Not only do I totally agree with your assessment of the logic of the situation (and CoC violations), I can add that Calliope is one of the nicest ORCs I've ever chatted with.
As for the part about her Rules/Game knowledge, the ORCs have a primary mandate to help players particularly with rules questions. If they are asked questions they answer as correctly as they can and as quickly as they see them.
I've never seen Calliope fail to do so. It is true, occasionally someone (sometimes myself) comes up with the answer before the ORCs are done typing but to state she doesn't know the game is just rude, bitter and uninformed.
I'd say this fellow is sore and looking for a scapegoat. No one likes a ban even if it is trivial in nature. It is a proverbial slap in the face. However that is not an excuse to slander someone because they did their job and you happened to suffer for it.
I want in in that game!
Seriously, can we organize a regular weekly (or so) rendez-vous of PureMTGO Commander writers? I know Mike isn't available in the weekend, but workdays are fine with me, and even late night schedules (being in Europe, it will always be late for me than for you guys, but it's not a problem).
I think data have that MTGO has more users than ever, Theros was the most successful draft format ever, and recently we had the largest paper tournament ever, and so on. If anything, Magic is still peaking. It's one of the reasons why V3 needed to go: the number of players outgrew the client and servers' capability to handle them.
And check this article by Forbes, listing the best digital card games of 2013, where they put MTGO at #2, despite writing, "With new faces in the marketplace, the client can seem like an antiquated dinosaur and some recent issues have had impact on competitive play." (With link to Wollpert apologizing for the whole November mess). MTGO, and by extension Magic, are still firmly in the zeitgeist.
I will attempt to verify the bug, and will post it if verified.
As for the event and interaction with the ORC, I would be interested in hearing the rest of the story. I am pretty sure that ORCs don't have the authority or ability to see what every player in every draft has. I suspect that someone in a previous round complained to the ORC about something. I don't know, but there are not a ton of ways to abuse that bug. One would be to multi-queue and use it to reset the clock whenever your time was running out. Another would be to use the bug as a reset if you were losing. And if someone did complain to the ORC that your brother was abusing a bug in either of those ways, the ORC would just be doing his job to warn your brother not to do it again. The ORC would also be doing his job to punish your brother if he did it again anyway.
The fact that your brother found a bugged card does not give him the right to abuse it to win games. The code of conduct clearly say that. Moreover, the disclaimer you scrolled over and agreed to to play the game says that Wizards will try to keep the game bug free, but they are not perfect. Paying for a draft does not change any of that. 99.999% of cards work correctly. The rest don't - but you cannot abuse those bugs to steal games you should not otherwise win.
And in a paper tournament, if you try some shenanigans to win a game, I am going to tell you not to do it again. If you do, I am going to disqualify you immediately, and I will recommend more than a one week ban.
Okay, enough said. Can we bring this back this discussion back to something I actually wrote about? Thanks.
If you don't know how to read (the CoC) you are of course excused.
Allow me to explain so that you can avoid violating the CoC again:
1) WotC staff=orc told you not to do something and you did it anyway. Clear violation -> You should be banned.
2) Harassment. Your first post is clearly a personal attack on a named specific person -> You should be banned. If this wasn't a third party site, I would happily report you.
3) It is unsportsmanlike manner to take advantage of a bug. You disrupted a tournament by doing so. You should have followed directions from the orc and then filed for compensation.
A card was drafted and played. Its wotc responsibility to make sure the cards work, not ours. Nobody tried to take advantage of a bug, just played like normal and your quotes from the coc have no bearing on this at all.
It sounds like you and your brother should be banned. From the CoC: "Wizards of the Coast staff are the final judges of whether a member’s behavior qualifies as inappropriate or a disruption." and do not "Harass a specific person (repeated flaming, personal attacks or posting their private information)" and do not attempt "unsportsmanlike manner that affects the game".
We all know it is against the rules to take advantage of a bug. So if you cannot win because of a bug then you file for compensation.
Can you imagine a situation where a judge at a paper tourney says dont play that card that is in your hand or you are DQed? No, because it would never happen. The card was legally in his deck, there was no prior notice before the draft started that the card could not be played. His choice was to cast a card that was legally in his deck, or lose the game. Pretty easy choice.
