Great article. I am of the perspective that V4 is not very good, but V3 was also not very good, so we're just on a different not very good which we are less used to.
The learning curve is steep and the presentation is horrifying (more so if you have a huge collection with lots of singletons.) And the features you got used to on v3 aren't there. That's a lot to swallow. But as my cartoon suggests I expect we will. I agree that it is disappointing but hang in there. Hopefully it will get better. And if not we can make our views known, again and again and again.
Great read that I think sums up many of the issues perfectly. I'm of the mind that v4 is not as bad as many make it out to be, but as you said, they changed things that didn't need changed. My favorite interface was v2.5, but that boats sailed.
i downloaded and attempted to do anything on the new client, and ill tell, i am done. seriously. i guess i can try to navigate this crapfest once leagues come back (HA!) anyway, i dont get it at all. maybe the youth of today understands this, but i certainly dont get it at all. i wanted to trade for tickets, good luck with that, i have no idea what is for trade and what isnt and when i click on a card, i can save the deck? wtf?
anyway, thanks for writing this article, im sure hasbro will not give a flying cow, but ill be sure to nerd rage the next time i see an executive (which isnt that too spaced apart, my son is friends with their son)
Now I have the opponents graveyard, played succesfully some casual and some
competetive games: All in all it works but playing experience is down some 50% mainly
due to sloppy things like chat but mostly a really 'unmagic' feeling with the graphic interface;
Might be my personal feeling but slinging a Black Lotus first time in a tamagotchi atmosphere is just
weird and disappointing.
Read this on the forums and felt that you pretty much hit the nail on the head. However, there are counter arguments on reddit about what you wrote as well. I am pretty sure I am trusting the guy who has done something for 30 years over some random internet person though.
That is one massive, exhaustive Saproling treatise! Kudos!
Now I've one more reason to be glad I decided to cover only Plant and Treefolk for my 'pedia (mostly just because I wanted to call it Dendropedia, and Fungi wouldn't fit the denomination).
Some notes:
Saproling Cluster would be great if it didn't say, for unfathomable reasons, "Any player may play this ability." It's a fast, solid discard outlet. It makes you able to download your fattie to the graveyard and get a saproling for Recurring Nightmare (or even Natural Order), which is more than Bitterblossom does for the same cost. In fact, I might even try it in a Rec.dec. If the opponent isn't reanimator/graveyard based as well, they'll just get to exchange a couple lands for 1/1 blockers, not a big deal.
Do you like Verdeloth better than Nemata? I also was playing saproling decks back then (of course I was), and never cared much for Verdeloth because there was already Nemata in his slot, and he couldn't compare.
"We go through Odyssey Block, Onslaught Block, Kamigawa Block and Mirrodin Block": Mirrodin came before Kamigawa.
There's a mnemonic way to remember the sets' order. Starting from when they first organized new releases into 3-set blocks, they are doing 7-year cycles, and the first block of each cycle is a MIR: MIRage, MIRrodin, Scars of MIRrodin. There are also other recurring elements within the 7-year cycle. I might write an article about this.
You can tell Fertile Imagination is clearly Simic because its name merges a green watchword, "fertile", with a blue watchword, "imagination".
The problem with black is that it won't ever win you the game by itself. All it really has is a few removal spells and an Accursed Spirit. I'd play at most 7 of my black cards and have to play 15/16 cards of another color. At that point your black is a splash, and none of my colors are so strong that they can win the game on their own. Double Flesh to Dust is hard to pass up at first glance, but once you look into the color, you'll realize why it can't be played.
It looks like I didn't actually talk about the seeded packs (whoops), so I'll do that here:
I like them, but they have to be balanced and similar to each other in power level. In M15 and JOU, there was clearly a promo that was the best, so basically you fought to get the best one, or you got whatever else was left. From a play perspective, having to play against the same promo every match is annoying/frustrating (especially since I think everyone will go black on MTGO) so that takes some fun out of it.
If they can't balance the rares to make them all equally attractive, then they should just go back to 6x boosters. But personally, I'd be fine seeing them do away with the seeded packs.
As I looked at your pool, I had a hard time saying no to Black, but you might be right. I know at my Pre Release, I didn't really have much support from my Rares, so I ended up building a B/R destroy everything and win with Witches' Familiars and Thundering Giants. I think with your pool I either build a B/W or R/W, but R/G could be correct too. My inclination is that you are a better sealed deck player than I am so you would know!
I took the Black seeded pack and the promo was really good. I really am, like many, tired of the seeded packs. Luckily I got to play a "traditional" sealed the next week, playing R/B again but this time splashing G for Apex Predator. I went 3-1 in each tournament.
Thanks for your report! It will be interesting to see how this format develops.
Glad to see you're picking up again with this type of article series. Your RoE series remains one of the most insightful looks at limited Magic.
