The rabbit from Donnie Darko should have been in Innistrad, as a horror trope. Or I guess it was a Human in a rabbit suit in that one scene. Or it was an Illusion created by that guy's mind to reconcile living in an impossible future, or... what the hell was that movie about??!!
I think your Merfolk design is pretty good right there and could easily see them do it in certain limited environments where that might make sense.
It was meant to be African. The lore of the depicted region was pretty well fleshed out, they even had somebody write a full-length poem within the universe to use for flavor text and all that. It kept some of the cohesive world-building efforts of Homelands but made sure not to totally compromise set design just for flavor and story as Homelands did. I love Mirage, and I think it's worth going back there. Weatherlight was kind of crammed onto it at the end and didn't feel right with the block anyhow.
2) Yeah, most definitely they could, should, maybe will.
3) I'm always happy to underline the good job they did with the Zen vamp. However, I don't dislike the more Sturm-und-Drang Innistrad ones, and they were needed both in the block and in the game in general.
7) While I was looking at the Merfolk art to find some leggy ones, I saw that they essentially have been depicted in the largest possible spectrum. Basically, they are anything from the Little Mermaid, to Lovecraft's Deep Ones or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, to barely humanized fish-like creatures or sea monsters. It depends on the plane, I guess, although I wouldn't be surprised if a deeper analysis would show that that's not entirely true, and in fact it depends only on the artist's whim.
"This is a game that lets a stone wall hold a sword" is so wonderfully hilarious that should be used as a slogan!
I'm kind-of planning an article tracking the time every tribe has been introduced. I started laying down something when I listed the 64 Original Tribes (in Diaries of the Apocalypse 102, the spam filter doesn't allow me to link it, weirdly), the ones from Alpha. But of course something like that would need a lot of research. If you like the idea, I can give it to you, or we could do it together somehow?
7. Darryl Hannah, still the only merfolk for me, established that merfolk can have legs for some period of time while on land. Strangely, that movie also established that a merfolk can give a human permanent waterbreathing abilities.
On one of the article's other points, I suspect Rabbits and Badgers could be anthropomorphized a bit into a full tribe, which would be cute if they basically still looked like rabbits and badgers -- but if they walked like humans and had monocles and breasts, it would be creepy as hell, like some teenaged furry-fetishist's sketchbook. When they made Foxes a two-legged species in Kamigawa, they must have been aware of that danger, since they avoided anything that looked even remotely like the anthropomorphic foxes from the Disney Robin Hood movie.
I'm pretty sure Mirage was at least partially inspired by their earlier Arabian Nights set. There could be a return to Mirage block too. Though I guess it would be weird without the Weatherlight crew.
1) Good point! I could see this (or something similar) happening.
2) Sad but true. I can still dream. It is possible that they'll do something Arabian Nights inspired, if not Arabian Nights exactly.
3) I certainly don't think the Zendikar vampires were meant to be mimics of the Twilight ones. I'm just saying the decision to make them a tribe was very likely influenced by their sudden nationwide popularity. Of course after they were voted into the set they were retooled to be more uniquely Magic-y.
4) True again. Haha maybe those vanilla wizards are still young and their powers are latent. That's a pretty popular trope in YA fantasy fiction.
5) Looks like an octopus with all those tentacles. That's all I meant.
6) It's possible, but I can't imagine it feeling like anything other than a let-down.
7) It's mostly the newer mefolk that have legs, due to the exact flavor concern I raised. But I never minded the flavor contradiction back in the day, personally. I mean this is a game that lets a stone wall hold a sword. I don't care if a sea-dwelling creature attacks a powerful wizard. Maybe he was visiting the beach that day and doing some wading in his clamdiggers.
How many more tribal articles you'll need to write before deciding that it's time to build a tribal deck and come to play? :) (So you'll find out that you don't need small guys to win with midrange or fattie tribes!)
So many things to say.
1) About (things somehow similar to) Badgers: Maybe at some point they'll do another Japanese-flavored block (medieval Japan is always popular, especially if you give it non-crappy mechanics this time) and we'll get tanuki like in Miyazaki's Pom Poko. That would be cool.
2) Sorry to disappoint, but there's now a single chance in the world they'll do a "Return to Arabian Nights" block, seeing how Arabian Nights wasn't set in the Magic multiverse, but in the freaking real world. Because at the time, "background story" was treated as "something other games have".
3) Did the Twilight craze give us the Zendikar vampires? Because in that case they found a pretty original way to roll with that, as they mostly are feral savages. And I don't think the Twilight vampires are often seen covered in cockroaches.
4) Find a unifying mechanic isn't always necessary: look at how little the modern Kor, Kithkin or Faerie have to do with their ancestors. Plus, if a tribe get big enough, it stands to reason that it might/should be able to do a bit of everything, even without getting to the ginormous tribes, where this becomes obvious (of course being a Wizard means doing everything and its opposite, including not doing anything at all, as befuddling as it is).
