For me, playing storm reminds me of playing it in Pauper. I loved playing pauper storm and love those memories of attacking with 41 2/1 haste goblins. I think you deck is a little more pricy than the pauper version.
You actually hit a bunch of the issues I realized after playing one event. From a budget stand point its probably the most expensive of the formats since dual lands and fetches are basically required to get over the hurtle of playing three to five colors. Of the 4 decks that placed the cheapest mana base was 60 tickets.
I think a bigger issue at least for me is it really just isn’t much fun. The games played kind of like really broken limited decks. Since a lot staple cards are missing, removal is super awkward, instead of building synergistic decks these felt like just jamming powerful cards. Because tribal synergies and identities just aren’t there.
I also wouldn't mind doing more regular events. I do find it a little odd that regular events are only as once a month, but I am sure there is a reason.
Sounds reasonable to me. :) Though there are a number of people have done that it is not that often you find people who have the knack for it. As a graphic design background helps a lot with layout issues and technology familiarity that all seems like a reasonable explanation. (Though I knew all that already. :D)
As an Elves player in Tribal, I've been waiting for Sage for years. I know engineered plague isn't legal in tribal but this card can even take that card out where as Viridian Zealot couldn't. An enter play naturalize really shows how the power level of creatures has been increasing. This card is great.
Is how many people have forwarded this to some sort of Hasbro email/site?? This thing needs to come from all 500 or so players (teehee) in order to actually get noticed. Also, anyone interested in a collection? I am seriously about done with MTGO and strongly considering getting back into casual paper.
I was a graphic designer for many, many years for an NYC marketing company. I use photoshop CS5 presently.
The formating is owing to using html tables without borders. I used to design webpages and still do occasionally freelance. I can write code in notepad. I'm not trying to sound pompous, I'm just answering ya!
I don't have any interest in playing Kaleidoscope. I love Singleton. I think it's a lot of fun to get to play with cards we never play with any other time, and Singleton is where we get to do that. Kaleidoscope just lacks too many of the staple kinds of cards that we need to make the game work. And even some of the cards we have are probably stealth-banned by their price. The best deck probably has Pernicious Deed, Vindicate, and Rishadan Port in it, but it's not feasible to purchase those cards for a format that we only play six times a year. At least with Singleton, the new cards we have to buy for it are cheap.
I would replace Kaleidoscope with anything else. Anything. Maybe try some type of event where you can only run creatures. Or pauper underdog. I don't know what it should be, but I would much rather play another regular event than Kaleidoscope. I have a ton of ideas for cool regular decks, but I never get to play them because there's only one regular even per month.
Of the various unfun decks to see in Just for fun, TPS (or TiPS as the case may be) is a majority front runner along side blue goodstuff.dec, rarely Oath, and occasionally something else comboish. I wonder if that is why it is harder to build a top version for tourney? Familiarity breeds a sideboard?
Don't get me wrong, I do hope that I'll like v4 eventually. Time will tell. Part of me misses the pointless rows of tables with avatars sitting on them from 2.5, but I rarely even think about that any more. :D
I think one of the replies to my post on the Wizards forum had a pretty good point though - they should have made it totally skinnable. Then even if they didn't provide a skin that had a lot of the look & style of the 3.0 client, the community would surely produce one almost overnight. Even just that would go a good ways towards easing the transition.
I very much trust The Internet to point out when something I say is wrong and full of crap, whether I mention my level of experience in that subject or not. The internet is very good at that. (In fact, even when you post something accurate and correct a few people will tell you how wrong it is!)
Given the volume of talk about any subject under the sun, mentioning "What's the background of the person saying this" is primarily, in my view, a tool to help people decide which posts, articles, essays, etc. they want to bother to read. Magazines and websites often have a little bio info about authors, I think it's partly for that same reason, Especially when something's long (as this Wizards forum post was). I was particularly wanting Wizards employees to bother to read this, or maybe some people they know or talk to encouraging them to - because I really want Wizards to stop making drastic overhauls of look and feel. In a moment of optimism, I managed to convince myself that maybe there's a slight chance I could influence someone there in that direction. Though realistically and cynically, that sort of thing rarely happens in this world we live in.