So yeah I blame the orc for being an idiot and ordering someone to lose the game in a paid tourney. And apparently wotc does too since they overturned the ban.
And orcs are not tourney officials or judges, not sure why you seem to think they are.
So you are saying that an ORC took the time to message your brother before he cast the spell to inform him that it was bugged to the point that it will crash the match and instruct him not to cast it, and then you blame the ORC for the ban when your brother ignored the instructions and did it anyway?
Failing to follow the direct instruction of a tournament
official can get you ejected from a paper event, I'm not sure why you expected any less online.
Another bugged card is "tomorrow, azamais familiar" which will reset the game and clock when you try to draw a card with it in play. It also happens to be in the current flashback drafts. My brother got banned by an orc for casting it in his draft. The orc (callioppe) messaged him during the draft to tell him he was not allowed to cast it if he drew it, which is completely insane. She then gave him a weeklong ban for casting a card in his deck in a draft.
On another note, Orc Callioppe should have been fired a long time ago. Rude, unhelpful, doesnt know the basics of the game, bans and mutes people for no reason, and is a blight on mtgo. This is at least the tenth time my brother and I have had a major issue with her and I know of at least a dozen other people who have filed complaints directly against her.
"Now imagine if the fast red decks get an uncommon Wasteland in the mix. They can drop some goblins, then color screw their opponents. Not a fun way to lose – and that’s my guess why Wizards didn’t include Wasteland."
can't they just do the same thing with strip mine?
i have to say that i think Kumagoro42's comment on your last article "State of the Program for May 23rd 2014" is the only explanation for this wasteland debacle that hasn't made me feel sick to my digital mtgo stomach. it implies they might be saving some good cards for another potential masters set.
~~~~~~~~
"We know Vintage Masters's main rule was "cards not legal in Modern". But I believe (and maybe someone at Wizards even said it out loud, on one of the two hundred different media outlets they use) that Vintage Masters had a secondary rule: "cards not legal in Legacy". In fact, almost the entire Legacy ban list is in Vintage Masters.
Now, the above-mentioned cards are played in Vintage as well, but they are Legacy staples for sure. Say they want to do a Legacy Masters set next year."
~~~~~~~~
to his comment, i replied:
********
"very interesting idea: legacy masters! the lack of wasteland and rishadan port hints at sneak attack, misdirection, and show and tell. the reprint of city in a bottle (lol) hints at apocalypse chime and golgothian sylex (lol x 3). i like the idea... glass is half full! but in the mean time...
has wizards made any specific declarations that they are either (a) attempting to gain new players by hosting the vintage format online, or (b) merely trying to fulfill the never ending requests to print the power nine coming from existing players?
how can wasteland cost more than dual lands?!?! just seems illogical when you think about it from a nostalgic viewpoint. and isn't nostalgia the real theme of vintage masters?
i would say that if they want new players, not printing wasteland is a major fail.
if they are just trying to satiate existing players/collectors... or simply make some more money... then they are doing just fine.
i also agree that there will always be a card or cards that seem overpriced, and will be seen as a "hurdle" discouraging new players from entering the format. sadly, though, those prices aren't defined by wizards, they are defined by **US** - it's the players who decide what they are willing to pay and what they aren't."
********
i just don't understand the logic behind reprinting all 10 duals, power nine, and FOW, but not wasteland, and including strip mine...
The argument that the failure to reprint wasteland is a big problem is essentially this:
1. Wizards has the potential to create an opportunity to make Vintage and Legacy more accessible, which will in turn lead to the formats being more popular. If the format is sufficiently popular events will fire and a community will develop.
2. Two major factors scare people away from formats: high price of entry and the perception that a format is "dead". If the format is too expensive, it will attract few players which in turn creates a perception that the format is dead which in turn makes players less willing to invest large amounts of cash in building a deck. This becomes a vicious cycle which is very difficult to break.
3. The failure to reprint key cards like wasteland and misdirection means that the entry level cost for Vintage (and Legacy) will be substantially higher than it would have been if these cards had not been reprinted.
