Counterbalance is notoriously awful against Delve spells, and is the primary reason that Tombstalker was popular during the peak of CounterTop dominance. I'd think that with everybody trying out Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise as the flavors of the week in Legacy, it would only be even weaker right now.
I'm happy Block Constructed is back and I'm even happier your articles will be back too! I believe, I have found the reason, why reading your articles is so satisfying ;) Most articles I read are focused on Standard and after some time they become repetitive. You, on the other hand, cover an unexplored area, which is always intriguing. In addition, the structure of your articles is beautiful, I wish I could write so smoothly. Keep up the great work!
Thank you for the nice laugh too! Having had some recent stress it was quite the relief.
Now, to comment on your remarks individually:
I am more than willing to imagine women fighting back by using the same foul techniques and thus blowing their high road status. (Thus without a shred of evidence of that I will take your word for it. After all it takes 2 to tango so to speak.) But that makes the ggers no less wrong or plain socially stupid imho.
I will say this I am proud to be a Liberal because I think social progress is important for human evolution. As for the term being used as a pejorative I think you should try harder. Republicans have been unsuccessfully doing that for years and failing miserably.
A point of fact: Liberalism is not Socialism or Marxism which are both discrete ideas, distinct from Liberalism even in its most modern usage.
I doubt you want a lengthy lecture on the subject so I will only recommend you look them up in the terrible but handy Wikipedia.
As for 'white knighting' I hear this term a lot and I think people using it the way you did, are perhaps not using it the way it was initially intended. There is very little about an internet post that can rise to the chivalry required of a White Knight. We are all just mundanes here I think. Magic Playing Mundanes for sure...
(An aside: I knew a fairly noxious young fellow in a few games called Ocelot, would you be related? Just curious. It is after all an uncommon animal name as cat fanciers go.)
I agree with your penultimate sentence in principle. If gamergaters come forward and tell their story I will certainly listen to them before burning them at the stake. :p From what I have read so far the issue hasn't been terribly persuasive for me.
And finally "No, Thanks to YOU, for playing, please do come back and visit."
"WIth the way it is, many of the more dedicated Multiplayer players have gone elsewhere for their gaming fun."
It isn't just the multiplayer aficionados, though I agree that they have gotten the worst of V4. I suspect that a large part of the Vintage crowd has moved elsewhere as well. I know I've spent the better part of the last 2 months replaying the Mass Effect trilogy on the highest difficulty setting (which I just finally finished about a half hour ago) rather than deal with the sorry state of MODO these days.
Your recent comments show how little you actually understand the gamersgate fiasco. You seem to think the thuggery is one sided? More doxxing has occurred on the feminist side than the side of the gamers. Now I understand as a liberal it must be fairly difficult to not white knight every socially marxist idea, but really at least hear out both sides of the argument before completely discarding opinion. Thanks for playing
point of order: going back to v3 is technically impossible. they have clearly ported over much of the server functionality into a new format, and I would be tremendously surprised if it was backwards-compatible. Unrolling to the day v3 was shut down might be possible, but I would bet my hat on the fact that all the new information created since then (matches played, cards bought and traded, etc.) would have to be jettisoned, which I suspect is both practically and legally unacceptable. All we can do is to look forward to v5, which will no doubt be the Kingdom of Loathing version of MTG.
If they had already lost their player base, we would not be talking about this here. We would be playing other games. It is true that they have done some serious damage to their reputation (such as it is) and the player confidence levels (cf my last article) but I doubt very much it is done yet. I still get plenty of games of Standard on demand and while I haven't been playing the other formats I play as much I am sure if I were to stick it out Id get some games in them too.
The VERY BAD part is even while there are players in Just for Fun and the other rooms they aren't talking with each other. They don't even seem to know to do so. The chat rooms don't open automagically when you join a room.
This is what makes it appear worse than it is. Because asking for a game in chat is basically like talking to an echo chamber. The players are there but they are only looking at a small portion of the whole player base. This leaves some people out in the cold.
I think this will eventually lead to players abandoning the game in droves but at the moment the losses are made up for by new players and those who persevere (like myself) and fit in whatever games they feel safe in waiting for.
Also the state of multiplayer is about as bad as it has ever been. WIth the way it is, many of the more dedicated Multiplayer players have gone elsewhere for their gaming fun.
We can only hope that this trend does not continue. Or at some point the sky really will be fallen.