If you disagree with any of my observations or conclusions, you're just as welcome to say so & say why as you are to reply that way to anyone with a smaller or larger amount of experience than myself, and to anyone who mentioned their experience or kept quiet about it. I will say I'm certainly not the kind of elitist who thinks that only people with tons of experience have a valid opinion on a subject. When working on my own games, I often ask people of all ages and experience levels what they like & dislike about my game, or about similar games in the same genre. They know what is and isn't fun to THEM, and that's valuable information to me every time.
Goblins are presently losing to knights, I expect they would lose to any other competent midrange deck but be favored against control... which is exactly the Rock Paper Scissors game WotC develops for. I very much doubt my cleric deck could ever have lost to Goblins.
We are currently pretty far along in our project to re-implement our original Furcadia client for the web, using a different programming language, different technologies, etc. I think the project is going fairly well, and it'll let us reach a lot more players as well as having some more flexible and powerful underlying technologies to use for future upgrades and new features. So the project is in some ways comparable.
We could have taken an approach of "redesign the user interface and art from scratch, since we're redoing the programming and it's an easy time to do that".
Instead, we chose to keep most existing features working either just as they did before, or in a very similar fashion. We chose to base the look and feel and style on the original art, while upgrading some of it to higher resolution versions & redoing some of the 8 bit art to 32 bit with alpha translucency.
Nobody's going to come into our new version and say "I don't know what button to click or command to type to do basic game functions I use constantly". Nobody's going to come in and say "This thing has changed so drastically even the basic underlying color scheme isn't the same, it doesn't feel like my online home of the last 5 or 10 years any more but rather like some different, new place."
Generally when we put out major upgrades to Furcadia, we get some complaints and some praise, like any game. But the ratio is a lot better than for MTGO, because we don't yank the rug out from under people's feet. Even when you're redoing all the programming, you don't have to change your look, your user interface - or what keystrokes make a smiley appear in the chat box. You just don't.
Silly me, I didn't know that control-Q S, control-Q T, control-t G, etc. were gone so I was supposed to do smileys "the other way that I hadn't learned about". Had they kept both ways, I wouldn't have had that problem. Evolution instead of revolution.
If my goals or overall thesis for the article were different, a thorough playthrough and analysis of the client would be relevant or even necessary. Given that my point was "Wizards drastically changes the look, feel, and interface of products and services and I think this is a mistake", I've had more than enough time with the client to know this to be the case. I think even the biggest fans of 4.0 would agree that the look and interface have changed a lot.
I learn new things constantly. It's part of my job, it's part of my hobbies, it's part of my passion for life. But I know damn well I have to strike the proper balance between the new and the familiar in my own work, and so does everybody else out there doing ongoing support of a product, service or brand. "Not enough new" is a common complaint about sequels too, in books and movies in particular. As far as user interface design & product look and feel, I don't think "not enough new" is a problem for Gleemox, dailymtg.com, mtgo, etc. Quite the contrary.
I don't want to have to learn "more new things than there's any good reason for". I suppose there's some bad reasons for remaking so much of the user interface to MTGO, but not good ones.
Regarding Commander - I watched a ton of it on v3. Often when playing in Sunday Commander PREs I would have all the other games on watch & flip between them while waiting, so I could see what to expect from my opponents in the finals. Sure, I think the ABILITY to minimize some of the players is an enhancement. But starting with them minimized is crazy. Hopefully "defaulting to nobody minimized" will be one of the tweaks they make in future. I can't think of any time I've wanted to come into a view of a game and START with some of the players minimized. I also notice that a lot of the reasons you cite for wanting to minimize players is to work around bugs in the V3 handling of Commander games. What I'd greatly prefer is for those bugs to be fixed. Maybe some or all of them have been in V4 - or will be.
I am glad to hear multiplayer is getting some improvements, whether motivated by a concern for that audience or coincidental. The destruction of the multiplayer room and dumping that audience into the Just For Fun room dropped the number of multiplayer casual games launching, and Wizards left multiplayer bugs active for years at a time. I understand they have to focus resources and effort on 2 player, since that's where 99.9% of the money comes from, but I still found it disappointing.
I do like that you can do more with dual monitors and/or big monitors because there's so many separate, moveable and resizable windows. Because I have a dual monitor desktop machine, personally. But I'm concerned they didn't do enough to optimize for smaller resolution displays & laptops. I don't know if I'll want to play this client on my laptop after I've tried it a couple times, we'll see.