5) According to back story, Dark Depths actually summons a beautiful (?) sorceress who likes to take the form of a Kraken to scare her enemies, or something like that. So that's the Avatar of Marit Lage, where Marit Lage is, say, a Human Wizard, and the Avatar is a Kraken. Not confusing at all.
6) Maybe the next evolution of the Rigger meta-joke will be to really print them in the end. Meta-joke on us!
7) Why the Merfolk shouldn't be able to walk the land? They have legs, occasionally. Some of them have great legs, even.
If you look at the red line right at the 50% win rate, which is the average for "all us players" from our perspective, or "all our customers" from Wizards, it's on a par with all the draft formats (and a little better than 4-3-2-2s). This 50% level could also be treated as the aggregate expectation, if you add the results of all players in all queues together and average them out.
A glass is half empty guy could say "We had better EV on old 4 pack, they TOOK OUR STUFF". A glass is half full guy could say "They introduced 4 pack sealed at a higher than normal payout rate to get us to like the new format or because they occasionally reward their playerbase with extra high EV events from time to time, and now they've moved it back to around the normal level of EV that MTGO events have". If the rates on current drafts are the implied "social contract" between players and wizards, where we say with our playing habits and dollars "We will keep paying for this game at that rate of return", I can't find fault with wizards at changing the costs & payouts of some event that was above (or below) that level and moving it to that level. I certainly wouldn't call it "nickel and diming us to death".
Anyone who's surprised at what it takes to "go infinite" should remember, everyone who goes infinite is not a source of income for Wizards any more. And they can't pay people to keep adding each new card set, adding features, fixing bugs, and keeping the servers operating if they don't make money from the game. So it only makes sense that just a small portion of the playerbase can go infinite.
The rabbit from Donnie Darko should have been in Innistrad, as a horror trope. Or I guess it was a Human in a rabbit suit in that one scene. Or it was an Illusion created by that guy's mind to reconcile living in an impossible future, or... what the hell was that movie about??!!
I think your Merfolk design is pretty good right there and could easily see them do it in certain limited environments where that might make sense.
T: Target Human gains islandwalk.
Hey, you're right, anthropomorphic rabbits are cool! Donnie Darko! Usagi Yojimbo!
It was meant to be African. The lore of the depicted region was pretty well fleshed out, they even had somebody write a full-length poem within the universe to use for flavor text and all that. It kept some of the cohesive world-building efforts of Homelands but made sure not to totally compromise set design just for flavor and story as Homelands did. I love Mirage, and I think it's worth going back there. Weatherlight was kind of crammed onto it at the end and didn't feel right with the block anyhow.
I'm pretty ignorant about background of that era, but Mirage block always looked like some kind of African setting/African fairytale to me.
2) Yeah, most definitely they could, should, maybe will.
3) I'm always happy to underline the good job they did with the Zen vamp. However, I don't dislike the more Sturm-und-Drang Innistrad ones, and they were needed both in the block and in the game in general.
7) While I was looking at the Merfolk art to find some leggy ones, I saw that they essentially have been depicted in the largest possible spectrum. Basically, they are anything from the Little Mermaid, to Lovecraft's Deep Ones or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, to barely humanized fish-like creatures or sea monsters. It depends on the plane, I guess, although I wouldn't be surprised if a deeper analysis would show that that's not entirely true, and in fact it depends only on the artist's whim.
"This is a game that lets a stone wall hold a sword" is so wonderfully hilarious that should be used as a slogan!
I'm kind-of planning an article tracking the time every tribe has been introduced. I started laying down something when I listed the 64 Original Tribes (in Diaries of the Apocalypse 102, the spam filter doesn't allow me to link it, weirdly), the ones from Alpha. But of course something like that would need a lot of research. If you like the idea, I can give it to you, or we could do it together somehow?
7. Darryl Hannah, still the only merfolk for me, established that merfolk can have legs for some period of time while on land. Strangely, that movie also established that a merfolk can give a human permanent waterbreathing abilities.
On one of the article's other points, I suspect Rabbits and Badgers could be anthropomorphized a bit into a full tribe, which would be cute if they basically still looked like rabbits and badgers -- but if they walked like humans and had monocles and breasts, it would be creepy as hell, like some teenaged furry-fetishist's sketchbook. When they made Foxes a two-legged species in Kamigawa, they must have been aware of that danger, since they avoided anything that looked even remotely like the anthropomorphic foxes from the Disney Robin Hood movie.
I'm pretty sure Mirage was at least partially inspired by their earlier Arabian Nights set. There could be a return to Mirage block too. Though I guess it would be weird without the Weatherlight crew.
1) Good point! I could see this (or something similar) happening.
2) Sad but true. I can still dream. It is possible that they'll do something Arabian Nights inspired, if not Arabian Nights exactly.
