Where did MTG design go wrong? I think a lot of people point towards New World Order and only MaRo...

Yeah, I just threw that out there since people shit on MaRo a lot for no particular reason - it's definitely due to the newest generation of designers fucking with the formula imo

Power has shifted from sorceries and instants to insanely overvalued creatures. Can you imagine if a creature like pic related existed back in the 90's? It would be an autoinclude in any black deck. Now it's an afterthought in standard because there are dozens of even more valuable cards.

Meanwhile our answers to these cards are nerfed. Have fun paying a CMC of 3 to effectively lightning bolt this.

>he says while Lightning Strike and Bombard are Standard-legal

did you read cards like ammit eternal and ripjaw raptor?
it's fucking GROSS how good and pushed they are, and still they don't see play because they don't have an etb or haste
meanwhile the new chupacabra will see play 100%

>bombard
are you fucking serious you stupid nigger

He said 3CMC bolt was what we had, I listed better cards than that for creature removal

it’s a joke fuckwit, if he really wanted cheaper stuff he’d be using Mutiny to make his opponent’s deathtouch creature kill his bigger shit in that matchup

Just because MaRo was once good doesn't mean he IS still good. People change. If you've ever read his article of what he'd tell young Richard Garfield to do when designing the original Magic sets, you'd realize he's off his fucking rocker with power.

Pushed cards still existed back then, and they had some support to make them truly terrifying, like t1 dark rit into hypnotic specter. But that can easily run into STP from an opponent.

There's just no reason to run creatures that have to survive to get value any more.

It is literally the GDS cunts that are spawning these sets. Fuck the Great Designer Search, it ruined the game.

An issue I have had for years is the keyword/ability bloat. They complain about running out of limited design space and yet they keep throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks... And then never checking the wall to see what stuck.

Two/Three sets a block, each set has half a dozen new keyword/abilities. Maybe one keyword/ability gets reused in the block. Some of the stuff would have been good if it was just used throughout the entire block and given the proper support.

They also complain about planeswalkers being limited design space and then they go and decide to print unique planeswalker decks. Are they stupid or just stupid? If you are going to be asinine then save us some money and simple reprint the planeswalkers that will be in the set. The only reason that Liliana the Last Hope is still $30+ is due to speculation, not due to play demand.

People that complain about creatures warping the format.. Very very few cards from the last few years have impacted Modern/Vintage/Legacy. Those cards breaking in have been a balance of all the card types. The sole exception would be Eldrazi, but they fixed that problem.

Ahem

Incidentally, the end of blocks will contribute to the end of mtg because they are really going to have to burn through a lot of interesting world concepts very very fast.

That costs four mana, you have to squint to see the "2"

Return to Origins when?

that card is bad and you know it

>The only reason that Liliana the Last Hope is still $30+ is due to speculation, not due to play demand.
Many decks run 1 or 2.

>Very very few cards from the last few years have impacted Modern/Vintage/Legacy
grim flayer, siege rhyno, tireless tracker, baral, tasigur, gurmag angler, torrential gearhulk, monastery swiftspear, monastery mentor, kitesail freeboater, reflector mage, thalia's lieutenant, mantis rider, new ulamog, world breaker, walking ballista, every colorless eldrazi basically are all creatures that see play in modern that would be legal in frontier as well and the list could go on.
And that's only creatures.

>frontier

nice meme

that was an easy way to say "cards from the last few years"

If I were to look at Modern, which block and set has the highest concentration of played cards?
Fifth Dawn? Worldwake? Innistrad?
Tarkir block? Innistrad block? Scars of Mirrodin block?

I have an idea.

How good or bad it is is up to you guys

But: narrative tournaments

Neither one.
Buy singles

In an effort to make Magic more viewer- and new player-friendly, the designers and developers pushed creatures way too hard. The idea driving the game now is that the battlefield is what matters - the more creatures on the battlefield the better, because spectators like to see creatures on the battlefield and potential newcomers to the game understand creatures better (when I play online, people at my house who don't play magic regularly comment that I'm winning because I have more creatures/lands/enchantments, and I'm losing when my board is empty). They are trying to grow the game, and as a spectator game, creatures = excitement.