The chat flaws don't surprise me. I personally feel like chat is the most important feature in most multiplayer games. But I'm well aware most people in the game industry don't prioritize it anywhere near as highly as I do. I wish a few more people did.
If your opponent is taking a really long time, the best thing you can do is call for a judge and ask to watch for Slow Play and/or ask him to speed up.
I believe that it is the responsibility of both players to manage the clock, just like you're expected to manage it on Magic Online. Your opponent is completely within his rights not to concede. Like he said, he still had a chance at Top 8, and why should he jeopardize his chances at making it there?
This situation happened to me last night actually (slow play-wise), I was playing a Modern tournament and my first round opponent took forever on his turns. Game 1 took 30 minutes, 25 of which he spent on his turns. I lost game 1, and had to win games 2 and 3 in 20 minutes. I ended up winning game 2 on turn 3 of turns to get a draw, only using about 5 of the 20 minutes on my turns. I annoyed having to start out with a draw, but I never asked my opponent to hurry up, nor did I mention the clock at all. Clock management is part of the game, and I didn't effectively manage the clock to allow myself a better chance at winning. Rather than saying "Oh, I got a draw because he took forever", it's more helpful and constructive to say "The match took too long and I didn't effectively manage time. I should be more aware of the clock and speak up when my opponent is playing slowly".
My honest opinion: I get the feeling that you feel that you're ENTITLED to a "win". You didn't win the match. I feel like just because you had lethal for next turn, you're already thinking the match is yours, and when your opponent doesn't concede, that you got robbed. You didn't get robbed of a win, you never had it! The match ends on turn 5 of turns, and after that there was no winner. If there was unlimited time in the match, then yes, you win. However, we must play within the confines of the rules, and the rules are 50 minutes plus 5 extra turns. You both rightfully earned a draw.
Lastly - you bring up Paul and Jon at PT JOU. They both earned a draw and still had a chance for Top 8, so there was no reason for Jon to concede. Furthermore, Paul actually wrote in his PT report that if he was in Jon's shoes, he wouldn't have conceded either. You can read it here:
This letter was posted on the forums first. WWW and yourself gave a reply there days before the letter was posted here. So if this was only aiming at Wizards then there would be no need to post the letter here as well. Hence, it seems to me that the aim is not just to tell Wizards how to think?
Anyway, you are reading my analogy out of context. I have no doubt that Dr Cat is a mtgo loving field expert. But being a loving field expert does not validate your statements and is thus unnecessary boilerplate (....in my world). However, I acknowledge that it seems to impress others and as such serves its cause.
Strongly disagree about the lack of potential creativity in Singleton builds. You should study competitive Commander decks more closely: there are crazy consistent combo builds that just ignore the commander, choosing stuff like Sliver Queen just because they need access to all 5 colors, but rarely even playing her. Or Child of Alara for having an emergency reset button in case things go south, not because it's part of the intricate web of interactions those decks can build.
Problem with competitive Commander is that there aren't large quantities of available data to analyze. I do what I can with my article series.
Rex, I'm not sure the Knights are strong because of the protections. It seems to me they just smash with huge beefed up beaters. Some combination of Knight of New Alara, Wilt-Leaf Liege, Knotvine Paladin, plus Knight of the Reliquary who grows big on her own. Stillmoon Cavalier is the only consistently used Knight with protection (Robin only used 2 copies, with Galina's Knight as a meta-call against Goblin).
The thing is that the format is slow, the removal are slow and somehow clunky (several of those able to kill a large body are 3-mana sorceries), with little mass removal. So the knights just overwhelm you, the goblins just kill you before you can stabilize the board.
Solutions seem all problematic. If we ban Knight as a tribe, they'll just play Human with the Liege off-tribe, or Elves with New Alara off-tribe, or so. Banning the Knight type is a pretty awkward solution. And then we have to stop Goblins as well, or we would just hand over the format to them.
Singleton and K-Scope are two very different kinds of restrictive formats. There's a distinction between deck *building* restrictions, and card pool restrictions. K-Scope restricts which cards are in your pool, which is very much like the restrictions we deal with all the time in block constructed and standard. Sometimes in a limited card pool, a few cards or a single strategy is so much better than the others, it merits a ban. This happened very recently with Lingering Souls in INN/DKA block constructed.