On the topic of archetypes, what do you think about Blue Based Tempo as a separate archetype from U/G Madness? This deck would seem to prioritize big hitters (Sea Drake, Serendib Efreet, and anything in the paired color) and bounce/tap (Man-o-War, Repel, Choking Tethers) as opposed to Madness outlets.
It looks like Obzen only runs 6 fetches. It sucks that Careful study is $2.25 which is too much for me to drop on a common because getting a crusher in play turn two seems really fun.
It's usually a decent way to hold me over until the new core set comes out, but this year I couldn't play it until after the set came out. I have played it enough to be worth the $10, but it's not super exciting or anything like that.
Supposedly you can mod DotP 2014 for the PC and add every card that has been hard coded in by the modders. I would never buy any of the DotP series, as maintaining a collection the other broken PC game is enough for me. I avoid any game with micro-tranactions like the plague. Apparently, that model makes money otherwise people would not still keep making games that has it.
If we tried to really find the optimal decks in Legacy Tribal Wars, if it were supported by WotC and firing DE's with prize support every couple days, I believe there would probably be about 4 or 5 Tier One decks in the metagame. An all-in graveyard deck like Manaless Dredge or Living End, Elves, *maybe* Goblins, certainly some G/W/x Human Hatebears deck, and probably some sort of creature-based combo deck, either Painter's Servant or Cephalid Illusionist.
I agree with you that the format is kept diverse by people trying to be creative within it, rather than purely playing the supposed best decks. I also think that, as Kuma notes, the players in the event now *are* efficiently trying to win. But they are mostly doing so within budget constraints. For anybody not named mihahitlor, playing the same stable of 2-3 decks over and over isn't very satisfying, and you probably would see more format diversity just out of boredom.
And I think what you perceive as "broken" is what Magic is, deep down, ALWAYS, when pushed to its competitive limits (you can say the same for many, many other games). I ask you, is Vintage any less broken? Hell no. And yet there's still people who are willing and happy to play it, for high prizes, and resulting in the same 2-3 possible scenarios all over again. Is it fun for you and me? Hell no. Not played *that* way. But then what we're really talking about here is what you and me and AJ *like* to have fun with. Which has nothing to do with the legitimization of a format.
"Fixing" a format, in the hope that it will result in some warm, rich competitive experience, is a pointless, endless path. "Fixing" Vintage resulted in Legacy, which is broken. "Fixing" Legacy resulted in Extended, which was broken, then in Modern, which is also broken in its own, different ways, if you count dominance of a few top decks and fast combos as a factor. When you analyze them at the top levels, Legacy is Vintage + 1 turn, Modern is Vintage + 2 turns. 2 turns more not a warm, rich experience make.
Or else, everything does. Everything is meta. The flaws you mention about Tribal Wars work against the same decks they assumedly help. You also underestimate the current Tribal Apocalypse crowd: most of the players are not there to smile and joke. They try to come up with very efficient, very brutal ways to win through aggro and combo, which every sub-format makes possible. Rogue decks still occasionally thrive, everybody still has fun enough, newcomers still show up on a regular basis (and I assure you I don't do much to attract them).
And combo rarely wins, btw, which is why I'm not sure that, were Tribal Wars a pro environment, we'd see the pros taking the combo route. Elf in particular would be the most fragile deck, since in a pro meta they would be hated maindeck with cards that would be useful against aggro too. The top decks would probably be something like Kithkin or Merfolk, and you have to tell me what format that fancies itself the realm of tribal strategies would make sense if it was impossible for Kithkin or Merfolk decks to exist within it. It's like saying, let's do a format that's only burn. But hey, let's ban all the burn spells though, otherwise it'll be only burn, and that's annoying!
There's also a strange idiosyncrasy I'm detecting lately. I call it "Good Johnny gone Spike". Johnny was ruined by the proximity with Spike, and has almost forgotten that Johnny's main pleasure is not winning. Johnny enters a tournament of Spikes (like all are), wins a game per match pulling off his elaborate, labyrinthine combo, then *he* won.
Sometimes "fixing Legacy Tribal Wars" sounds like turning it into Legacy Johnny Wars, but I'm not sure Legacy Johnny Wars is not an utopia, because to achieve it you wouldn't need to ban cards; you would need to ban people.
Tx - nothing more to say!
Great article. I am of the perspective that V4 is not very good, but V3 was also not very good, so we're just on a different not very good which we are less used to.
The learning curve is steep and the presentation is horrifying (more so if you have a huge collection with lots of singletons.) And the features you got used to on v3 aren't there. That's a lot to swallow. But as my cartoon suggests I expect we will. I agree that it is disappointing but hang in there. Hopefully it will get better. And if not we can make our views known, again and again and again.