I really get the feeling this time they managed to loose their player base a bit more effective - at least my preferred formats (granted, niche formats) in casual dried up almost completely. The only thing available is drafting but I wonder how long the secondary market will survive under this signs and gave at least some financial justification for limited.
At least once before we've seen Counterbalance go over 20 tix due to someone attempting to horde it. It seems like a wise target for hording: it was printed only once, it isn't likely to appear in the next preconstructed product or in a Standard legal set, and it's an eternal staple with no replacement. So raise the price!
But it is a bad target for hording because there are hundreds of thousands of them online and mere thousands of eternal players who want them. And Miracles isn't even the hottest deck right now.
I tried playing a phantom draft today. The program crashed while I was deck-building. So in addition to all the other various problems with the client, I can see no real reason why I should invest any amount of time, effort, and/or money into playing magic any longer. Their response is horrendously inadequate: I've heard nothing about the crash, nor about any of the fixes implemented. I didn't even know there were Khans bugs in the first place.
Economics basically works like this: if you upset your customers enough times, they'll stop buying stuff from you. Then you'll be losing money. I really cannot understand why Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast has not figured this out.
Edit: I wanted to do the survey, but it wasn't accepting responses it said. That's just lovely...
When I watched the live stream of the last Pro Tour, I was surprised by how many professionals were shuffling face up (which I define as being able to see any of the contents of the cards being shuffled) and none of them were being warned about that...mystifying to me.
Also, any reason why counterbalance has skyrocketed (since M15's release it has doubled in price to ~24 tix)?
I'm well familiar with html, I write all my articles in notepad with manual html tags. I was up till past midnight trying to get this article in before the deadline, I wanted to get it up ASAP so people interested in playing the format over the weekend could get an early glimpse of the metagame and one of the top decks. I've been manually linking cards in my previous weeks articles, didn't have the energy to do so late last night.
Note too that as I write block, I'm far more affected by new sets taking so long to be updated in the system than other writers as the vast majority of my cards are affected. I've offered in the past to Josh to help with the data entry or coding for new sets but I've been told that isn't practical.
I think your assumption that the bloggers aren't doing anything is really flawed. For example someone like myself. I write songs. You may feel that isn't doing anything but we may have to just disagree on that topic. Some go out and march for what they believe in, getting arrested like our Billy Moreno who right or wrong got arrested for teaching the protesters in Fergusson how to protest peacefully.
I agree that people who just blog an agenda for the hits are mostly ignorable (and that's what I do with 99.99% of all blogs anyway.) But don't lump everyone into that category.
As for SJW being popularized by tumblr I don't know. That sounds right but I haven't see anything that talks about it.
And finally as for raising social awareness, really? Pointless? Maybe if you are only concerned about a) what you care about already or b) the instances where people "raise their awareness" and then do nothing because all they care about is appearances. But those who are spurred to action no matter how futile are the actual point. Changing views and discourse is important and despite some people trivializing it, change occurs partially because of these kinds of things.
And I'd like to say because I don't think I have before: Good for you, for being in a lousy profession with a lousy reputation and doing something extraordinary with it and yourself. Putting people in jail for killing, hurting or otherwise abusing their spouses is important. As long as its not just to feed the penal industry. Which I am sure is not the case with you. I know you to be conscientious if extremely right of most beliefs I have. NY vs TX traditions and all.
The "social justice warrior" appellation seems to have arisen on Tumblr, I first encountered it at a very funny Tumblr blog that highlights some of the more weird or fervent devotees to the stranger corners of the social justice blogger-verse. I honestly don't have much respect for those people, because they never really do anything but complain about the world and preach at us as if they are enlightened and we're stupid or evil. I'm the one out there actually having to DO SOMETHING about, for example, domestic violence. I don't get to just yell about the patriarchy, watch all the clicks to my website roll in, and then walk away feeling smug. I have to actually take the dang case to trial, deal with victims who still love the defendant, juries that "don't want to get involved", and so on. Internet bloggers may sincerely hold their beliefs, but their expression of those beliefs merely reveals over and over how little actual experience they have with the issues they write about. I never cared for the whole 90's craze of "raising awareness" -- it was just a way to feel superior by showing how much you cared about something, but without getting your own hands dirty actually dealing with a problem on the ground. Now we have social media, where "raising awareness" requires only a click of the "share" or "retweet" button, and is more pointless and trivial than ever.