Singleton's restriction acts to basically just undermine the entire process of creative deckbuilding by eliminating any attempt to make a deck do something coherent. There are a few tribes with enough redundancy to escape this, but they all do extremely straight-forward things: many Goblins are cheap attackers, many Elves make mana, etc. There's no way to do anything creative, build around something quirky, or so forth, because you just aren't going to see the build-around cards often enough. Why did EDH take off and replace Singleton as a casual format years back? Because having access to the General gave 100 card singleton decks an identity and a level of consistency that deckbuilders wanted.
Tribal Wars is already a deckbuilding puzzle in and of itself, and I think varying the card pool with things like K-Scope is a fun diversion. It just needs some tweaking.
Singleton, OTOH, is just fundamentally incoherent, and Tribal Singleton amounts to smashing two deck-building restrictions together in a way that doesn't work at all.
I don't know that you are in the minority there. I have yet to talk to someone in client who likes it as is. I certainly don't. It isn't placed well, distracts from other things going on and as has been said requires your view to wander the screen from right to left just to make sure you are in the correct phase/turn.
Let's remember, though, that Singleton wasn't half-dropped to make room for Kaleidoscope; it happened because more than 50% of the voters didn't want to play Singleton every week. Kaleidoscope was the easier, more immediately available option to fill the void left by half Singleton events. Next year, I might envision using those slots for something else, maybe just more of another regular event. (Since you pretty much already have to consult the calendar/read the newsletter/follow the articles to be 100% sure of what the next event will be, at this point half the Singleton slots might be devoted to a "rotation inside the rotation", adding one more of the other 3 events over the year, and maybe 3 K-Scope).
I think is my favorite card from m15. I love the idea of chord of calling in up mid combat and throwing it in front of an oncoming creature.
For me, playing storm reminds me of playing it in Pauper. I loved playing pauper storm and love those memories of attacking with 41 2/1 haste goblins. I think you deck is a little more pricy than the pauper version.
You actually hit a bunch of the issues I realized after playing one event. From a budget stand point its probably the most expensive of the formats since dual lands and fetches are basically required to get over the hurtle of playing three to five colors. Of the 4 decks that placed the cheapest mana base was 60 tickets.
I think a bigger issue at least for me is it really just isn’t much fun. The games played kind of like really broken limited decks. Since a lot staple cards are missing, removal is super awkward, instead of building synergistic decks these felt like just jamming powerful cards. Because tribal synergies and identities just aren’t there.
I also wouldn't mind doing more regular events. I do find it a little odd that regular events are only as once a month, but I am sure there is a reason.
Sounds reasonable to me. :) Though there are a number of people have done that it is not that often you find people who have the knack for it. As a graphic design background helps a lot with layout issues and technology familiarity that all seems like a reasonable explanation. (Though I knew all that already. :D)
You should converse with the good folks at MTGOtraders about that.
As an Elves player in Tribal, I've been waiting for Sage for years. I know engineered plague isn't legal in tribal but this card can even take that card out where as Viridian Zealot couldn't. An enter play naturalize really shows how the power level of creatures has been increasing. This card is great.
Is how many people have forwarded this to some sort of Hasbro email/site?? This thing needs to come from all 500 or so players (teehee) in order to actually get noticed. Also, anyone interested in a collection? I am seriously about done with MTGO and strongly considering getting back into casual paper.
I was a graphic designer for many, many years for an NYC marketing company. I use photoshop CS5 presently.
The formating is owing to using html tables without borders. I used to design webpages and still do occasionally freelance. I can write code in notepad. I'm not trying to sound pompous, I'm just answering ya!
I don't have any interest in playing Kaleidoscope. I love Singleton. I think it's a lot of fun to get to play with cards we never play with any other time, and Singleton is where we get to do that. Kaleidoscope just lacks too many of the staple kinds of cards that we need to make the game work. And even some of the cards we have are probably stealth-banned by their price. The best deck probably has Pernicious Deed, Vindicate, and Rishadan Port in it, but it's not feasible to purchase those cards for a format that we only play six times a year. At least with Singleton, the new cards we have to buy for it are cheap.