4. Furthermore, the more popular the format becomes, the higher the prices for these unavailable cards will become. This will essentially limit the growth of the format as the factors that suppress format adoption become more powerful as more people adopt the format.
5. Therefore, if Wizards doesn't do something to control the cost of these unreprinted staples the growth of the format will be stifled and we are much more likely to see a period of initial enthusiasm followed by a rapid return to a situation where events aren't firing because people were scared off by the price tag. At that point it will be MUCH harder for Wizards to popularize the format. Basically Vintage Masters is an opportunity for Wizards to make the format (and Legacy) accessible and popular. If the price of unreprinted format staples isn't addressed, then this opportunity will be lost and the community will suffer.
The entire reason why some of us are making so much noise about this issue is to encourage Wizards to act. I would be THRILLED to see Wasteland as a store promo and Misdirection as a MOCS promo. Legacy staples like Show and Tell, Sneak Attack etc. can wait for a Legacy Masters set... that's fine. Simply reprinting Wasteland as a MOCS promo will not be good enough, although a two or three week triple tempest flashback draft period might do the trick.
The point, however, is that these things need to happen NOW before the moment passes. If Vintage is going to be a real format that significant numbers of people play online, this is the single greatest opportunity to set the stage. In order to do that the format needs to be accessible from the start.
What you say makes a lot of sense. The people I talked to Saturday (and this is a relatively "big time" store that does a lot of mail order business and has sponsored some big-time tournaments) said pretty much the same thing you're saying.
The idea that your standard deck must have tons of mythics to be considered worthwhile is a huge problem for them. Not only that, but one big complaint I saw was that there is a perception that Wizards does not listen to their customer base. Their attitude of "we know what's best for the game" turns a lot of people off. MTGO is seen by some as being in full meltdown mode and when you add up stuff like all that it's no wonder that the game has lost some people.
I don't know, honestly. It's gone strong for 20+ years. Yu Gi Oh is (in theory) for a different audience. The younger crowd enjoy it for its simpler mechanics and (arguably better and certainly flashier) japanese based art.
MTG may suffer from some of the problems D&D suffers in that people who don't play may avoid it as the old-guy on the block. It isn't all that new and exciting. Particularly since it seems like the mythic rarity model pushed the prices of singles up instead of down since most of the mystics being printed aren't just playable but must have 4 ofs. I could be way off on this because I am not into paper mtg as a thing anymore.
I'm not gonna be the guy that says Magic is dying, but I think it may be losing some steam.
Last Saturday I played in a paper tournament and there was a Yugioh tournament going on at the same time. I was surprised that there were twice as many (at least) Yugioh players as there were Magic players.
Not only that, but in the four hours I was there, they were selling Yugioh singles out of the display cases left and right. In four hours, I was the only one who bought a Magic single out of the case.
It was just a regular Saturday store tournament for Yugioh but it was Game Day for Magic with lots of extra prizes and stuff.
I'm seeing people selling out their collections and dumping their MTGO accounts like I've never seen before and switching over to other games.
very interesting idea: legacy masters! the lack of wasteland and rishadan port hints at sneak attack, misdirection, and show and tell. the reprint of city in a bottle (lol) hints at apocalypse chime and golgothian sylex (lol x 3). i like the idea... glass is half full! but in the mean time...
has wizards made any specific declarations that they are either (a) attempting to gain new players by hosting the vintage format online, or (b) merely trying to fulfill the never ending requests to print the power nine coming from existing players?
how can wasteland cost more than dual lands?!?! just seems illogical when you think about it from a nostalgic viewpoint. and isn't nostalgia the real theme of vintage masters?
i would say that if they want new players, not printing wasteland is a major fail.
if they are just trying to satiate existing players/collectors... or simply make some more money... then they are doing just fine.
i also agree that there will always be a card or cards that seem overpriced, and will be seen as a "hurdle" discouraging new players from entering the format. sadly, though, those prices aren't defined by wizards, they are defined by **US** - it's the players who decide what they are willing to pay and what they aren't.
That's your opinion and you aren't alone in that view but I suspect that WOTC doesn't see it that way at all. If they did they would be doing all in their power to make the client better not merely minimally functional.
