an ignorant, entitled asshole uses.
There's no doubt in that, user. But one has to clearly read and understand information.

Pick none, idiot.
They just have to replan their shit.

Attack with a weak creature, use some instant to make it hit hard after.
Or just use big ones with vigilance.

Have you people considered that the mentality that spawned the game's best art, story, and gameplay has been scrubbed from the collective unconscious of the world by subtle global influences meshing together and there is no saving this deeply compromised genre?

Has anyone else noticed the recent trend of the first main set of a block being utter shit to draft?

I get the feeling that Wizards intended Amonkhet draft to be a lot slower than it actually was, and the same seems to be true for Ixalan as well. There are so many garbage commons in Ixalan, holy shit

>I get the feeling that Wizards intended Amonkhet draft to be a lot slower than it actually was, and the same seems to be true for Ixalan as well. There are so many garbage commons in Ixalan, holy shit
Garbage commons don't make for a bad draft. Garbage design does.

>Garbage commons don't make for a bad draft. Garbage design does.

and Ixalan has both

>and Ixalan has both
It sure does!

>someone actually allowed Seb to draw for good cards

Now I have to waste money on this shit.

Thing is, any source I can find is showing Magic's playbase sort of just circling around the 12 million active/20 million total estimate for the past 3-5 years or so. It's not experiencing massive growth like it did from 2011 to 2014, but it's still twice as big as it was in 2011.

The idea that calling it growth is debatable is fine, but there definitely doesn't seem to be a leg to stand on for the "Magic is dying" team. If Time Spiral/Lorwyn couldn't kill it, and they only seem to have bumped it down to like 3.5 million active/6 million total from 5 million active/8 million total. The fact that 5 million active/8 million total was thought of as "good" compared to what's going on now is laughable though.

It would have to lose half the playerbase to go back to being "good" and lose nearly three quarters to be back near "dying" again.

So I guess this is a major problem going forwards. Rivals of Ixalan might save Ixalan limited the same way Hour of Devastation did, but going forward Wizards is only going to have 1 set blocks.

Their track record so far has been pretty shitty, though Shadows over Innistrad was a welcome exception. How bad is the new Dominaria block going to be?

/thread

lmfao

every year you guys do this dance. In the winter you start crying "Magic is dying!! We need to get rid of the reserve list!! Maybe Magic will be bought out!" It never pans out. Even back in 2000 people were declaring the death of Magic with absolute certainty.

Sweetie, I know you're mad about the big bad sjws making Spike a girl, but maybe you should just take a break from the Internet.

What are you guys on about?
It has been well known in almost all the gaming circles i've been involved in that magic is no longer playable as a serious game, and it hasn't been for 7+ years.
Haven't you guys wondered why LCG's have become so popular?
All the serious and driven players interested in battles of wit rather than wallet simply went to LCG's.

I'm honestly surprised there's enough of an audience on a 18+ site to warrant this amount of discussion about a game that has been shit/dead for so long.

No one besides ignorant idiots and trolls can say that MtG is dying.
Sure as hell I was not. But people need to understand the difference between growth in sales and growth in brand/participation.
At this stage, it's all about the secondary market keeping the economy afloat.

WotC still needs to tune their crap.
This year, with so many secondary, crappy, products was just a continuous flood.
That's not the good way to handle this.

>How bad is the new Dominaria block going to be?
god fuck it's going to be so pathetic. I seriously do not want to think about current year WotC making a set in Dominaria...

The best it could possibly be is not a complete ass blasting of MTG's past.

Lore and flavour-wise it should be a blast, but I would surely not expect any fucking SSS+ class cards over there.
The Meta is being slowed down a lot in the last years, they won't be turning back now.

>no longer playable as a serious game, and it hasn't been for 7+ years.
This is actually when I'd peg its overall decline in quality beginning, around Dark Ascension is when it began.

I just want MTG to be interesting again, and not just shitty reprints of the same set with slightly different mechanics over and over.

>Lore and flavour-wise it should be a blast,
You tell me, seriously, if this sounds like a blast for long-time MTG players:

>Jacetice League in Dominaria

I'm hoping it's not Gatewatch at all, but something to do with Karn.

