While I may agree with the general sense of "let's tell the WotC what our issues are" (like there's not a million forum messages per day doing exactly that anyway - except everybody has different ideas about what's right and what's wrong), this doesn't seem the right way at all. Being over-aggressive and shouting generic, pointless sentences like "fix your shit" is the worst possible way to make yourself heard, especially when addressing a company. That's not being constructive, it's just an outburst. That's why I enjoy reading this type of articles from people like Pete Jahn: because Pete Jahn is a smart, thoughtful guy who always try to understand the reasons behind any corporate choice, without demonizing anyone. This article is just a populist rant to me. WotC isn't "the enemy". It's just a company. With many different departments. Organized play has nothing to do with "corporate greed" policies. And Jace & Stoneforge was an error (in good faith) of the R&D department. It's absolutely pointless and disingenuous to put everything in the same basket.
Btw, the main points look hardly the big problems. The 3-day dead zone between prerelease and release? Seriously? If anything, the real annoyance is the 2/3-week disconnect between paper world and online.
And how many users actually care about PTQ prize support? I'm sorry, but this is a totally elitist point of view. Please take the time to talk to the many thousands of new players who don't even know what a PTQ is, and don't care to know. Teenagers that play Duel of the Planeswalkers. The (huge) casual crowd. The Commander crowd. The PRE crowd. The drafters. The real user base, not the elite. They have issues too, but to give more prizes to the PTQ players is hardly their main one. This article doesn't represent "the Magic players" at all.
MY biggest problem with mtgo is the orcs, with calliope being by far the worst. Yes i understand they are there to keep the chat under control, and that if there was nobody the chat would be full of swearing, etc. The problem is that the orcs do a horrible job. They have no sense of context, and will quickly mute one person while letting another do whatever they want. They are not customer service, they are security guards, and they act just like a mall security guard does. The orcs need actual training, and until they get it they will continue to drive people away from mtgo.
My way of dealing with all the bullsht that wotc/mtgo does-
Stop spending money. I used to spend 1000+ a year on mtgo, easily. Now I spend nothing. I may occasionally but something from mtgotraders, but I will never again spend money in the wotc store.
The rudeness from orcs, the crappy program, the greed from wotc has turned me from someone who used to bring new players to the game all the time and used to spend close to 100 a month, to someone who actively tells people not to start playing magic and doesnt spend anything on the game.
Nice job wotc, you continue to piss off your customers.
You just summarized everything I hate about Magic Online. Whoever can fix any or all of these issues please do. Stop waiting. We want online to be a better experience than paper, not the other way around.
An entire restructure of the trading system to mimic that of Urban Rivals would be better. Take away trade sessions altogether. Take away the tix system. Make it so that I can buy a card for .5 cents from the lowest seller off a full list of sellers for any given card. Ie. I search "Doom Blade" and I get a list of all sellers, I click buy, it's done. No interaction, no wasting my time. I HATE HOW MUCH TIME MODO WASTES FOR ME TO JUST GET A STUPID COMMON. THEN I HAVE TO LEAVE CREDIT AT A BOT, AND THAT IS RIDICULOUS.
The downtime is stupid. The client crashing constantly is even worse. Trade sessions are the thing I hate the most about magic more than anything else. I sure hope someone fixes this stuff.
We should make a new hashtag to complain to wizards. How about #WOTCLISTENUP
Lol I wish I was him, but I love the guy. I've actually helped teach his class locally 4 times. If our government used his logic we would be far better off! BTW that quote is so awesome, I use it all the time!
Don't agree with the comment about not being able to find cards online. True, a search for cards available for trade is not built in to mtgo beyond classifieds, but last time I checked this thing called Google exists and many bots have websites. It's so easy to get any card day or night on mtgo, usually for pennies. I get upset when it takes me more than five minutes to find a card. Compare that to paper where you've got to scour local stores (some of which don't carry every single, or if they do they are in disorganized piles in boxes) or order online and wait days.
I know this is about the things we don't like, but we gotta keep the record straight here, it's super easy to find any card you need online (unless it hasn't been brought online yet, but that's another story).