For all those reasons, you can rightly assume I didn't involve myself in the GamerGate thing, because I don't involve myself in ANY social media wars. They run on a spectrum between "pointless and stupid" on one end and "actively harmful" on the other. There is no thought or insight to be had there, only herd mentality and groupthink and the Two Minutes Hate, with a sprinkling of tar and feathers.
I am glad to see you writing again. You provide some interesting insights into not just block meta but how that meta shapes up from set to set.
However, it does not take THAT much work to correct the broken links created by Jam's not inputting the new set in his deck editor.
1. In the rich text editor there is an insert link button (looks like a globe with a chain link) 2. and if you high light text with the cursor all you have to do then 3. is provide the url which is fairly easy. You a) go to MTGOTrader's site and b) search for the card and c) then copy the url of the page that comes up. d)Paste that into the open text box in the popup and viola! Newly linked card. Yes it is easier to have the deck editor do it for you but since that is perennially broken when it is most crucial for it to work, you can still accomplish what you want that way.
I think if you consider hobby writers as pundits rather than journalists you get closer to the truth and less hyperbolic responses as a result. Seriously though, Rex we don't 100% see eye to eye on this issue. Calling the group millenials does not excuse their behavior and it does not make it OK. I don't care what the hashtag is. Twitter needs to go away if that is all the thought it generates. (I'd be perfectly happy to see that happen btw.)
I thought Geordie Tate's article was pretty on target even if it made some people uncomfortable. This isn't a social justice issue. This is a gaming community issue. Obfuscating it by calling the people who bring it up pejoratives is missing the point.
Also "SJW" as the term is used seems to be sarcastic as if those proposing attitude changes and awareness of issues aren't earnest or sincere. If they aren't then fine, have at them. But attacking people for sincerely held opinions is pretty fracking stupid.
Counterbalance is notoriously awful against Delve spells, and is the primary reason that Tombstalker was popular during the peak of CounterTop dominance. I'd think that with everybody trying out Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise as the flavors of the week in Legacy, it would only be even weaker right now.
I'm happy Block Constructed is back and I'm even happier your articles will be back too! I believe, I have found the reason, why reading your articles is so satisfying ;) Most articles I read are focused on Standard and after some time they become repetitive. You, on the other hand, cover an unexplored area, which is always intriguing. In addition, the structure of your articles is beautiful, I wish I could write so smoothly. Keep up the great work!
OK cool, I probably should mention you will need the css part to make the rounded corners, and gradients work.
Thanks, I'll be sure to check it out next time.
I hear that. I have thought about making my own deck editing app but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Spurred on by your complaint I have cobbled together a temporary deck generator:
http://outofthebrokensky.com/mtgo/decklistgen/deckgen3.html
It doesn't sort and doesn't connect to mtgotraders.com but it does access gatherer.wizards.com which at least means your links will be consistent.
Thank you for the nice laugh too! Having had some recent stress it was quite the relief.
Now, to comment on your remarks individually:
I am more than willing to imagine women fighting back by using the same foul techniques and thus blowing their high road status. (Thus without a shred of evidence of that I will take your word for it. After all it takes 2 to tango so to speak.) But that makes the ggers no less wrong or plain socially stupid imho.
I will say this I am proud to be a Liberal because I think social progress is important for human evolution. As for the term being used as a pejorative I think you should try harder. Republicans have been unsuccessfully doing that for years and failing miserably.
A point of fact: Liberalism is not Socialism or Marxism which are both discrete ideas, distinct from Liberalism even in its most modern usage.
I doubt you want a lengthy lecture on the subject so I will only recommend you look them up in the terrible but handy Wikipedia.
As for 'white knighting' I hear this term a lot and I think people using it the way you did, are perhaps not using it the way it was initially intended. There is very little about an internet post that can rise to the chivalry required of a White Knight. We are all just mundanes here I think. Magic Playing Mundanes for sure...
(An aside: I knew a fairly noxious young fellow in a few games called Ocelot, would you be related? Just curious. It is after all an uncommon animal name as cat fanciers go.)
I agree with your penultimate sentence in principle. If gamergaters come forward and tell their story I will certainly listen to them before burning them at the stake. :p From what I have read so far the issue hasn't been terribly persuasive for me.
And finally "No, Thanks to YOU, for playing, please do come back and visit."
Hey new members, eh? :D
Huh. Someone actually made an account just to flame someone else regarding the fiasco.
"WIth the way it is, many of the more dedicated Multiplayer players have gone elsewhere for their gaming fun."