Though lets be real, DOTP is not MTG. It is MTG Lite and anyone who thinks that you can get a top notch video game out of MTG (DOTP doesn't come close imho) is probably in for a rude awakening. The first thing that MUST happen is that people can play an actual game of MTG. Not MTG Lite.
Pokemon, Hearthstone, Sol Forge, etc are not MTG either. Some have varying degrees of charm. (I won't play any of them though since I don't care for pokemon, won't play anything published by Blizzard, and don't think much of Sol Forge particularly since they never did fix the bug that causes a DEP error on my PC. They never even got back to me to tell me they weren't bothering. They just dropped it like a hot potato.
That said if dissatisfied customers slowly bleed off into these other games, I doubt very much WOTC will notice. Instead what I think will happen is that when the drafters eventually can't sell their cards for enough tix to play again, they will stop drafting. No good secondary market because Casual Players are shafted = No place to sell draft leavings to get tix to buy packs. After the game gets a bad rep being a poor place to test/draft, the money flow will stop. Eventually even this will correct itself as the game is fun even when the client is terribad. Witness: V3 after 7 years.
Actually the problem with influx of new player is that digital card game scene is rapidly evolving and mtgo isn't good enough to attract players on its own. People will play Dotp, will want to play mtgo then they will hit giant stone wall of uselessness and then they will quit. They will go to some other card games, worse than mtg but with digital interfaces much better than mtgo.
drop what you are doing and read all 4 of them.
It's a scifi retelling of the canterbury tells in the first book, and its sheer amazing in total.
His Olympos and Illium were awesome too, but they didn't have as satisfying and lasting of an effect on me as the hyperion books
Not only do I totally agree with your assessment of the logic of the situation (and CoC violations), I can add that Calliope is one of the nicest ORCs I've ever chatted with.
As for the part about her Rules/Game knowledge, the ORCs have a primary mandate to help players particularly with rules questions. If they are asked questions they answer as correctly as they can and as quickly as they see them.
I've never seen Calliope fail to do so. It is true, occasionally someone (sometimes myself) comes up with the answer before the ORCs are done typing but to state she doesn't know the game is just rude, bitter and uninformed.
I'd say this fellow is sore and looking for a scapegoat. No one likes a ban even if it is trivial in nature. It is a proverbial slap in the face. However that is not an excuse to slander someone because they did their job and you happened to suffer for it.
I want in in that game!
Seriously, can we organize a regular weekly (or so) rendez-vous of PureMTGO Commander writers? I know Mike isn't available in the weekend, but workdays are fine with me, and even late night schedules (being in Europe, it will always be late for me than for you guys, but it's not a problem).
I think data have that MTGO has more users than ever, Theros was the most successful draft format ever, and recently we had the largest paper tournament ever, and so on. If anything, Magic is still peaking. It's one of the reasons why V3 needed to go: the number of players outgrew the client and servers' capability to handle them.
And check this article by Forbes, listing the best digital card games of 2013, where they put MTGO at #2, despite writing, "With new faces in the marketplace, the client can seem like an antiquated dinosaur and some recent issues have had impact on competitive play." (With link to Wollpert apologizing for the whole November mess). MTGO, and by extension Magic, are still firmly in the zeitgeist.
We are sort of getting off topic here.
I will attempt to verify the bug, and will post it if verified.
As for the event and interaction with the ORC, I would be interested in hearing the rest of the story. I am pretty sure that ORCs don't have the authority or ability to see what every player in every draft has. I suspect that someone in a previous round complained to the ORC about something. I don't know, but there are not a ton of ways to abuse that bug. One would be to multi-queue and use it to reset the clock whenever your time was running out. Another would be to use the bug as a reset if you were losing. And if someone did complain to the ORC that your brother was abusing a bug in either of those ways, the ORC would just be doing his job to warn your brother not to do it again. The ORC would also be doing his job to punish your brother if he did it again anyway.