I agree with much of the sentiment, but believe it is completely pointless. WOTC was charging $20 for swiss drafts of a set that you can play for $14 if you can just wait a few days - yet the qeues were firing rapidly. Obviously for a lot of players, $20 is fine, and if that's the case, why shouldn't WOTC charge that price? I think there are several reasons why people play in these pre-release queues. One, they can get higher prices for some of the chase cards during that timeframe. Two, they can get ahead of the curve on experience so they have an initial advantage over drafters who wait for the regular release. Three, they simply don't have the patience to wait and are willing to pay a premium to play NOW. Until people start not attending the pre-release, I can't blame WOTC for charging a high price. Note that I am one of those players who is happy to wait until the price becomes a more reasonable $14, and accept that I may take it on the chin a couple times from more experienced drafters while I get up to speed.
As far as the dead zone; perhaps that gives WOTC an opportunity to fix any bugs that were identified during the pre-release. Another advantage that I didn't mention above is that the pre-release also provides WOTC a sort of super-beta test before the actual release to make sure the new cards aren't causing any problems.
Wishing WOTC would charge less, but accepting that there's no reason why WOTC should not price at a level that corresponds to demand.
Kind of hard to justify cutting the prerelease prices considering that there were around 2000+ people constantly in the prerelease rooms. I'm guessing that Wizards brought in somewhere around $500,000 this weekend.
It's not that I don't agree with you, but I don't think WotC is going to change something for which people keep paying. Same problem with 4322s.
Also, we're supposed to be going into a new client beta sometime soon, so we'll see what things justify ranting after that.
The other problem with releasing the set earlier is that they would have to open up the beta earlier, which means giving spoiler access to non-WotC-employees even earlier. This severely reduces the ability of WotC to manage the roll out of their spoilers. Since WotC sales data suggests that spoiling a set too soon results in reduced sales, I don't think it's going to be possible to get the set sooner.
You're comparing an online PTQ with a Grand Prix, which is actually apples to oranges. Yes, they're both fruit, but I'd like to see the comparative prize structure with an IRL PTQ.
So what you are saying is that you are only a nerd behind closed doors and you only hang out with fat smelly men behind closed doors?
Truth is, not everyone plays mtgo for profit. Some people want to just play the freaking game. I happen to not be one of those people as I prefer the trading aspect that magic has to offer. At the end of the day, typical players just want to play, they don't want to be gouged at the prerelease just because the profit margins are higher.
Besides, MTGO isn't supposed to care about the 2ndary market, therefore they should be more focused on what benefits the players financially and from a gameplay standpoint. $20 swiss drafts are laughable and if you play them, then you deserve what you get. Get your big boy panties on and wait the extra few days to pay regular draft costs. Spending that extra money to play with new cards is childlike. Children do what feels good, Mature Adults devise a plan and follow it.
As far as the article goes, I agree with most of it, I just don't see the need for the profanity. As a business owner, I guarantee you profanity gets you nowhere. In fact, I am probably less likely to handle your problem because if you are going to be that kind of customer, then I might be better off finding a new customer.
Adding profanity in your statements doesn't add anything to them, it just turns off the business owner to whom you are trying to communicate with. There are other more reasonable ways to request demands than that.
1) The pre-release's are overpriced, but you can break even or ever come out on top if done right, or if you get lucky.
Although Pre-releases are more expensive, the bot prices and what people are buying cards for are sometimes 100-300% higher than when the cards are released to the rest of the public. So 1 or 2 cards can make you break even, or you can at least make back your tickets by winning packs + a few cards here and there.
A few examples:
Lilliana was 50 at one point, I even sold my foiled one for $75, and the non-foil for $43. But it has continually gone down.
Geist or Stained Tramp was $16-20, now it's in the 10-12 range.
The Duals were all much more expensive, like 8-9, and are now 4-5
Skaab Ruinator was 16, now it's 5.25 (I haven't checked yet today)
I sold 4 packs for $20.
So if I'm right, you can break even on every pre-release. Granted some people wont, but even if you don't get a single good rare and you win 3 packs, that is $12-15 depending on the date, and 1 Mythic Rare, that's breaking even.
2) I don't play on paper. Even though this is a release for you, this is a pre-release for me.
I think there are other people out there that do the same thing. I mean to be honest if my gf heard that I was playing a card game not named Texas Hold 'em in public, I would be minus one girlfriend. Not to mention most of those places are filled with fat smelly people. I would know, I had to quit a little over a decade ago because you shouldn't be spending your Saturday night's at a small store playing cards with other men.