It isn't just the multiplayer aficionados, though I agree that they have gotten the worst of V4. I suspect that a large part of the Vintage crowd has moved elsewhere as well. I know I've spent the better part of the last 2 months replaying the Mass Effect trilogy on the highest difficulty setting (which I just finally finished about a half hour ago) rather than deal with the sorry state of MODO these days.
Your recent comments show how little you actually understand the gamersgate fiasco. You seem to think the thuggery is one sided? More doxxing has occurred on the feminist side than the side of the gamers. Now I understand as a liberal it must be fairly difficult to not white knight every socially marxist idea, but really at least hear out both sides of the argument before completely discarding opinion. Thanks for playing
Lol now that I'd play for sure.
point of order: going back to v3 is technically impossible. they have clearly ported over much of the server functionality into a new format, and I would be tremendously surprised if it was backwards-compatible. Unrolling to the day v3 was shut down might be possible, but I would bet my hat on the fact that all the new information created since then (matches played, cards bought and traded, etc.) would have to be jettisoned, which I suspect is both practically and legally unacceptable. All we can do is to look forward to v5, which will no doubt be the Kingdom of Loathing version of MTG.
I hope you are right - another negative indicator of mine is that most of my buddies seem to be gone. Maybe only for a break..
If they had already lost their player base, we would not be talking about this here. We would be playing other games. It is true that they have done some serious damage to their reputation (such as it is) and the player confidence levels (cf my last article) but I doubt very much it is done yet. I still get plenty of games of Standard on demand and while I haven't been playing the other formats I play as much I am sure if I were to stick it out Id get some games in them too.
The VERY BAD part is even while there are players in Just for Fun and the other rooms they aren't talking with each other. They don't even seem to know to do so. The chat rooms don't open automagically when you join a room.
This is what makes it appear worse than it is. Because asking for a game in chat is basically like talking to an echo chamber. The players are there but they are only looking at a small portion of the whole player base. This leaves some people out in the cold.
I think this will eventually lead to players abandoning the game in droves but at the moment the losses are made up for by new players and those who persevere (like myself) and fit in whatever games they feel safe in waiting for.
Also the state of multiplayer is about as bad as it has ever been. WIth the way it is, many of the more dedicated Multiplayer players have gone elsewhere for their gaming fun.
We can only hope that this trend does not continue. Or at some point the sky really will be fallen.
I really get the feeling this time they managed to loose their player base a bit more effective - at least my preferred formats (granted, niche formats) in casual dried up almost completely. The only thing available is drafting but I wonder how long the secondary market will survive under this signs and gave at least some financial justification for limited.
At least once before we've seen Counterbalance go over 20 tix due to someone attempting to horde it. It seems like a wise target for hording: it was printed only once, it isn't likely to appear in the next preconstructed product or in a Standard legal set, and it's an eternal staple with no replacement. So raise the price!
But it is a bad target for hording because there are hundreds of thousands of them online and mere thousands of eternal players who want them. And Miracles isn't even the hottest deck right now.
I tried playing a phantom draft today. The program crashed while I was deck-building. So in addition to all the other various problems with the client, I can see no real reason why I should invest any amount of time, effort, and/or money into playing magic any longer. Their response is horrendously inadequate: I've heard nothing about the crash, nor about any of the fixes implemented. I didn't even know there were Khans bugs in the first place.
Economics basically works like this: if you upset your customers enough times, they'll stop buying stuff from you. Then you'll be losing money. I really cannot understand why Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast has not figured this out.
Edit: I wanted to do the survey, but it wasn't accepting responses it said. That's just lovely...
To be fair SDT was banned in modern and had a lot of side product reprints.
So the supply/demand dynamic is out the window.
Why Counterbalance should be jumping one could only speculate..
(I apologize for that pun.)
Also interesting is that Counterbalance's buddy, Sensei's Divining Top has dropped a lot.
When I watched the live stream of the last Pro Tour, I was surprised by how many professionals were shuffling face up (which I define as being able to see any of the contents of the cards being shuffled) and none of them were being warned about that...mystifying to me.
Also, any reason why counterbalance has skyrocketed (since M15's release it has doubled in price to ~24 tix)?
I'm well familiar with html, I write all my articles in notepad with manual html tags. I was up till past midnight trying to get this article in before the deadline, I wanted to get it up ASAP so people interested in playing the format over the weekend could get an early glimpse of the metagame and one of the top decks. I've been manually linking cards in my previous weeks articles, didn't have the energy to do so late last night.