I would replace Kaleidoscope with anything else. Anything. Maybe try some type of event where you can only run creatures. Or pauper underdog. I don't know what it should be, but I would much rather play another regular event than Kaleidoscope. I have a ton of ideas for cool regular decks, but I never get to play them because there's only one regular even per month.
Of the various unfun decks to see in Just for fun, TPS (or TiPS as the case may be) is a majority front runner along side blue goodstuff.dec, rarely Oath, and occasionally something else comboish. I wonder if that is why it is harder to build a top version for tourney? Familiarity breeds a sideboard?
Don't get me wrong, I do hope that I'll like v4 eventually. Time will tell. Part of me misses the pointless rows of tables with avatars sitting on them from 2.5, but I rarely even think about that any more. :D
I think one of the replies to my post on the Wizards forum had a pretty good point though - they should have made it totally skinnable. Then even if they didn't provide a skin that had a lot of the look & style of the 3.0 client, the community would surely produce one almost overnight. Even just that would go a good ways towards easing the transition.
No, its not free, but I think there are is a free trial period still.
It has the ability to upload directly to Youtube (after you put in your login in info, of course)
I just checked the techsmith site. Yes, there is still a free trial.
I very much trust The Internet to point out when something I say is wrong and full of crap, whether I mention my level of experience in that subject or not. The internet is very good at that. (In fact, even when you post something accurate and correct a few people will tell you how wrong it is!)
Given the volume of talk about any subject under the sun, mentioning "What's the background of the person saying this" is primarily, in my view, a tool to help people decide which posts, articles, essays, etc. they want to bother to read. Magazines and websites often have a little bio info about authors, I think it's partly for that same reason, Especially when something's long (as this Wizards forum post was). I was particularly wanting Wizards employees to bother to read this, or maybe some people they know or talk to encouraging them to - because I really want Wizards to stop making drastic overhauls of look and feel. In a moment of optimism, I managed to convince myself that maybe there's a slight chance I could influence someone there in that direction. Though realistically and cynically, that sort of thing rarely happens in this world we live in.
If you disagree with any of my observations or conclusions, you're just as welcome to say so & say why as you are to reply that way to anyone with a smaller or larger amount of experience than myself, and to anyone who mentioned their experience or kept quiet about it. I will say I'm certainly not the kind of elitist who thinks that only people with tons of experience have a valid opinion on a subject. When working on my own games, I often ask people of all ages and experience levels what they like & dislike about my game, or about similar games in the same genre. They know what is and isn't fun to THEM, and that's valuable information to me every time.
Goblins are presently losing to knights, I expect they would lose to any other competent midrange deck but be favored against control... which is exactly the Rock Paper Scissors game WotC develops for. I very much doubt my cleric deck could ever have lost to Goblins.
We are currently pretty far along in our project to re-implement our original Furcadia client for the web, using a different programming language, different technologies, etc. I think the project is going fairly well, and it'll let us reach a lot more players as well as having some more flexible and powerful underlying technologies to use for future upgrades and new features. So the project is in some ways comparable.
We could have taken an approach of "redesign the user interface and art from scratch, since we're redoing the programming and it's an easy time to do that".
Instead, we chose to keep most existing features working either just as they did before, or in a very similar fashion. We chose to base the look and feel and style on the original art, while upgrading some of it to higher resolution versions & redoing some of the 8 bit art to 32 bit with alpha translucency.
Nobody's going to come into our new version and say "I don't know what button to click or command to type to do basic game functions I use constantly". Nobody's going to come in and say "This thing has changed so drastically even the basic underlying color scheme isn't the same, it doesn't feel like my online home of the last 5 or 10 years any more but rather like some different, new place."
Generally when we put out major upgrades to Furcadia, we get some complaints and some praise, like any game. But the ratio is a lot better than for MTGO, because we don't yank the rug out from under people's feet. Even when you're redoing all the programming, you don't have to change your look, your user interface - or what keystrokes make a smiley appear in the chat box. You just don't.
Silly me, I didn't know that control-Q S, control-Q T, control-t G, etc. were gone so I was supposed to do smileys "the other way that I hadn't learned about". Had they kept both ways, I wouldn't have had that problem. Evolution instead of revolution.