I smile every time I read comments like Erman's.
Why compare? Because that's what people do in order to tell the
difference between two often dissimilar things! In this case, it is
a comparison of two eternal formats (I did not compare Standard because it
is not an eternal format).
You made my point for me when you mentioned that the power level of Legacy
is higher than that of Modern.
I offered up my opinion: Modern is Legacy Lite. The guy who owns
the store where I do most of my playing has a more extreme opinion:
"Modern was created for the crybabies, the people who cry because
Legacy is too expensive or too powerful or too blue. Any time I talk
about scheduling a Legacy tournament, people start crying and begging for
Modern because they can afford the cards."
While I agree 200% with this entire article, the cynic in me believes whole-heatedly that WotC will either never read this article (regardless of where it's posted) or read it and blatantly disregard it. Nothing in the 8 years I've played MTGO makes me believe that WotC give two flying f**ks about its player base. In fact, their CEO basically came out as said EXACTLY that recently...
I stopped playing online because I got tired of pouring my money into a hole.
Online you're paying for digital objects that you don't even own. Any time
WOTC decides to pull the plug you're screwed.
Their pricing and prize payout are designed to get every last nickel they can
get. Customer appreciation and customer service are non-existent.
I could possibly live with that if the Magic Online were state-of-the-art.
(You have no idea how difficult it is to type the words "Magic Online" and
"state-of-the-art" in the same sentence.)
Ah, I misread the original article. I thought he was talking about the 2-3 weeks between paper and online release. I agree with you then, the dead zone between online prerelease and online release (which are both just "releases" but one is more expensive) doesn't make any sense except for price gouging.
In paper there is a difference between prerelease and release; you can only buy boxes at release and people actually buy boxes. But nobody buys boxes online so there isn't any distinction except for the gouging.
Shops already get the cards 3 weeks before online releases. If they can't make money during that time, they are doing something wrong. There is no reason to have a "pre-release" online and then a dead zone then a release...other than WotC can gouge us for the "pre-release" dollars. I would rather they wait another week from the paper release and then just release the set online and keep it there.
Yep, online organized play is garbage. It seems the only way to satisfy your concerns by both changing Wizards activity and giving you something fun to do is to not play organized. Do something else.
After all, this is the kind of feedback Wizards acts on. When caw-blade drove down tournament attendance, when coldsnap and time spiral block drove down pack sales, Wizards adjusted their business model. When coldsnap and time spiral were out, people stopped drafting. It worked then and it can work again. People need to leave the online prereleases in greater numbers to kill the increased revenue from the sales.
*I agree with Wizards on the Letusplay point about dead zones. The point of this is to protect the brick and mortar retail shops who have been closing left right and center (because as you say of location costs). They need that time for players to come in, and Wizards doesn't want to kill Peter to pay Paul. I agree that it's better for the game if they take this simple step to save more stores. Just be patient. Wait a couple of weeks. Take a break. Play a different video game or go outside and see the sun on 2 Saturday afternoons every 3 months.
I don´t really agree that the main plan of old Flare decks was the reanimation strategy. It was even less about reanimating than the new buildsy as research was worse at getting things in the grave, (you wanted to discard land most of the time since you had bouncelands), and unburial rites is much stronger than zombify. I also played the deck heavily at the time and in about 80% of the games you would play zombify to reanimate something you hardcasted turns ago. (Especially in the mirror where card advantage was king)
Also I think the section in which you compare research to alchemy is at least misleading. While Alchemy is better in a more reanimation heavy deck, it is not the better card, that would be research for sure. But of course this is just my personal oppinion, overall a really good article with some very spicy lists. (As always, you are definitely one of my favorite authors here.)
Oh and the origin of the name is indeed from dragonball.
If I remember correctly, the name Solar Flare comes from Angel of Despair. The angel on the art looks very much like Krillin (a character in Dragonball) and that Krillin dude has an ability that is called Solar Flare. I never understood the connection (as I had zero knowledge about Dragonball), but that name somehow became popular.
Regarding the deck: The deck had two different versions. The CHK - RAV version was playing many 1-ofs as its finishers, because Cranial Extraction was a big problem back then. And it wasen't called reanimator because it wasen't technically one. Solar Flare was a Control deck with Wrath effects, with Persecutes and Castigates and Remands and Mortify's. Normal Reanimator decks don't play those cards as their sole purpose is to drop a fattie to the yard and then reanimate it as fast as possible.