The problem is that due to the nature of the game, too-powerful creatures essentially break the game. Spells are so poor nowadays that there is no good strategy to play that doesn't involve playing the best creatures. Creature synergy is non-existent - just play the Scarab God, or Rogue Refiner, etc. The only recent broken spells are ones that have cheated creatures into play - CoCo and Marvel. The nature of the game means that too-powerful creatures simply trump everything else - so the best deck to play is always the one that plays the best creatures.

Additionally, the game is completely over-designed nowadays - the poster above that said they build sets thinking of the kinds of decks they want to see first is completely correct. In the past, what decks would become good was less obvious - now, they want to see energy, so they want to push energy, or they want to see mythic gods so they push mythic gods.

They have to go back to just printing interesting, cool cards, but unfortunately I don't think the current crop of designers is capable of that.

nerds want to be wizards, children want to see monsters slap eachother

>I think a lot of people point towards New World Order
That would be because these people have no idea what NWO is, which is just their plan for less complex commons.

I don't like NWO, but the problem with Magic is a lot more than that.

My point is which set ended up having the most eternally playable cards?
My guess is New Phyrexia considering several of the Phi mana cards and how at least three of them are banned, as well as other notable and formerly notable cards such as Elesh Norn, 3 Infect creatures, Phyrexian Unlife, and Batterskull.
I'm not counting, though, and there's also the factor of rarity. NWO has had an effect on common card power. Simple doesn't mean bad, but it usually limits power.

>Creature synergy is non-existent
>just play the Scarab God
Scarab God synergizes really well with creatures that have ETB effects.

>throughout a significant portion of the game, we had STP and ETB effects were rare. No one really complained about stp or counter spell
And some of the earliest, successful decks ran barely any creatures because they were too easy to deal with for the payoff.

>R&D thought the issue was removal making creatures too good, but the problem is that there's not enough removal for the good creatures.
100% agreed. We're on the other side of Magic's early days: the payoff for creatures is enormous and they're difficult to remove.

They will never restrict cards.

Will you people stop suggesting this retarded idea?

He looks like he has severe case of the down syndrome

>They will never restrict cards.
Vintage called and said you're a fag.

he has a PhD it's basically the same thing

>New World Order
This
and this On top of shit art, shot card quality, stories that only focus on shitty superhero characters instead of the plane it self and so on so forth.

Pretty sure I remember reading that he's on the autism spectrum, and not in the Veeky Forums sense.

He has a Ph.D. in math and has designed several successful board games.

Is that supposed to be arguing my post or defending it, because I honestly can't tell.

I think the point is that he's contributing to society with his autism instead of shitposting in a not-so-obscure-anymore anime forum

Hi Richard. We like you, we're just going to tease you anyway because a cabal of amateur hour corporate sorcerers are pissing on your legacy.

Yeah, like I said:
>and not in the Veeky Forums sense

So he's living his life incorrectly?

>making a literally shit and failing children card game
>contributing to society

Uhm no...manchildren, that's not how it works.

Hiring people who aren't very good at game design was probably the starting point.

>manchildren
Go glow in the dark.

>contributing to society
hey myaaan, what are you, like a cog in the myans machine?
i always assumed cantonese basket weaving and such was a reference to inconsequential nature, not obscurity

So it's always been wrong?

>laughs in Wood Elemental

The intent was defending

>manchildren

Why are you here?