The fact that your brother found a bugged card does not give him the right to abuse it to win games. The code of conduct clearly say that. Moreover, the disclaimer you scrolled over and agreed to to play the game says that Wizards will try to keep the game bug free, but they are not perfect. Paying for a draft does not change any of that. 99.999% of cards work correctly. The rest don't - but you cannot abuse those bugs to steal games you should not otherwise win.
And in a paper tournament, if you try some shenanigans to win a game, I am going to tell you not to do it again. If you do, I am going to disqualify you immediately, and I will recommend more than a one week ban.
Okay, enough said. Can we bring this back this discussion back to something I actually wrote about? Thanks.
If you don't know how to read (the CoC) you are of course excused.
Allow me to explain so that you can avoid violating the CoC again:
1) WotC staff=orc told you not to do something and you did it anyway. Clear violation -> You should be banned.
2) Harassment. Your first post is clearly a personal attack on a named specific person -> You should be banned. If this wasn't a third party site, I would happily report you.
3) It is unsportsmanlike manner to take advantage of a bug. You disrupted a tournament by doing so. You should have followed directions from the orc and then filed for compensation.
I feel we should organize a duel or 2HG (same team) where you play this deck and I rock Tromokratis from my Colossal article.
Thoughts?
A card was drafted and played. Its wotc responsibility to make sure the cards work, not ours. Nobody tried to take advantage of a bug, just played like normal and your quotes from the coc have no bearing on this at all.
Too bad WotC has seemed to gone soft.
It sounds like you and your brother should be banned. From the CoC: "Wizards of the Coast staff are the final judges of whether a member’s behavior qualifies as inappropriate or a disruption." and do not "Harass a specific person (repeated flaming, personal attacks or posting their private information)" and do not attempt "unsportsmanlike manner that affects the game".
We all know it is against the rules to take advantage of a bug. So if you cannot win because of a bug then you file for compensation.
You don't start to harass a specific person.
Can you imagine a situation where a judge at a paper tourney says dont play that card that is in your hand or you are DQed? No, because it would never happen. The card was legally in his deck, there was no prior notice before the draft started that the card could not be played. His choice was to cast a card that was legally in his deck, or lose the game. Pretty easy choice.
So yeah I blame the orc for being an idiot and ordering someone to lose the game in a paid tourney. And apparently wotc does too since they overturned the ban.
And orcs are not tourney officials or judges, not sure why you seem to think they are.
So you are saying that an ORC took the time to message your brother before he cast the spell to inform him that it was bugged to the point that it will crash the match and instruct him not to cast it, and then you blame the ORC for the ban when your brother ignored the instructions and did it anyway?
Failing to follow the direct instruction of a tournament
official can get you ejected from a paper event, I'm not sure why you expected any less online.
Another bugged card is "tomorrow, azamais familiar" which will reset the game and clock when you try to draw a card with it in play. It also happens to be in the current flashback drafts. My brother got banned by an orc for casting it in his draft. The orc (callioppe) messaged him during the draft to tell him he was not allowed to cast it if he drew it, which is completely insane. She then gave him a weeklong ban for casting a card in his deck in a draft.
On another note, Orc Callioppe should have been fired a long time ago. Rude, unhelpful, doesnt know the basics of the game, bans and mutes people for no reason, and is a blight on mtgo. This is at least the tenth time my brother and I have had a major issue with her and I know of at least a dozen other people who have filed complaints directly against her.
one million words:
"Now imagine if the fast red decks get an uncommon Wasteland in the mix. They can drop some goblins, then color screw their opponents. Not a fun way to lose – and that’s my guess why Wizards didn’t include Wasteland."
can't they just do the same thing with strip mine?
i have to say that i think Kumagoro42's comment on your last article "State of the Program for May 23rd 2014" is the only explanation for this wasteland debacle that hasn't made me feel sick to my digital mtgo stomach. it implies they might be saving some good cards for another potential masters set.
~~~~~~~~
"We know Vintage Masters's main rule was "cards not legal in Modern". But I believe (and maybe someone at Wizards even said it out loud, on one of the two hundred different media outlets they use) that Vintage Masters had a secondary rule: "cards not legal in Legacy". In fact, almost the entire Legacy ban list is in Vintage Masters.