After CHK rotated out and TSP rotated in, people replaced those CHK dragons (Yosei and Kokusho mainly) with Akroma. And in time the deck dropped Zombify completely and transformed into a more Control deck than a reanimator deck. 10th Edition then gave it Beacon of Unrest and the final versions of the deck were playing it as a 2-of. Then RAV rotated out and the deck died.
Good job. I have to ask because it's really haunting me: why the old Solar Flare deck was called like that? I mean, it looks like a name for a red deck, not a deck using the coldest colors ever. Was it ironic?
Also, how was it different from the classic "discard & reanimate" archetype which ever existed, to the point of requiring a new name? I mean, Caw Blade is UW Control (sort of), but it deserved a new name because it used very specific win-con cards (Squadron Hawk and the swords) with very specific enablers, and this made it different from any UW Control deck of the past. I don't see how using Zombify instead of Exhume was different enough. In fact, the new ISD-based Solar Deck replaces every single card of it, yet the name seems too specific to define a generic broad archetype like Fish or Rock. Or if that's the idea, why we're not calling it just Reanimator? Because it's more midrange and the reanimating strategy isn't Plan A? (Indeed I just saw a list that, while still called "Solar Flare" by the writer, had just 2 Unburial Rites in the sideboard!).
Re: the website, one of the funniest MTG lampoon I ever read (also passingly mentioned in one of the comments there) is this one:
- I summon Soulless One.
- Remove Soul!
- Ha! You think that will... hang on... it worked?! How did you even do that?!
- Muahaha! Now, Headless Horseman, attack! But first, put on this Helm of Kaldra.
- No! Neck Snap!
(I was never able to identify the original author/authors)
My comments on the article are already on record on the original post, which PureMTGO neglected to provide: http://mixedknuts.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/the-trouble-with-magic-online/
That's fair... I'm just an angry person...
To say that the CEO of WoTC said they didn't give a flying F*** about the MTGO player base is a lengthy stretch from what he actually said...
http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/21062.html
While I may agree with the general sense of "let's tell the WotC what our issues are" (like there's not a million forum messages per day doing exactly that anyway - except everybody has different ideas about what's right and what's wrong), this doesn't seem the right way at all. Being over-aggressive and shouting generic, pointless sentences like "fix your shit" is the worst possible way to make yourself heard, especially when addressing a company. That's not being constructive, it's just an outburst. That's why I enjoy reading this type of articles from people like Pete Jahn: because Pete Jahn is a smart, thoughtful guy who always try to understand the reasons behind any corporate choice, without demonizing anyone. This article is just a populist rant to me. WotC isn't "the enemy". It's just a company. With many different departments. Organized play has nothing to do with "corporate greed" policies. And Jace & Stoneforge was an error (in good faith) of the R&D department. It's absolutely pointless and disingenuous to put everything in the same basket.
Btw, the main points look hardly the big problems. The 3-day dead zone between prerelease and release? Seriously? If anything, the real annoyance is the 2/3-week disconnect between paper world and online.
And how many users actually care about PTQ prize support? I'm sorry, but this is a totally elitist point of view. Please take the time to talk to the many thousands of new players who don't even know what a PTQ is, and don't care to know. Teenagers that play Duel of the Planeswalkers. The (huge) casual crowd. The Commander crowd. The PRE crowd. The drafters. The real user base, not the elite. They have issues too, but to give more prizes to the PTQ players is hardly their main one. This article doesn't represent "the Magic players" at all.
I completely agree with this article.
MY biggest problem with mtgo is the orcs, with calliope being by far the worst. Yes i understand they are there to keep the chat under control, and that if there was nobody the chat would be full of swearing, etc. The problem is that the orcs do a horrible job. They have no sense of context, and will quickly mute one person while letting another do whatever they want. They are not customer service, they are security guards, and they act just like a mall security guard does. The orcs need actual training, and until they get it they will continue to drive people away from mtgo.
My way of dealing with all the bullsht that wotc/mtgo does-
Stop spending money. I used to spend 1000+ a year on mtgo, easily. Now I spend nothing. I may occasionally but something from mtgotraders, but I will never again spend money in the wotc store.