Great read that I think sums up many of the issues perfectly. I'm of the mind that v4 is not as bad as many make it out to be, but as you said, they changed things that didn't need changed. My favorite interface was v2.5, but that boats sailed.
yup dr cat, you got it right.
i downloaded and attempted to do anything on the new client, and ill tell, i am done. seriously. i guess i can try to navigate this crapfest once leagues come back (HA!) anyway, i dont get it at all. maybe the youth of today understands this, but i certainly dont get it at all. i wanted to trade for tickets, good luck with that, i have no idea what is for trade and what isnt and when i click on a card, i can save the deck? wtf?
anyway, thanks for writing this article, im sure hasbro will not give a flying cow, but ill be sure to nerd rage the next time i see an executive (which isnt that too spaced apart, my son is friends with their son)
and get off my lawn
Now I have the opponents graveyard, played succesfully some casual and some
competetive games: All in all it works but playing experience is down some 50% mainly
due to sloppy things like chat but mostly a really 'unmagic' feeling with the graphic interface;
Might be my personal feeling but slinging a Black Lotus first time in a tamagotchi atmosphere is just
weird and disappointing.
Read this on the forums and felt that you pretty much hit the nail on the head. However, there are counter arguments on reddit about what you wrote as well. I am pretty sure I am trusting the guy who has done something for 30 years over some random internet person though.
All that removal though! I think black looks soooooooo good at the surface but when you break it down it's not as great as it could be.
That is one massive, exhaustive Saproling treatise! Kudos!
Now I've one more reason to be glad I decided to cover only Plant and Treefolk for my 'pedia (mostly just because I wanted to call it Dendropedia, and Fungi wouldn't fit the denomination).
Some notes:
Saproling Cluster would be great if it didn't say, for unfathomable reasons, "Any player may play this ability." It's a fast, solid discard outlet. It makes you able to download your fattie to the graveyard and get a saproling for Recurring Nightmare (or even Natural Order), which is more than Bitterblossom does for the same cost. In fact, I might even try it in a Rec.dec. If the opponent isn't reanimator/graveyard based as well, they'll just get to exchange a couple lands for 1/1 blockers, not a big deal.
Do you like Verdeloth better than Nemata? I also was playing saproling decks back then (of course I was), and never cared much for Verdeloth because there was already Nemata in his slot, and he couldn't compare.
"We go through Odyssey Block, Onslaught Block, Kamigawa Block and Mirrodin Block": Mirrodin came before Kamigawa.
There's a mnemonic way to remember the sets' order. Starting from when they first organized new releases into 3-set blocks, they are doing 7-year cycles, and the first block of each cycle is a MIR: MIRage, MIRrodin, Scars of MIRrodin. There are also other recurring elements within the 7-year cycle. I might write an article about this.
You can tell Fertile Imagination is clearly Simic because its name merges a green watchword, "fertile", with a blue watchword, "imagination".
I love how Faithless looting is Careful Study plus. As time goes on, card power increases.
A great article to look back at, unfortunately it doesn't look like they have heeded any advice to fix these issues
Awesome article Kuma! Thanks for the shout out on my decklist as well!
Thank you for you comment!
The problem with black is that it won't ever win you the game by itself. All it really has is a few removal spells and an Accursed Spirit. I'd play at most 7 of my black cards and have to play 15/16 cards of another color. At that point your black is a splash, and none of my colors are so strong that they can win the game on their own. Double Flesh to Dust is hard to pass up at first glance, but once you look into the color, you'll realize why it can't be played.
It looks like I didn't actually talk about the seeded packs (whoops), so I'll do that here:
I like them, but they have to be balanced and similar to each other in power level. In M15 and JOU, there was clearly a promo that was the best, so basically you fought to get the best one, or you got whatever else was left. From a play perspective, having to play against the same promo every match is annoying/frustrating (especially since I think everyone will go black on MTGO) so that takes some fun out of it.
If they can't balance the rares to make them all equally attractive, then they should just go back to 6x boosters. But personally, I'd be fine seeing them do away with the seeded packs.
As I looked at your pool, I had a hard time saying no to Black, but you might be right. I know at my Pre Release, I didn't really have much support from my Rares, so I ended up building a B/R destroy everything and win with Witches' Familiars and Thundering Giants. I think with your pool I either build a B/W or R/W, but R/G could be correct too. My inclination is that you are a better sealed deck player than I am so you would know!
I took the Black seeded pack and the promo was really good. I really am, like many, tired of the seeded packs. Luckily I got to play a "traditional" sealed the next week, playing R/B again but this time splashing G for Apex Predator. I went 3-1 in each tournament.
Thanks for your report! It will be interesting to see how this format develops.
Try the Euro and APAC plains. All the ones I use are either Euro or APAC. I love the sunflower fields and the dutch windmill ones.
Glad to see you're picking up again with this type of article series. Your RoE series remains one of the most insightful looks at limited Magic.