If my goals or overall thesis for the article were different, a thorough playthrough and analysis of the client would be relevant or even necessary. Given that my point was "Wizards drastically changes the look, feel, and interface of products and services and I think this is a mistake", I've had more than enough time with the client to know this to be the case. I think even the biggest fans of 4.0 would agree that the look and interface have changed a lot.
I learn new things constantly. It's part of my job, it's part of my hobbies, it's part of my passion for life. But I know damn well I have to strike the proper balance between the new and the familiar in my own work, and so does everybody else out there doing ongoing support of a product, service or brand. "Not enough new" is a common complaint about sequels too, in books and movies in particular. As far as user interface design & product look and feel, I don't think "not enough new" is a problem for Gleemox, dailymtg.com, mtgo, etc. Quite the contrary.
I don't want to have to learn "more new things than there's any good reason for". I suppose there's some bad reasons for remaking so much of the user interface to MTGO, but not good ones.
Regarding Commander - I watched a ton of it on v3. Often when playing in Sunday Commander PREs I would have all the other games on watch & flip between them while waiting, so I could see what to expect from my opponents in the finals. Sure, I think the ABILITY to minimize some of the players is an enhancement. But starting with them minimized is crazy. Hopefully "defaulting to nobody minimized" will be one of the tweaks they make in future. I can't think of any time I've wanted to come into a view of a game and START with some of the players minimized. I also notice that a lot of the reasons you cite for wanting to minimize players is to work around bugs in the V3 handling of Commander games. What I'd greatly prefer is for those bugs to be fixed. Maybe some or all of them have been in V4 - or will be.
I am glad to hear multiplayer is getting some improvements, whether motivated by a concern for that audience or coincidental. The destruction of the multiplayer room and dumping that audience into the Just For Fun room dropped the number of multiplayer casual games launching, and Wizards left multiplayer bugs active for years at a time. I understand they have to focus resources and effort on 2 player, since that's where 99.9% of the money comes from, but I still found it disappointing.
I do like that you can do more with dual monitors and/or big monitors because there's so many separate, moveable and resizable windows. Because I have a dual monitor desktop machine, personally. But I'm concerned they didn't do enough to optimize for smaller resolution displays & laptops. I don't know if I'll want to play this client on my laptop after I've tried it a couple times, we'll see.
The chat flaws don't surprise me. I personally feel like chat is the most important feature in most multiplayer games. But I'm well aware most people in the game industry don't prioritize it anywhere near as highly as I do. I wish a few more people did.
If your opponent is taking a really long time, the best thing you can do is call for a judge and ask to watch for Slow Play and/or ask him to speed up.
I believe that it is the responsibility of both players to manage the clock, just like you're expected to manage it on Magic Online. Your opponent is completely within his rights not to concede. Like he said, he still had a chance at Top 8, and why should he jeopardize his chances at making it there?
This situation happened to me last night actually (slow play-wise), I was playing a Modern tournament and my first round opponent took forever on his turns. Game 1 took 30 minutes, 25 of which he spent on his turns. I lost game 1, and had to win games 2 and 3 in 20 minutes. I ended up winning game 2 on turn 3 of turns to get a draw, only using about 5 of the 20 minutes on my turns. I annoyed having to start out with a draw, but I never asked my opponent to hurry up, nor did I mention the clock at all. Clock management is part of the game, and I didn't effectively manage the clock to allow myself a better chance at winning. Rather than saying "Oh, I got a draw because he took forever", it's more helpful and constructive to say "The match took too long and I didn't effectively manage time. I should be more aware of the clock and speak up when my opponent is playing slowly".
My honest opinion: I get the feeling that you feel that you're ENTITLED to a "win". You didn't win the match. I feel like just because you had lethal for next turn, you're already thinking the match is yours, and when your opponent doesn't concede, that you got robbed. You didn't get robbed of a win, you never had it! The match ends on turn 5 of turns, and after that there was no winner. If there was unlimited time in the match, then yes, you win. However, we must play within the confines of the rules, and the rules are 50 minutes plus 5 extra turns. You both rightfully earned a draw.