The rudeness from orcs, the crappy program, the greed from wotc has turned me from someone who used to bring new players to the game all the time and used to spend close to 100 a month, to someone who actively tells people not to start playing magic and doesnt spend anything on the game.
Nice job wotc, you continue to piss off your customers.
http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75846/28292501/So_this_expla......
You just summarized everything I hate about Magic Online. Whoever can fix any or all of these issues please do. Stop waiting. We want online to be a better experience than paper, not the other way around.
An entire restructure of the trading system to mimic that of Urban Rivals would be better. Take away trade sessions altogether. Take away the tix system. Make it so that I can buy a card for .5 cents from the lowest seller off a full list of sellers for any given card. Ie. I search "Doom Blade" and I get a list of all sellers, I click buy, it's done. No interaction, no wasting my time. I HATE HOW MUCH TIME MODO WASTES FOR ME TO JUST GET A STUPID COMMON. THEN I HAVE TO LEAVE CREDIT AT A BOT, AND THAT IS RIDICULOUS.
The downtime is stupid. The client crashing constantly is even worse. Trade sessions are the thing I hate the most about magic more than anything else. I sure hope someone fixes this stuff.
We should make a new hashtag to complain to wizards. How about #WOTCLISTENUP
I'd like to read that CEO comment, where can I find it?
Lol I wish I was him, but I love the guy. I've actually helped teach his class locally 4 times. If our government used his logic we would be far better off! BTW that quote is so awesome, I use it all the time!
Don't agree with the comment about not being able to find cards online. True, a search for cards available for trade is not built in to mtgo beyond classifieds, but last time I checked this thing called Google exists and many bots have websites. It's so easy to get any card day or night on mtgo, usually for pennies. I get upset when it takes me more than five minutes to find a card. Compare that to paper where you've got to scour local stores (some of which don't carry every single, or if they do they are in disorganized piles in boxes) or order online and wait days.
I know this is about the things we don't like, but we gotta keep the record straight here, it's super easy to find any card you need online (unless it hasn't been brought online yet, but that's another story).
"Children do what feels good, Mature Adults devise a plan and follow it."
Is that you Dave Ramsey? :P
I agree with much of the sentiment, but believe it is completely pointless. WOTC was charging $20 for swiss drafts of a set that you can play for $14 if you can just wait a few days - yet the qeues were firing rapidly. Obviously for a lot of players, $20 is fine, and if that's the case, why shouldn't WOTC charge that price? I think there are several reasons why people play in these pre-release queues. One, they can get higher prices for some of the chase cards during that timeframe. Two, they can get ahead of the curve on experience so they have an initial advantage over drafters who wait for the regular release. Three, they simply don't have the patience to wait and are willing to pay a premium to play NOW. Until people start not attending the pre-release, I can't blame WOTC for charging a high price. Note that I am one of those players who is happy to wait until the price becomes a more reasonable $14, and accept that I may take it on the chin a couple times from more experienced drafters while I get up to speed.
As far as the dead zone; perhaps that gives WOTC an opportunity to fix any bugs that were identified during the pre-release. Another advantage that I didn't mention above is that the pre-release also provides WOTC a sort of super-beta test before the actual release to make sure the new cards aren't causing any problems.
Wishing WOTC would charge less, but accepting that there's no reason why WOTC should not price at a level that corresponds to demand.
Kind of hard to justify cutting the prerelease prices considering that there were around 2000+ people constantly in the prerelease rooms. I'm guessing that Wizards brought in somewhere around $500,000 this weekend.
It's not that I don't agree with you, but I don't think WotC is going to change something for which people keep paying. Same problem with 4322s.
Also, we're supposed to be going into a new client beta sometime soon, so we'll see what things justify ranting after that.
The other problem with releasing the set earlier is that they would have to open up the beta earlier, which means giving spoiler access to non-WotC-employees even earlier. This severely reduces the ability of WotC to manage the roll out of their spoilers. Since WotC sales data suggests that spoiling a set too soon results in reduced sales, I don't think it's going to be possible to get the set sooner.
You're comparing an online PTQ with a Grand Prix, which is actually apples to oranges. Yes, they're both fruit, but I'd like to see the comparative prize structure with an IRL PTQ.
So what you are saying is that you are only a nerd behind closed doors and you only hang out with fat smelly men behind closed doors?