Note too that as I write block, I'm far more affected by new sets taking so long to be updated in the system than other writers as the vast majority of my cards are affected. I've offered in the past to Josh to help with the data entry or coding for new sets but I've been told that isn't practical.
I think your assumption that the bloggers aren't doing anything is really flawed. For example someone like myself. I write songs. You may feel that isn't doing anything but we may have to just disagree on that topic. Some go out and march for what they believe in, getting arrested like our Billy Moreno who right or wrong got arrested for teaching the protesters in Fergusson how to protest peacefully.
I agree that people who just blog an agenda for the hits are mostly ignorable (and that's what I do with 99.99% of all blogs anyway.) But don't lump everyone into that category.
As for SJW being popularized by tumblr I don't know. That sounds right but I haven't see anything that talks about it.
And finally as for raising social awareness, really? Pointless? Maybe if you are only concerned about a) what you care about already or b) the instances where people "raise their awareness" and then do nothing because all they care about is appearances. But those who are spurred to action no matter how futile are the actual point. Changing views and discourse is important and despite some people trivializing it, change occurs partially because of these kinds of things.
And I'd like to say because I don't think I have before: Good for you, for being in a lousy profession with a lousy reputation and doing something extraordinary with it and yourself. Putting people in jail for killing, hurting or otherwise abusing their spouses is important. As long as its not just to feed the penal industry. Which I am sure is not the case with you. I know you to be conscientious if extremely right of most beliefs I have. NY vs TX traditions and all.
The "social justice warrior" appellation seems to have arisen on Tumblr, I first encountered it at a very funny Tumblr blog that highlights some of the more weird or fervent devotees to the stranger corners of the social justice blogger-verse. I honestly don't have much respect for those people, because they never really do anything but complain about the world and preach at us as if they are enlightened and we're stupid or evil. I'm the one out there actually having to DO SOMETHING about, for example, domestic violence. I don't get to just yell about the patriarchy, watch all the clicks to my website roll in, and then walk away feeling smug. I have to actually take the dang case to trial, deal with victims who still love the defendant, juries that "don't want to get involved", and so on. Internet bloggers may sincerely hold their beliefs, but their expression of those beliefs merely reveals over and over how little actual experience they have with the issues they write about. I never cared for the whole 90's craze of "raising awareness" -- it was just a way to feel superior by showing how much you cared about something, but without getting your own hands dirty actually dealing with a problem on the ground. Now we have social media, where "raising awareness" requires only a click of the "share" or "retweet" button, and is more pointless and trivial than ever.
For all those reasons, you can rightly assume I didn't involve myself in the GamerGate thing, because I don't involve myself in ANY social media wars. They run on a spectrum between "pointless and stupid" on one end and "actively harmful" on the other. There is no thought or insight to be had there, only herd mentality and groupthink and the Two Minutes Hate, with a sprinkling of tar and feathers.
I am glad to see you writing again. You provide some interesting insights into not just block meta but how that meta shapes up from set to set.
However, it does not take THAT much work to correct the broken links created by Jam's not inputting the new set in his deck editor.
1. In the rich text editor there is an insert link button (looks like a globe with a chain link) 2. and if you high light text with the cursor all you have to do then 3. is provide the url which is fairly easy. You a) go to MTGOTrader's site and b) search for the card and c) then copy the url of the page that comes up. d)Paste that into the open text box in the popup and viola! Newly linked card. Yes it is easier to have the deck editor do it for you but since that is perennially broken when it is most crucial for it to work, you can still accomplish what you want that way.
Either that or don't link any of the cards.
I look forward to your next article.
I think if you consider hobby writers as pundits rather than journalists you get closer to the truth and less hyperbolic responses as a result. Seriously though, Rex we don't 100% see eye to eye on this issue. Calling the group millenials does not excuse their behavior and it does not make it OK. I don't care what the hashtag is. Twitter needs to go away if that is all the thought it generates. (I'd be perfectly happy to see that happen btw.)
I thought Geordie Tate's article was pretty on target even if it made some people uncomfortable. This isn't a social justice issue. This is a gaming community issue. Obfuscating it by calling the people who bring it up pejoratives is missing the point.
Also "SJW" as the term is used seems to be sarcastic as if those proposing attitude changes and awareness of issues aren't earnest or sincere. If they aren't then fine, have at them. But attacking people for sincerely held opinions is pretty fracking stupid.
That's my sincerely held opinion of course. :D