Now, the above-mentioned cards are played in Vintage as well, but they are Legacy staples for sure. Say they want to do a Legacy Masters set next year."
~~~~~~~~
to his comment, i replied:
********
"very interesting idea: legacy masters! the lack of wasteland and rishadan port hints at sneak attack, misdirection, and show and tell. the reprint of city in a bottle (lol) hints at apocalypse chime and golgothian sylex (lol x 3). i like the idea... glass is half full! but in the mean time...
has wizards made any specific declarations that they are either (a) attempting to gain new players by hosting the vintage format online, or (b) merely trying to fulfill the never ending requests to print the power nine coming from existing players?
how can wasteland cost more than dual lands?!?! just seems illogical when you think about it from a nostalgic viewpoint. and isn't nostalgia the real theme of vintage masters?
i would say that if they want new players, not printing wasteland is a major fail.
if they are just trying to satiate existing players/collectors... or simply make some more money... then they are doing just fine.
i also agree that there will always be a card or cards that seem overpriced, and will be seen as a "hurdle" discouraging new players from entering the format. sadly, though, those prices aren't defined by wizards, they are defined by **US** - it's the players who decide what they are willing to pay and what they aren't."
********
i just don't understand the logic behind reprinting all 10 duals, power nine, and FOW, but not wasteland, and including strip mine...
The argument that the failure to reprint wasteland is a big problem is essentially this:
1. Wizards has the potential to create an opportunity to make Vintage and Legacy more accessible, which will in turn lead to the formats being more popular. If the format is sufficiently popular events will fire and a community will develop.
2. Two major factors scare people away from formats: high price of entry and the perception that a format is "dead". If the format is too expensive, it will attract few players which in turn creates a perception that the format is dead which in turn makes players less willing to invest large amounts of cash in building a deck. This becomes a vicious cycle which is very difficult to break.
3. The failure to reprint key cards like wasteland and misdirection means that the entry level cost for Vintage (and Legacy) will be substantially higher than it would have been if these cards had not been reprinted.
4. Furthermore, the more popular the format becomes, the higher the prices for these unavailable cards will become. This will essentially limit the growth of the format as the factors that suppress format adoption become more powerful as more people adopt the format.
5. Therefore, if Wizards doesn't do something to control the cost of these unreprinted staples the growth of the format will be stifled and we are much more likely to see a period of initial enthusiasm followed by a rapid return to a situation where events aren't firing because people were scared off by the price tag. At that point it will be MUCH harder for Wizards to popularize the format. Basically Vintage Masters is an opportunity for Wizards to make the format (and Legacy) accessible and popular. If the price of unreprinted format staples isn't addressed, then this opportunity will be lost and the community will suffer.
The entire reason why some of us are making so much noise about this issue is to encourage Wizards to act. I would be THRILLED to see Wasteland as a store promo and Misdirection as a MOCS promo. Legacy staples like Show and Tell, Sneak Attack etc. can wait for a Legacy Masters set... that's fine. Simply reprinting Wasteland as a MOCS promo will not be good enough, although a two or three week triple tempest flashback draft period might do the trick.
The point, however, is that these things need to happen NOW before the moment passes. If Vintage is going to be a real format that significant numbers of people play online, this is the single greatest opportunity to set the stage. In order to do that the format needs to be accessible from the start.
What you say makes a lot of sense. The people I talked to Saturday (and this is a relatively "big time" store that does a lot of mail order business and has sponsored some big-time tournaments) said pretty much the same thing you're saying.
The idea that your standard deck must have tons of mythics to be considered worthwhile is a huge problem for them. Not only that, but one big complaint I saw was that there is a perception that Wizards does not listen to their customer base. Their attitude of "we know what's best for the game" turns a lot of people off. MTGO is seen by some as being in full meltdown mode and when you add up stuff like all that it's no wonder that the game has lost some people.
In the Opinions section, the MTGOTraders.com link is "broken".
I don't know, honestly. It's gone strong for 20+ years. Yu Gi Oh is (in theory) for a different audience. The younger crowd enjoy it for its simpler mechanics and (arguably better and certainly flashier) japanese based art.