Truth is, not everyone plays mtgo for profit. Some people want to just play the freaking game. I happen to not be one of those people as I prefer the trading aspect that magic has to offer. At the end of the day, typical players just want to play, they don't want to be gouged at the prerelease just because the profit margins are higher.
Besides, MTGO isn't supposed to care about the 2ndary market, therefore they should be more focused on what benefits the players financially and from a gameplay standpoint. $20 swiss drafts are laughable and if you play them, then you deserve what you get. Get your big boy panties on and wait the extra few days to pay regular draft costs. Spending that extra money to play with new cards is childlike. Children do what feels good, Mature Adults devise a plan and follow it.
As far as the article goes, I agree with most of it, I just don't see the need for the profanity. As a business owner, I guarantee you profanity gets you nowhere. In fact, I am probably less likely to handle your problem because if you are going to be that kind of customer, then I might be better off finding a new customer.
Adding profanity in your statements doesn't add anything to them, it just turns off the business owner to whom you are trying to communicate with. There are other more reasonable ways to request demands than that.
Just my 2 cents
Ok, I agree. But I have 2 issues with this.
1) The pre-release's are overpriced, but you can break even or ever come out on top if done right, or if you get lucky.
Although Pre-releases are more expensive, the bot prices and what people are buying cards for are sometimes 100-300% higher than when the cards are released to the rest of the public. So 1 or 2 cards can make you break even, or you can at least make back your tickets by winning packs + a few cards here and there.
A few examples:
Lilliana was 50 at one point, I even sold my foiled one for $75, and the non-foil for $43. But it has continually gone down.
Geist or Stained Tramp was $16-20, now it's in the 10-12 range.
The Duals were all much more expensive, like 8-9, and are now 4-5
Skaab Ruinator was 16, now it's 5.25 (I haven't checked yet today)
I sold 4 packs for $20.
So if I'm right, you can break even on every pre-release. Granted some people wont, but even if you don't get a single good rare and you win 3 packs, that is $12-15 depending on the date, and 1 Mythic Rare, that's breaking even.
2) I don't play on paper. Even though this is a release for you, this is a pre-release for me.
I think there are other people out there that do the same thing. I mean to be honest if my gf heard that I was playing a card game not named Texas Hold 'em in public, I would be minus one girlfriend. Not to mention most of those places are filled with fat smelly people. I would know, I had to quit a little over a decade ago because you shouldn't be spending your Saturday night's at a small store playing cards with other men.
I smile every time I read comments like Erman's.
Why compare? Because that's what people do in order to tell the
difference between two often dissimilar things! In this case, it is
a comparison of two eternal formats (I did not compare Standard because it
is not an eternal format).
You made my point for me when you mentioned that the power level of Legacy
is higher than that of Modern.
I offered up my opinion: Modern is Legacy Lite. The guy who owns
the store where I do most of my playing has a more extreme opinion:
"Modern was created for the crybabies, the people who cry because
Legacy is too expensive or too powerful or too blue. Any time I talk
about scheduling a Legacy tournament, people start crying and begging for
Modern because they can afford the cards."
While I agree 200% with this entire article, the cynic in me believes whole-heatedly that WotC will either never read this article (regardless of where it's posted) or read it and blatantly disregard it. Nothing in the 8 years I've played MTGO makes me believe that WotC give two flying f**ks about its player base. In fact, their CEO basically came out as said EXACTLY that recently...
I stopped playing online because I got tired of pouring my money into a hole.
Online you're paying for digital objects that you don't even own. Any time
WOTC decides to pull the plug you're screwed.
Their pricing and prize payout are designed to get every last nickel they can
get. Customer appreciation and customer service are non-existent.
I could possibly live with that if the Magic Online were state-of-the-art.
(You have no idea how difficult it is to type the words "Magic Online" and
"state-of-the-art" in the same sentence.)
Ah, I misread the original article. I thought he was talking about the 2-3 weeks between paper and online release. I agree with you then, the dead zone between online prerelease and online release (which are both just "releases" but one is more expensive) doesn't make any sense except for price gouging.
In paper there is a difference between prerelease and release; you can only buy boxes at release and people actually buy boxes. But nobody buys boxes online so there isn't any distinction except for the gouging.