On the topic of archetypes, what do you think about Blue Based Tempo as a separate archetype from U/G Madness? This deck would seem to prioritize big hitters (Sea Drake, Serendib Efreet, and anything in the paired color) and bounce/tap (Man-o-War, Repel, Choking Tethers) as opposed to Madness outlets.
Wizards continues it's downward ascent. I used to love the planeswalker games just like I used to love MTGO. Now it's questionable for both...
The memory usage got a LOT better in recent builds. Try it out if you haven't already.
Show and tell is August Promo card.
Oh & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJlEinRNoXQ&t=5m5s
Ah, good catch. It looks like he has cut 2 fetches since last week and I didn't notice.
If you like the exhume/crusher concept, there is a cheaper version that uses red instead of blue and Faithless Looting instead of Careful Study.
Here is a link:
http://www.mtgo-stats.com/decks/112989
It looks like Obzen only runs 6 fetches. It sucks that Careful study is $2.25 which is too much for me to drop on a common because getting a crusher in play turn two seems really fun.
It's usually a decent way to hold me over until the new core set comes out, but this year I couldn't play it until after the set came out. I have played it enough to be worth the $10, but it's not super exciting or anything like that.
Supposedly you can mod DotP 2014 for the PC and add every card that has been hard coded in by the modders. I would never buy any of the DotP series, as maintaining a collection the other broken PC game is enough for me. I avoid any game with micro-tranactions like the plague. Apparently, that model makes money otherwise people would not still keep making games that has it.
If we tried to really find the optimal decks in Legacy Tribal Wars, if it were supported by WotC and firing DE's with prize support every couple days, I believe there would probably be about 4 or 5 Tier One decks in the metagame. An all-in graveyard deck like Manaless Dredge or Living End, Elves, *maybe* Goblins, certainly some G/W/x Human Hatebears deck, and probably some sort of creature-based combo deck, either Painter's Servant or Cephalid Illusionist.
I agree with you that the format is kept diverse by people trying to be creative within it, rather than purely playing the supposed best decks. I also think that, as Kuma notes, the players in the event now *are* efficiently trying to win. But they are mostly doing so within budget constraints. For anybody not named mihahitlor, playing the same stable of 2-3 decks over and over isn't very satisfying, and you probably would see more format diversity just out of boredom.
And I think what you perceive as "broken" is what Magic is, deep down, ALWAYS, when pushed to its competitive limits (you can say the same for many, many other games). I ask you, is Vintage any less broken? Hell no. And yet there's still people who are willing and happy to play it, for high prizes, and resulting in the same 2-3 possible scenarios all over again. Is it fun for you and me? Hell no. Not played *that* way. But then what we're really talking about here is what you and me and AJ *like* to have fun with. Which has nothing to do with the legitimization of a format.
"Fixing" a format, in the hope that it will result in some warm, rich competitive experience, is a pointless, endless path. "Fixing" Vintage resulted in Legacy, which is broken. "Fixing" Legacy resulted in Extended, which was broken, then in Modern, which is also broken in its own, different ways, if you count dominance of a few top decks and fast combos as a factor. When you analyze them at the top levels, Legacy is Vintage + 1 turn, Modern is Vintage + 2 turns. 2 turns more not a warm, rich experience make.
Or else, everything does. Everything is meta. The flaws you mention about Tribal Wars work against the same decks they assumedly help. You also underestimate the current Tribal Apocalypse crowd: most of the players are not there to smile and joke. They try to come up with very efficient, very brutal ways to win through aggro and combo, which every sub-format makes possible. Rogue decks still occasionally thrive, everybody still has fun enough, newcomers still show up on a regular basis (and I assure you I don't do much to attract them).
And combo rarely wins, btw, which is why I'm not sure that, were Tribal Wars a pro environment, we'd see the pros taking the combo route. Elf in particular would be the most fragile deck, since in a pro meta they would be hated maindeck with cards that would be useful against aggro too. The top decks would probably be something like Kithkin or Merfolk, and you have to tell me what format that fancies itself the realm of tribal strategies would make sense if it was impossible for Kithkin or Merfolk decks to exist within it. It's like saying, let's do a format that's only burn. But hey, let's ban all the burn spells though, otherwise it'll be only burn, and that's annoying!
There's also a strange idiosyncrasy I'm detecting lately. I call it "Good Johnny gone Spike". Johnny was ruined by the proximity with Spike, and has almost forgotten that Johnny's main pleasure is not winning. Johnny enters a tournament of Spikes (like all are), wins a game per match pulling off his elaborate, labyrinthine combo, then *he* won.
Sometimes "fixing Legacy Tribal Wars" sounds like turning it into Legacy Johnny Wars, but I'm not sure Legacy Johnny Wars is not an utopia, because to achieve it you wouldn't need to ban cards; you would need to ban people.