>hurr durr the format that literally exists to give collectors a place to play $25000 decks

Call me when a real format has a single card restricted

>implying collectors would ever play with the cards
MY VALUE MIGHT BE DECREASED REEEEEEEEEE

at this point complaining about magic is like buying a turd and complaining about the smell then more turds come out that also smells the same so you end up with a box of turds under your bed but you still complain about the smell

there are basically three problems, and they're all philosophical problems more than problems with people

first, they emphasize permanents a little too much. this isn't a huge deal but it reduces the opportunities for interaction a little bit.

second, they emphasize value to the exclusion of everything else. it's the only real axis they use to design good cards. there's not really any other good avenues to building a competitive deck in a metagame. the deck that's best at accruing value on the board will be the best deck.

the third and biggest problem is that the emphasis on thematic design has led to a really linear design philosophy. because they want to have everything work in harness with flavor, so they try to make everything in a set work as a unitary whole. but this is a fundamentally misguided goal for designing Magic sets. having good standard environments requires having a wide variety of things going on.

so because they emphasize value too much and because they build everything from relatively top-down flavor ideas, you end up with situations where 1 or 2 decks are much better at accruing value than anything else in the metagame, and therefore dominate.

Corporate greed. The game had a moderate spike in popularity and so they jumped at the opportunity to maximize profit. Everything points to that.

>Tried to force an Avengers-like team so they can make a movie
>Simplifying the sets to make it more appealing to a broader audience
>Releasing something every single month when it used to just be two or three sets a year

I wouldn't be surprised if they dug up the weird commercial campaigns they tried in the late 90s/early 00s.

They could facilitate this by hard capping how many Rares and such you can have in a deck and then design minor synergies among "main character" rares

Yes they will. They will design their game well or it will crash.

Banning pic related instead of printing better answers. They decided that designing powerful permanents and then banning them is easier than designing/reusing uniquitous answers.

I don't think many people would want to bother with that at all, since the narrative for magic is far from compelling and there's no chance of them being able to keep an illusion of "YOUR RESULTS WILL INFLUENCE IN STORY EVENTS" for any even remotely respectable length of time

Holy fucking shit why would they print that and let it be run along other rares?

Because when everyone is doing something busted, it’s balanced. Kaladesh Standard was literally the last time Standard was cyclical.

Kaladesh pushed the new mechanics too far.

Who cares? It just feels nice to play a game and feel like you are in the setting. If the standard tournament rules don't facilitate that then they should change that.

You get a copy of that card with each booster?

Maybe you should play DnD instead of a card game.

Maybe card games with settings should have those settings be relevant to the card game.

Literally no card exists where that's the case
Not gonna lie, that MIGHT kill magic

Sounds like you want to play Planechase.

>the list could go on
And so it will: Prized Amalgam, Insolent Neonate, Vizier of Remedies, Duskwatch Recruiter, Ramunap Excavator, Spell Queller, Hollow One, Pia + Kiran Nalaar, Dwynen's Elite

How many time to be patient ? One year, ten years?
Maybe I should have a kid too?

Soon hopefully, but probably not. Wizards is painfully not self aware and their twitter echo chamber is not helping things

This.

>everything in this thread
>while also spending a fuck ton of time and money pandering to neocommunists
Hasbro has a virus called wotc

Wizards is based in Seattle

the people's republic of starbucks

>The big question was: Why? What about Magic was keeping new players from wanting to play the game?

I kinda doubt it was "complexity of the game" and more the fact that the after market for singles is *goddamn expensive* even in those early days, and blocks coming out one-after-another-after-the-other constantly to where you couldn't look at the sets for a bit and let them breathe and find the problems and try to do better with the next set with some time to reflect.

I also agree with this. Getting rid of Dominera and then doing planes while introducing new characters for "Lore" really didn't do shit for Lore-focused folks like me.

>let it be run along other rares?
>You get a copy of that card with each booster?
Spotted the guy from the kitchen table.

Let me clue you in on a few points about constructed formats.