Shops already get the cards 3 weeks before online releases. If they can't make money during that time, they are doing something wrong. There is no reason to have a "pre-release" online and then a dead zone then a release...other than WotC can gouge us for the "pre-release" dollars. I would rather they wait another week from the paper release and then just release the set online and keep it there.
Yep, online organized play is garbage. It seems the only way to satisfy your concerns by both changing Wizards activity and giving you something fun to do is to not play organized. Do something else.
After all, this is the kind of feedback Wizards acts on. When caw-blade drove down tournament attendance, when coldsnap and time spiral block drove down pack sales, Wizards adjusted their business model. When coldsnap and time spiral were out, people stopped drafting. It worked then and it can work again. People need to leave the online prereleases in greater numbers to kill the increased revenue from the sales.
*I agree with Wizards on the Letusplay point about dead zones. The point of this is to protect the brick and mortar retail shops who have been closing left right and center (because as you say of location costs). They need that time for players to come in, and Wizards doesn't want to kill Peter to pay Paul. I agree that it's better for the game if they take this simple step to save more stores. Just be patient. Wait a couple of weeks. Take a break. Play a different video game or go outside and see the sun on 2 Saturday afternoons every 3 months.
I don´t really agree that the main plan of old Flare decks was the reanimation strategy. It was even less about reanimating than the new buildsy as research was worse at getting things in the grave, (you wanted to discard land most of the time since you had bouncelands), and unburial rites is much stronger than zombify. I also played the deck heavily at the time and in about 80% of the games you would play zombify to reanimate something you hardcasted turns ago. (Especially in the mirror where card advantage was king)
Also I think the section in which you compare research to alchemy is at least misleading. While Alchemy is better in a more reanimation heavy deck, it is not the better card, that would be research for sure. But of course this is just my personal oppinion, overall a really good article with some very spicy lists. (As always, you are definitely one of my favorite authors here.)
Oh and the origin of the name is indeed from dragonball.
If I remember correctly, the name Solar Flare comes from Angel of Despair. The angel on the art looks very much like Krillin (a character in Dragonball) and that Krillin dude has an ability that is called Solar Flare. I never understood the connection (as I had zero knowledge about Dragonball), but that name somehow became popular.
Regarding the deck: The deck had two different versions. The CHK - RAV version was playing many 1-ofs as its finishers, because Cranial Extraction was a big problem back then. And it wasen't called reanimator because it wasen't technically one. Solar Flare was a Control deck with Wrath effects, with Persecutes and Castigates and Remands and Mortify's. Normal Reanimator decks don't play those cards as their sole purpose is to drop a fattie to the yard and then reanimate it as fast as possible.
After CHK rotated out and TSP rotated in, people replaced those CHK dragons (Yosei and Kokusho mainly) with Akroma. And in time the deck dropped Zombify completely and transformed into a more Control deck than a reanimator deck. 10th Edition then gave it Beacon of Unrest and the final versions of the deck were playing it as a 2-of. Then RAV rotated out and the deck died.
And our history lesson is thus over :)).
LE
Good job. I have to ask because it's really haunting me: why the old Solar Flare deck was called like that? I mean, it looks like a name for a red deck, not a deck using the coldest colors ever. Was it ironic?
Also, how was it different from the classic "discard & reanimate" archetype which ever existed, to the point of requiring a new name? I mean, Caw Blade is UW Control (sort of), but it deserved a new name because it used very specific win-con cards (Squadron Hawk and the swords) with very specific enablers, and this made it different from any UW Control deck of the past. I don't see how using Zombify instead of Exhume was different enough. In fact, the new ISD-based Solar Deck replaces every single card of it, yet the name seems too specific to define a generic broad archetype like Fish or Rock. Or if that's the idea, why we're not calling it just Reanimator? Because it's more midrange and the reanimating strategy isn't Plan A? (Indeed I just saw a list that, while still called "Solar Flare" by the writer, had just 2 Unburial Rites in the sideboard!).
Re: the website, one of the funniest MTG lampoon I ever read (also passingly mentioned in one of the comments there) is this one:
- I summon Soulless One.
- Remove Soul!
- Ha! You think that will... hang on... it worked?! How did you even do that?!
- Muahaha! Now, Headless Horseman, attack! But first, put on this Helm of Kaldra.
- No! Neck Snap!
(I was never able to identify the original author/authors)
Sign me up for that commander event. :)