Lastly - you bring up Paul and Jon at PT JOU. They both earned a draw and still had a chance for Top 8, so there was no reason for Jon to concede. Furthermore, Paul actually wrote in his PT report that if he was in Jon's shoes, he wouldn't have conceded either. You can read it here:
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/pro-tour-atlanta-report-top-16/
This letter was posted on the forums first. WWW and yourself gave a reply there days before the letter was posted here. So if this was only aiming at Wizards then there would be no need to post the letter here as well. Hence, it seems to me that the aim is not just to tell Wizards how to think?
Anyway, you are reading my analogy out of context. I have no doubt that Dr Cat is a mtgo loving field expert. But being a loving field expert does not validate your statements and is thus unnecessary boilerplate (....in my world). However, I acknowledge that it seems to impress others and as such serves its cause.
But we'll call you deacon blues.
You will always have people either complain that your deck is too good or not good enough, depending if your in juff or tp.
I get a lot of, "you think you're deck is tier one?" ROFL" _______Concedes the match" When i play blue tron in the tournament practice room.
You can always send me a challenge, i won't complain when I lose. :)
Strongly disagree about the lack of potential creativity in Singleton builds. You should study competitive Commander decks more closely: there are crazy consistent combo builds that just ignore the commander, choosing stuff like Sliver Queen just because they need access to all 5 colors, but rarely even playing her. Or Child of Alara for having an emergency reset button in case things go south, not because it's part of the intricate web of interactions those decks can build.
Problem with competitive Commander is that there aren't large quantities of available data to analyze. I do what I can with my article series.
Rex, I'm not sure the Knights are strong because of the protections. It seems to me they just smash with huge beefed up beaters. Some combination of Knight of New Alara, Wilt-Leaf Liege, Knotvine Paladin, plus Knight of the Reliquary who grows big on her own. Stillmoon Cavalier is the only consistently used Knight with protection (Robin only used 2 copies, with Galina's Knight as a meta-call against Goblin).
The thing is that the format is slow, the removal are slow and somehow clunky (several of those able to kill a large body are 3-mana sorceries), with little mass removal. So the knights just overwhelm you, the goblins just kill you before you can stabilize the board.
Solutions seem all problematic. If we ban Knight as a tribe, they'll just play Human with the Liege off-tribe, or Elves with New Alara off-tribe, or so. Banning the Knight type is a pretty awkward solution. And then we have to stop Goblins as well, or we would just hand over the format to them.
Singleton and K-Scope are two very different kinds of restrictive formats. There's a distinction between deck *building* restrictions, and card pool restrictions. K-Scope restricts which cards are in your pool, which is very much like the restrictions we deal with all the time in block constructed and standard. Sometimes in a limited card pool, a few cards or a single strategy is so much better than the others, it merits a ban. This happened very recently with Lingering Souls in INN/DKA block constructed.
Singleton's restriction acts to basically just undermine the entire process of creative deckbuilding by eliminating any attempt to make a deck do something coherent. There are a few tribes with enough redundancy to escape this, but they all do extremely straight-forward things: many Goblins are cheap attackers, many Elves make mana, etc. There's no way to do anything creative, build around something quirky, or so forth, because you just aren't going to see the build-around cards often enough. Why did EDH take off and replace Singleton as a casual format years back? Because having access to the General gave 100 card singleton decks an identity and a level of consistency that deckbuilders wanted.
Tribal Wars is already a deckbuilding puzzle in and of itself, and I think varying the card pool with things like K-Scope is a fun diversion. It just needs some tweaking.
Singleton, OTOH, is just fundamentally incoherent, and Tribal Singleton amounts to smashing two deck-building restrictions together in a way that doesn't work at all.
I don't know that you are in the minority there. I have yet to talk to someone in client who likes it as is. I certainly don't. It isn't placed well, distracts from other things going on and as has been said requires your view to wander the screen from right to left just to make sure you are in the correct phase/turn.
Let's remember, though, that Singleton wasn't half-dropped to make room for Kaleidoscope; it happened because more than 50% of the voters didn't want to play Singleton every week. Kaleidoscope was the easier, more immediately available option to fill the void left by half Singleton events. Next year, I might envision using those slots for something else, maybe just more of another regular event. (Since you pretty much already have to consult the calendar/read the newsletter/follow the articles to be 100% sure of what the next event will be, at this point half the Singleton slots might be devoted to a "rotation inside the rotation", adding one more of the other 3 events over the year, and maybe 3 K-Scope).