1: Card rarity has no bearing whatsoever on deck construction in constructed formats. None. Rarity affects the metagame of limited formats like drafts and it shifts the economic price of entry into constructed formats. But within the confines of building a competitive constructed deck, playsets of all cards of all rarities are effectively at your disposal.
2: Nobody smart opens packs for the purpose of collecting the necessary cards for their decklist. They may open packs to draft or open them to scratch some gambling itch, but by far the cheapest way to assemble a deck is to purchase or trade for singles.

MtG gathers love on both sides. Soon.

hi Veeky Forums
long time listener first time poster

i havent played magic in 5-6 years.
i was thinking of going for friday nite magic drafts before work

is it worth playing standard league? or modern?
i still have tons of decks, and load of nostolgia
i stopped playing because people took it way to seriously and got so butt hurt when you beat them, or people had no manners and really didnt give any quatter , lots of rage
lots of kids and know it alls , and the staff at some of the stores where so creppy, i wish i had a good community to join and have fun

when i was younger i alsways thought id play in the league / world champs etc 500$ a deck pppssshhh, i like to spend 100$- maybe things have changed??
for the curent set i was thinking of using vampires black and white, ignoring the egypt set and going with the latest two set blocks instead.

let me know , thank you

impatient bump

Champion-level decks in most formats will run you at least 500, usually more.

If you want to get back into magic and you have a ton of old cards, try playing commander. You can use any old cards you want.

If you wanna be really competitive in a constructed format you'll probably need to spend more than 100$. Should be enough to make a fun deck that can hold it's own though. Drafting is fine although a lot of people don't much like the new set. If you can get some friends into the game try get them into EDH/Commander, most of the complaints in this thread don't pertain to that.

Oh wait you said 5-6 years, nothing has changed just go play draft.

commander isn't for me , clever way to recycle all your old cards and you can only use one of each card?

i like deck building standard tournaments, i always hated that to be competitive you had to pay tons, and those folks that splurged they won the tournaments, all you get was more cards from winning, so it seemed like a constant cash cow sucking my miniumim wage out of me,

with draft the winners are thoose that new there cards well, as if they studied every single card before had and it made it frustrating, one place i played at they made us give back all the rares and according to the winning table /position we each took turns picking a rare, seemed fair i guess but if you loose every match ..

i miss the game

how about playing magic online, then i dont have to fit to a stores calender

anybody play magic online???? any experinces, plus is the prices the same? that would suck paying and not even having the real world item to trade in the future.

The problem is that you're the players getting left behind while MTG is flourishing with new players who like durdly creature-based decks

New Phyrexia held that title for a long time. Mistep, Dismember, Birthing Pod, Gitaxian Probe, the entirety of infect, Karn, Vapor Snag, Deceiver Exarch (in twin), Blade Splicer, Phyrexian Unlife, Melira, Surgical Extraction, Gut Shot, and Vault Skirge all see play (those which weren't/didn't have their decks banned of course)

Okay, real talk here, but that thing where they made you give back all the rares? That's against wizard's rules, and you could easily get them banned from running tournaments or even just get their magic supply cut off entirely by reporting that.
Not to mention it's of questionable legality

but what if one kid just picks just rares in the draft pick? guilty of that also and i won some matches

The game isn't going to crash, and restricting cards is the most asinine method of sculpting a meta.

They usually don't have a chance. The intent behind rare redrafting is to "Make the playing field more level by making it so that people aren't money drafting and instead picking the best card for their deck. This doesn't really work however, as there is an undeniable correlation between the cost of a card and it's quality, so if it's in color, you'd often pick it anyways, and even then, it still might be a good idea to "Hate draft" it and take it so it can't be used against you. Not to mention that the ideal rarely works out and it often ends up as just being a way to ensure that either the best players (Who may or may not be in league with the LGS owner) consistently get the best cards opened that night, and also so the store can skimp out on

>But within the confines of building a competitive constructed deck, playsets of all cards of all rarities are effectively at your disposal.

How does this work? Do you tell Wizards you want to play competitive and they give you all the cards?

The settings are the only thing keeping Magic relevant.