Try to make 4 new mechanics for a new set that aren't related to other mechanics.

>something to do with Karn.
Oh God please no don't let WotC fuck up Karn even more... fuck dude you're making me nervous..

Ever since innistrad, they declared the latest block to be "the most sold block in MtG history".

... Until battle for Zendikar which they only described as "the fastest selling block".

It's clear around that time the growth MtG was experiencing suffered.

Magic is putting out more stuff per year than before. For years we had

>Small expansion
>Small expansion
>Core Set
>Large expansion

But in 2017 alone we've had

>2 large expansions
>2 small expansions
>2 masters sets
>2 duel decks
>Commander
>Archenemy
>from the vault
>Explorers of Ixalan
>an Un-set

In what insane universe is this a dying game?

The problem isn't "new mechanics", the problem is how many cards in every set are just literal exact copies of cards from the previous 10 sets.

>Blue creature, usually 3CMC
>When ETB, tap target creature, it doesn't untap during its controller's next untap step.

>White enchantment
>Enchanted creature can't attack or block
etc. etc. etc.

It's as if they completely gave up on making new commons. They just copy+paste commons every set ad nauseum, has been hardcore going on since BFZ. They just drop the "new and innovative" mechanics onto replica cards and call it a day. Zero creativity.

>In what insane universe is this a dying game?
In the one where four expansions produced more interesting, quality cards and exciting experiences than the whole clusterfuck of useless fluff expansions produces these days.

I feel like draft environments would be better if sets weren't forced to have chaff like this every set just to fill the common slots out. I'm not asking for stuff like Goblin Guides at common, just give this guy vigilance or something.

We get it, you dislike non white people or anything that isnt a straight white male.

anything related to Karn is welcome in my book

The story writes itself though.
>Karn is freed from Phyrexian influence
>Armed with Venser's spark, he surveys his options
>"Jhoira is my friend"
>Heads back to Dominaria
>Tells Jhoira, Teferi, Jaya, and whoever else would care that it turns out Phyrexia's back and White/Blue/Greener than ever
>"So we should probably try to do something about this, right?"

and you're not seeing the big picture where white men are being sent to concentration camps in the future

It's way easier to do new mechanics when you haven't designed a lot of things beforehand, not to mention some of those are cards they need to reprint to exist in every draft environment as a reliable filler you can assume most decks can see once.

How the fuck can you complain about a lack of exciting experiences when we have a fucking Un-set coming out? It's literally a set full of all the mechanics from the last decade that they couldn't print because they were too extreme to fit into the normal rules. It's got shit too out-there for Future Sight.

Please, user, flooding the market doesn't equal to a healthy brand.
Many times product floods neared the last gasps of companies trying to cash in anything they could.

In this scenario, instead, WotC is simply grasping at straws to find some additional secondary product that becomes relevant enough in the community.
The flood they had lately was completely unnecessary and unhealthy.

Secondary market whales bought in just to stockpile, but the shit won't sell that much.
There isn't enough final buyers for this to sell.

Therefore, instead of sprouting ignorant shit, try to inform yourself.
The idiocy you pulled out of your ass is the same as in the Consolewar threads, in which idiots say that M$ has so much money to fuck Sony out of the market.... yet they couldn't even get valuable exclusives or secure development for Scalebound.

That's below first-grade dumbness at play.
Inform yourself and understand data, before sucking dicks, tyvm.

>The story writes itself though.
That's the worst part. Effortless, uncreative storytelling is fucking awful. I hate writers that just take the most obvious route.

Most of MTG's best storytelling was done in the two one-off blocks during the T2 transition (Ravnica and Kamigawa).

Say what you want about Kamigawa mechanically (Though, at least IMO, the draft format is stellar), the storytelling of that block was in the top ever for MTG. Same with OG Ravnica block, and the whole saga of early stuff. It was all so creative and fresh. Agrus Kos and Teysa Karlov both were extremely engaging characters in very interesting settings, Konda is probably the best-written villain in MTG history, etc. etc.

Fuck this recent trend of doing the most obvious, effortless trash writing possible. Who on the planet didn't predict that the moon was going to be used to seal Emrakul literally months in advance, for example.

