MTG thread

Mox Amber is going to be "one more cheap GW legendary away from playable..." its entire standard life, isn't it?

Kuro said:

Some neat previews, the counterspell+surveil 1 is definitely going to see play. Also, if the Clone spell is any indicator, the jump-start spells just might not be overcosted garbage (while that one is probably garbage due to its effect, that is the normal cost for that effect).

Click to expand...

Cackling Counterpart is 7cmc for the flashback, so I guess they value the card you pitch around 4 mana.

stupid interaction but ?fun?

plus some artifact that generates loyalty tokens in a non-expensive way?

edit: hrm, from looking at Gatherer, no such thing exists.

Nevermind then!

Daretti is an old walker. That's just a masterpiece from hasbro's money machine.

The big fancy promo box is an odd thing for them to make available on their website only given how hard they've been trying to give the reach around to LGS lately.

LGS folks I know think just the opposite. It's par for the course considering that WotC also just stopped direct sales to them. They now have to get all of their stuff through distributors.

This is the sort of product that *should* be LGS only for high rollers, and instead they're cutting them out entirely. My guess is it's a marketing test more than anything else.

At 250$ each and the ability to sell as many as they print I'm sure giving the LGS a taste of their money press ruffled someone higher up the Hasbro chain.

Real hard for a company to just give away a piece of their 3m+ bump in revenue.

And this way, when it sells out in 5 minutes on their website and people are bummed, Hasbro can say "But wait it's okay because we'll have more copies for sale at HASCON, so buy them tickets!"

Magic has a surprisingly delicate distribution chain. At least, the kind of Magic that makes the game a small, nerdy part of the cultural conversation. The vast majority of packs get sold through big box stores to people who buy very little, whereas local game shops are really important for the invested player to have a place to gather and a reason to buy more.

Hasbro should be very careful not to upset that apple cart.

Dealing with them as a shop owner isn't great and this development is concerning, but still not as bad as dealing with Games Workshop!

Inb4 wotc changes the tournament rules to only allow UltraPro sleeves

If you ever think WotC is fucking shit up, just let FFG dip in and show their hand. Apparently their new game, Keyforge, will track tournaments and decks using an app, and as of the OP reveal today... will ban your deck from local play after you win three tournaments.

Essentially, each tournament win at a "level" puts you 1/3rd of the way towards "leveling up" your deck. Win 3 level 1 tournaments, it becomes level 2 and you can't play it in level 1 tournaments anymore. So if you win 3 level 2 tournaments your deck will go to level 3 and be unplayable in level 2s as well.

It's like back when DCI ratings encouraged good players to just stop playing locally. Except with a backdoor of being able to drop $ on a new deck to "reset" your "rating."

Good player tax.

Don't forget LGS are going to be eating that price increase here soon too.

Yea...that makes me less interested in keyforge

Kuro said:

If you ever think WotC is fucking shit up, just let FFG dip in and show their hand. Apparently their new game, Keyforge, will track tournaments and decks using an app, and as of the OP reveal today... will ban your deck from local play after you win three tournaments.

Click to expand...

That's amazing.

Keyforge also has the most retarded card distribution system ever devised by man. Game is DOA.

Garfield just wants to somehow go back to before the internet existed so he can play Ironroot Treefolk and Fountain of Youth in his thallid deck and not lose to real decks.

ronne said:

Keyforge also has the most retarded card distribution system ever devised by man. Game is DOA.

Garfield just wants to somehow go back to before the internet existed so he can play Ironroot Treefolk and Fountain of Youth in his thallid deck and not lose to real decks.

Click to expand...

He very much liked how during the early days of Magic you could buy some cards, play some games, and then have an entirely different experience as you interacted with more and more people. There would be cards you never saw being used in ways you didn't think of and isn't this all so special. He wants to inject discovery and wonder back into gaming during the era of the internet.

I expect this all to go terribly but I'm absolutely tickled he's doing it. If the game ends up being very good than great! If collapses horrifically and there are no survivors (metaphorically) that's also great. It's win/win!

Sealed deck is the worst shit ever. It's super duper dumb to make a game that you can't draft.

I *hate* draft, but I recognize how important it is to MTG's success.

Heylel said:

I *hate* draft, but I recognize how important it is to MTG's success.

Click to expand...

Either I'm your opposite or you're mine.

I get what he's doing. By baking sealed deck RNG into your game you're opening yourself up to the possibility that some decks are grossly more powerful than others. If there's three trillion variations of decks (or whatever) than some of those are going to be a couple dozen standard deviations to the right. By introducing a tournament tested leveling system you can segregate outliers into their own format. It also does an interesting thing in that it gives decks pedigrees. You can put whole decks in the store's display case with their clan and level. You can set up eBay or online marketplaces the same way. You could also run fraudulent tournaments to boost up a deck's levels for resale if the game developed into a large and popular franchise. I can't wait for a deck used in a scam to be banned outright from all events and some poor idiot getting saddled with it. I also expect people at level one events to try and game the system somehow by conceding in the finals, intentionally drawing, or what have you to keep their S+ tier sealed pool live as long as possible.

This is why I'm so fascinated by the game. Everything they are doing has piles and piles of consequences and interactions. How they are setting up the rules and then how players will seek to exploit those rules is just entertaining as all heck to me. Can you report decks as stolen and get them banned? Can you ban all the decks a particular player owns when he's caught diddling the Pokemon players? Tracking every single deck opens up many possibilities! This is the card game that Winston Smith would play in 1984 or the game of choice in the world of Harrison Bergeron.

Thrilling to watch unfold I say! Thrilling!

Cube draft is fun. Anything else RNG is aids.