3) I certainly don't think the Zendikar vampires were meant to be mimics of the Twilight ones. I'm just saying the decision to make them a tribe was very likely influenced by their sudden nationwide popularity. Of course after they were voted into the set they were retooled to be more uniquely Magic-y.
4) True again. Haha maybe those vanilla wizards are still young and their powers are latent. That's a pretty popular trope in YA fantasy fiction.
5) Looks like an octopus with all those tentacles. That's all I meant.
6) It's possible, but I can't imagine it feeling like anything other than a let-down.
7) It's mostly the newer mefolk that have legs, due to the exact flavor concern I raised. But I never minded the flavor contradiction back in the day, personally. I mean this is a game that lets a stone wall hold a sword. I don't care if a sea-dwelling creature attacks a powerful wizard. Maybe he was visiting the beach that day and doing some wading in his clamdiggers.
Hey I paid him 40 shekels per page. The salary might have been imaginary but so was the editor so the arrangement worked out fine.
How many more tribal articles you'll need to write before deciding that it's time to build a tribal deck and come to play? :) (So you'll find out that you don't need small guys to win with midrange or fattie tribes!)
So many things to say.
1) About (things somehow similar to) Badgers: Maybe at some point they'll do another Japanese-flavored block (medieval Japan is always popular, especially if you give it non-crappy mechanics this time) and we'll get tanuki like in Miyazaki's Pom Poko. That would be cool.
2) Sorry to disappoint, but there's now a single chance in the world they'll do a "Return to Arabian Nights" block, seeing how Arabian Nights wasn't set in the Magic multiverse, but in the freaking real world. Because at the time, "background story" was treated as "something other games have".
3) Did the Twilight craze give us the Zendikar vampires? Because in that case they found a pretty original way to roll with that, as they mostly are feral savages. And I don't think the Twilight vampires are often seen covered in cockroaches.
4) Find a unifying mechanic isn't always necessary: look at how little the modern Kor, Kithkin or Faerie have to do with their ancestors. Plus, if a tribe get big enough, it stands to reason that it might/should be able to do a bit of everything, even without getting to the ginormous tribes, where this becomes obvious (of course being a Wizard means doing everything and its opposite, including not doing anything at all, as befuddling as it is).
5) According to back story, Dark Depths actually summons a beautiful (?) sorceress who likes to take the form of a Kraken to scare her enemies, or something like that. So that's the Avatar of Marit Lage, where Marit Lage is, say, a Human Wizard, and the Avatar is a Kraken. Not confusing at all.
6) Maybe the next evolution of the Rigger meta-joke will be to really print them in the end. Meta-joke on us!
7) Why the Merfolk shouldn't be able to walk the land? They have legs, occasionally. Some of them have great legs, even.
Wow, is the drawing computer generated or it is by hand? Either way, it is amazing. - J. Kale Flagg
Let us pay homage to the discoverer of America. Without him, life will be dull. - J. Kale Flagg
Cube drafts eh? That is going to be interesting. - Michael Courouleau
The men who trade for goats? Isn't that a movie or something? - Michael Courouleau
The soap opera is impressive. It is really well done and the actors are good. - Michael Courouelau
Command and conquer is one of the classic moves for a warrior. It is found in the Art of War. - Michael Courouelau
So the poor schlub is going to have to find another 0 paying job? :/ Mean ole' cotton!
Congratulations to the red deck. I don't know exactly what and how they won, but congratulations. - Casa Sandoval
The state is good. It is going pretty well. - Casa Sandoval
I wish to have even one copy of decklist. Hopefully I can play this very soon. - JustFab
I would rate Eyes as a 3. :)
If you look at the red line right at the 50% win rate, which is the average for "all us players" from our perspective, or "all our customers" from Wizards, it's on a par with all the draft formats (and a little better than 4-3-2-2s). This 50% level could also be treated as the aggregate expectation, if you add the results of all players in all queues together and average them out.
A glass is half empty guy could say "We had better EV on old 4 pack, they TOOK OUR STUFF". A glass is half full guy could say "They introduced 4 pack sealed at a higher than normal payout rate to get us to like the new format or because they occasionally reward their playerbase with extra high EV events from time to time, and now they've moved it back to around the normal level of EV that MTGO events have". If the rates on current drafts are the implied "social contract" between players and wizards, where we say with our playing habits and dollars "We will keep paying for this game at that rate of return", I can't find fault with wizards at changing the costs & payouts of some event that was above (or below) that level and moving it to that level. I certainly wouldn't call it "nickel and diming us to death".
Anyone who's surprised at what it takes to "go infinite" should remember, everyone who goes infinite is not a source of income for Wizards any more. And they can't pay people to keep adding each new card set, adding features, fixing bugs, and keeping the servers operating if they don't make money from the game. So it only makes sense that just a small portion of the playerbase can go infinite.
This is the reason why I do like your site. Just stay making more beautiful drafts. - JustFab
Well, I think your wish will be granted. Be continue making this kind of wonderful cards. - JustFab
That does it I am firing my copyeditor