>they need to reprint to exist in every draft environment as a reliable filler
Cop out for lazy designers.

When a musician puts filler on an album, people call them out. Why should we accept throwaway filler in game design?

>It's got shit too out-there for Future Sight.
>It literally has shit from Future Sight
l0l

Seriously though, putting contraptions in an Un set was an absolute mistake. Whoever thought of it is a moron that totally missed the whole reason Steamflogger was great.

...

Because it'd be like complaining that every level in Mario requires a bit of jumping.

Most cards aren't equivalent to songs in an album, they're notes in a song. They're tools you make the song from.

>Because it'd be like complaining that every level in Mario requires a bit of jumping.
lol wut? No, it would be like complaining that every level of mario is literally a reskin of the first level, repeated over and over again.

Complaining that every level of Mario requires jumping would be like complaining that every set in MTG requires attacking with creatures.

Learn to analogy you fucking lummox.

>Whoever thought of it is a moron that totally missed the whole reason Steamflogger was great.

Steamflogger was a prophecy that was never meant to be filled. It was deliberately made in a nonsense way they had no plans of ever following up.

The problem came when someone admitted to the joke, and then players spent the better half of a decade demanding they make good on the promise they never intended to keep.

>No, it would be like complaining that every level of mario is literally a reskin of the first level, repeated over and over again.

Okay, now you fucked your half of the analogy.
It'd be closer to complaining that every level of Mario has coin blocks.

>Steamflogger was a prophecy that was never meant to be filled.
>They filled the prophecy in a fucking Un set
The fact that they literally killed a joke in a set that is supposed to be a joke is... yeah...

sad.

>It'd be closer to complaining that every level of Mario has coin blocks.
Still wrong.

Coin blocks also a mechanical tool. Complaining about repeated coin blocks would be akin to complaining about evergreen mechanics being in every set.

Again, learn to analogy.

And yet all that writing isn't anything special when you just compare it to other fantasy books, not to mention most people don't care about the story at all.
When I was younger most people I played with didn't know who was Urza, and they certainly didn't care or thought the game became any better for that guy existing.

Putting effort in MtG's story is certainly not going to save or improve the game in any way compared to a better approach when selling the product, specially to new players, getting them to play and making set mechanics that are fun and good. That's what they have to fix, not actually waste money getting people to write filler.

Hasbro owns wizards,they are not on themshelves

Cards that fill draft roles are also mechanical tools. Maybe not as ubiquitous as coin blocks, but maybe like those platforms that tilt when you stand on them.

Ind to think it all begins by removing titties from children's card games

>And yet all that writing isn't anything special when you just compare it to other fantasy books
The Kamigawa block actually holds up somewhat. It's seriously good stuff. The writing quality itself, as in style, isn't quite as good, but the narrative of that block is wonderful.

Ravnica, as a setting, is leagues more creative than what most writers crap out.

I mean, the one thing you can say about early MTG storytelling is that it was fucking creative. It's seriously rare to find stories as absurd and original as the fucking Weatherlight saga.

How does that help the game after all?

the mothership has been dead for years now. I used to visit daily until they stopped posting articles about deck brewing and design and started using the writers as mouthpieces to shill whatever upcoming bullshit they wanted. I still remember their 125% damage control article for Emmara Tandris. The fucking sample EDH deck they built for her had motherfucking Rhys the Redeemed in the 99.

>Cards that fill draft roles are also mechanical tools.
"Fill draft roles" is a terrible way to think about design. This is exactly the thinking that leads to every single draft format feeling the same, over and over again.

All you can attribute this to is lazy design. Players know what to expect, so designers just do that instead of thinking fresh and being creative.

I haven't played in four years. What's suddenly killing it now?

>How does that help the game after all?
How would MTG feel if it was just black cards with raw stats, text, and names like "CREATURE 03" and such?

Lore and design go hand in hand. I don't think it is surprising at all that the quality of storytelling in MTG starting its nosedive at exactly the same time that the design quality went down.

Most players don't care much about lore, but some (like me) do. It may only "help" the game in the context of a small percentage of players, but it is an aspect that does matter.