MTG may suffer from some of the problems D&D suffers in that people who don't play may avoid it as the old-guy on the block. It isn't all that new and exciting. Particularly since it seems like the mythic rarity model pushed the prices of singles up instead of down since most of the mystics being printed aren't just playable but must have 4 ofs. I could be way off on this because I am not into paper mtg as a thing anymore.
Is that some Jewish-themed set or did you mean KHANS of Tarkir?
I'm not gonna be the guy that says Magic is dying, but I think it may be losing some steam.
Last Saturday I played in a paper tournament and there was a Yugioh tournament going on at the same time. I was surprised that there were twice as many (at least) Yugioh players as there were Magic players.
Not only that, but in the four hours I was there, they were selling Yugioh singles out of the display cases left and right. In four hours, I was the only one who bought a Magic single out of the case.
It was just a regular Saturday store tournament for Yugioh but it was Game Day for Magic with lots of extra prizes and stuff.
I'm seeing people selling out their collections and dumping their MTGO accounts like I've never seen before and switching over to other games.
Did I miss the memo?
very interesting idea: legacy masters! the lack of wasteland and rishadan port hints at sneak attack, misdirection, and show and tell. the reprint of city in a bottle (lol) hints at apocalypse chime and golgothian sylex (lol x 3). i like the idea... glass is half full! but in the mean time...
has wizards made any specific declarations that they are either (a) attempting to gain new players by hosting the vintage format online, or (b) merely trying to fulfill the never ending requests to print the power nine coming from existing players?
how can wasteland cost more than dual lands?!?! just seems illogical when you think about it from a nostalgic viewpoint. and isn't nostalgia the real theme of vintage masters?
i would say that if they want new players, not printing wasteland is a major fail.
if they are just trying to satiate existing players/collectors... or simply make some more money... then they are doing just fine.
i also agree that there will always be a card or cards that seem overpriced, and will be seen as a "hurdle" discouraging new players from entering the format. sadly, though, those prices aren't defined by wizards, they are defined by **US** - it's the players who decide what they are willing to pay and what they aren't.
Just a reminder, if the comments remain open, do not post answers for at least 72 hours or there will be no prizes!
That's your opinion and you aren't alone in that view but I suspect that WOTC doesn't see it that way at all. If they did they would be doing all in their power to make the client better not merely minimally functional.
Though lets be real, DOTP is not MTG. It is MTG Lite and anyone who thinks that you can get a top notch video game out of MTG (DOTP doesn't come close imho) is probably in for a rude awakening. The first thing that MUST happen is that people can play an actual game of MTG. Not MTG Lite.
Pokemon, Hearthstone, Sol Forge, etc are not MTG either. Some have varying degrees of charm. (I won't play any of them though since I don't care for pokemon, won't play anything published by Blizzard, and don't think much of Sol Forge particularly since they never did fix the bug that causes a DEP error on my PC. They never even got back to me to tell me they weren't bothering. They just dropped it like a hot potato.
That said if dissatisfied customers slowly bleed off into these other games, I doubt very much WOTC will notice. Instead what I think will happen is that when the drafters eventually can't sell their cards for enough tix to play again, they will stop drafting. No good secondary market because Casual Players are shafted = No place to sell draft leavings to get tix to buy packs. After the game gets a bad rep being a poor place to test/draft, the money flow will stop. Eventually even this will correct itself as the game is fun even when the client is terribad. Witness: V3 after 7 years.
After I finish this 3 part book (The Soldier Son Trilogy) by Robin Hobbs who is my current addiction. Hopefully it will be available as an Ebook.
Actually the problem with influx of new player is that digital card game scene is rapidly evolving and mtgo isn't good enough to attract players on its own. People will play Dotp, will want to play mtgo then they will hit giant stone wall of uselessness and then they will quit. They will go to some other card games, worse than mtg but with digital interfaces much better than mtgo.
drop what you are doing and read all 4 of them.
It's a scifi retelling of the canterbury tells in the first book, and its sheer amazing in total.
His Olympos and Illium were awesome too, but they didn't have as satisfying and lasting of an effect on me as the hyperion books
It's by Dan Simmons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos