You have an interesting viewpoint. Could you perhaps argue why you think there are so bad?
Most theories of financial markets suggest that a completely decentralized market (without dealers) is less efficient (for smaller customers) than a market with dealers. The dealers are there to facilitate trades across time and players, hence they reduce your searching costs significantly. You don't need to meet a counterparty selling the exact card you want at the price you want to give. Instead you can go to the dealer. The dealers then take a premium for taking on inventory risk etc. But that premium is a lot smaller than your search costs.
Ask yourself: If the market was better off without dealers, and player could get by easily without dealers, then why do they exists? And dealers do in fact exist.
Pete wrote:
"Magic exists as it does because the drafters can sell their cards, the constructed players can buy singles and the traders can always find a touchstone for value. All that relies on the network of dealers and card store. Without that elaborate secondary market, the game becomes a whole lot more expensive and getting decks together for sanctioned constructed events becomes a lot harder."
You are wrong when saying that certified second hand dealers are good for the game.
The only reason they exist is because WotC want them to.
They make the game more expensive than it otherwise would be.
They are nothing but bad for the game, and you should know it Pete !
First, thank you so much for doing these! I look forward to each comparison article.
I agree that Immolation is a great card. A strange red Dead Weight. However I don't think comparing to shock is in the best option.
I think it should be compared to Flowstone Embrace. It is the closest I have seen. I should also say I think Flowstone is crazy. If it was just R to cast it would have been a functional reprint... but different.
I'm real sorry guys, but since I submitted this article and the time it was published, things have changed and I've hit a rough spot. So despite what the article repeats over and over, I cannot host the SPDC tournament season after all.
Here's hoping somebody picks it up. I really hope it can continue, it's the oldest Standard Pauper scene there is and there's plenty of talented and trustworthy folks who probably have more time and better situation than I've got.
Sorry once again :-( One a' these days...
Till then, good luck & thanks for the good games, guys. Peace.
Seismic Assault is definitely not a nerfing of Land's Edge. Quite the reverse, being able to target creatures and not have your opponent gain any benefit from the card makes it far superior in all senses.
Also Fallen Angel is a combo enabler (albeit there are better ones available now such as the 1 cost guy featured in Melira Pod) not merely a flying beef. I agree about the art.
Well, Glare of Heresy is a thing, but you're still behind either way. The thing is, I don't think you can ban Elspeth. It gives decks an answer to the huge creatures outside of black and I don't think they want to ban it especially when it's kinda the face of Theros. I don't think a ban is necessary even if Born of the Gods wasn't coming out soon, it's just the nature of a single set constructed format. That said, I don't like facing Elspeth mirrors, even if she's my favorite card XD
Good call on elspeth, that seems a much better target. Right from my set review I was afraid of the power of that card in a set with only one non creature answer to planeswalkers, it took a while for her to find her home but has finally done so. You're right about the meta pre-naya too, I'm sure you'll find the graphical representation of thus in my next article interesting.
I tried something very similar to this with the Chimera and Niv Magus Elemental (another card I really want to make work). It was fun, and sometimes powerful, but it was oh so inconsistent.
Before Naya took over, the metagame was far more balanced. GR was clearly dominant, but that was just a result of the format having a very limited cardpool. Other decks stood a reasonable chance. After playing Naya though, every other deck just has a big uphill battle ahead of them if they want to compete. I think you actually target Elspeth if you target anything - targetting a creature means that creature has such good utility that no deck can deal with it before it takes over the game.
Look at Modern creatures that are banned. All of them provide great utility or enable broken things. Stormbreath is just a good midrange creature in a set with bad removal. Having bad or no removal was intentional from Wizards, they wanted creatures to matter more and the Voltron-esque Limited environment.
The new card frame looks fine on black cards, and hideously ugly on at least red cards. That tapering off to black before the bottom of the text box is really apalling from a graphic design standpoint, it definitely affects the aesthetic appreciation of the card. The new anti-counterfeit measures seem long overdue though, especially with the recently discovered counterfeit ring in China.
I've just put some stats together for my next article, and it's even gotten worse in the last week. Imo, we're actually at a point where the format is so broken that a ban would be justified (>70% of the metagame is naya or GW), but of course we're about to get a new set so that's pointless. It's interesting to speculate what you target for a ban if you really wanted to fix the meta (stormbreath dragon is my #1 target, as disappointing as that would be), basically though the problem isn't the threats, it's the poor answers they've given us in this set (no sweepers, not enough good creature removal, only one non-creature answer to planeswalkers).
Nowadays a set will have a weak 5-mana common creature and a strong 5-mana rare creature in the same set, but they didn't really do much of that back then. If you don't believe me, just... scroll up. Almost the only time multiple creatures with the same cmc would be printed within a color would be if they were doing two different things, like Abomination and Fallen Angel, or Pit Scorpion and Lost Soul.
So looking at a Cyclopean Mummy as a representative for the two-mana black slot isn't as misleading as it looks, even though he was common. That is what the power level for 1B was back then, no matter what rarity we were looking at.
I agree with the Facebook comment: I just realized that you mostly disregard rarity in your comparisons (at least here: didn't you take that into account in past articles of the series?).
Now, back in Legends times they didn't design with limited play in mind; but they do now, and we should pretend the rarity distribution made sense back then, too. Plus, with that logic, you can compare stuff in the same set as well: why should you play Siege Mastodon when you can play Archangel of Thune?
"During controller's next upkeep Giant Slug gains landwalk ability of controller's choice". As told by someone who just learned the rudiments of English. In the same set where other cards had wordings that essentially sounded like, "Hey fella, put a bunch of these counter thingies on some creature or other, would you?"
Wall of Tombstones: The flavor starts failing when you consider that the fact that the wall is made of tombstones rather than regular stones doesn't amount to anything (shouldn't scare the enemies or something, at least?).
Fallen Angel-Shadowbord Demon is a strange comparison. They don't seem to do anything alike. The Angel was about "I attack with her, sac my 5 saproling tokens, good game". The modern equivalents are Bloodthrone Vampire and Vampire Aristocrat, but none of them flies (which is crucial), so it's medium nerfing.
I believe these dealers know things before they should know it, and thus can buy/sell at prices/points which give them unfair profits.
Bans/unbans, new cards from new sets indicating which older cards that will rise in price, +++.
The Guillaume Matignon episode is plenty proof to me.
They are bad for the hustlers trying to get "value".
Nice look at the GP.
Some cool decklist in there. Mono-Red Devotion looks like fun.
You have an interesting viewpoint. Could you perhaps argue why you think there are so bad?
Most theories of financial markets suggest that a completely decentralized market (without dealers) is less efficient (for smaller customers) than a market with dealers. The dealers are there to facilitate trades across time and players, hence they reduce your searching costs significantly. You don't need to meet a counterparty selling the exact card you want at the price you want to give. Instead you can go to the dealer. The dealers then take a premium for taking on inventory risk etc. But that premium is a lot smaller than your search costs.
Ask yourself: If the market was better off without dealers, and player could get by easily without dealers, then why do they exists? And dealers do in fact exist.
Pete wrote:
"Magic exists as it does because the drafters can sell their cards, the constructed players can buy singles and the traders can always find a touchstone for value. All that relies on the network of dealers and card store. Without that elaborate secondary market, the game becomes a whole lot more expensive and getting decks together for sanctioned constructed events becomes a lot harder."
You are wrong when saying that certified second hand dealers are good for the game.
The only reason they exist is because WotC want them to.
They make the game more expensive than it otherwise would be.
They are nothing but bad for the game, and you should know it Pete !
Thank you for the kind words Pete!
Nice to see somel love for Fluxx. Star Fluxx is probably my favorite version.
First, thank you so much for doing these! I look forward to each comparison article.
I agree that Immolation is a great card. A strange red Dead Weight. However I don't think comparing to shock is in the best option.
I think it should be compared to Flowstone Embrace. It is the closest I have seen. I should also say I think Flowstone is crazy. If it was just R to cast it would have been a functional reprint... but different.
yeah, i totally knew that - see, it says so in the first sentence :P
States that Robot Week is next week :D
Robot Week is next week :)
I'm real sorry guys, but since I submitted this article and the time it was published, things have changed and I've hit a rough spot. So despite what the article repeats over and over, I cannot host the SPDC tournament season after all.
Here's hoping somebody picks it up. I really hope it can continue, it's the oldest Standard Pauper scene there is and there's plenty of talented and trustworthy folks who probably have more time and better situation than I've got.
Sorry once again :-( One a' these days...
Till then, good luck & thanks for the good games, guys. Peace.
I figured it out after recording. The fact I remembered the little used if ever bulk rare is more impressive to me :D
Blood Scrivener was from Dragon's Maze. Kinda off the mark there haha!
Seismic Assault is definitely not a nerfing of Land's Edge. Quite the reverse, being able to target creatures and not have your opponent gain any benefit from the card makes it far superior in all senses.
Also Fallen Angel is a combo enabler (albeit there are better ones available now such as the 1 cost guy featured in Melira Pod) not merely a flying beef. I agree about the art.
Well, Glare of Heresy is a thing, but you're still behind either way. The thing is, I don't think you can ban Elspeth. It gives decks an answer to the huge creatures outside of black and I don't think they want to ban it especially when it's kinda the face of Theros. I don't think a ban is necessary even if Born of the Gods wasn't coming out soon, it's just the nature of a single set constructed format. That said, I don't like facing Elspeth mirrors, even if she's my favorite card XD
Good call on elspeth, that seems a much better target. Right from my set review I was afraid of the power of that card in a set with only one non creature answer to planeswalkers, it took a while for her to find her home but has finally done so. You're right about the meta pre-naya too, I'm sure you'll find the graphical representation of thus in my next article interesting.
I tried something very similar to this with the Chimera and Niv Magus Elemental (another card I really want to make work). It was fun, and sometimes powerful, but it was oh so inconsistent.
Before Naya took over, the metagame was far more balanced. GR was clearly dominant, but that was just a result of the format having a very limited cardpool. Other decks stood a reasonable chance. After playing Naya though, every other deck just has a big uphill battle ahead of them if they want to compete. I think you actually target Elspeth if you target anything - targetting a creature means that creature has such good utility that no deck can deal with it before it takes over the game.
Look at Modern creatures that are banned. All of them provide great utility or enable broken things. Stormbreath is just a good midrange creature in a set with bad removal. Having bad or no removal was intentional from Wizards, they wanted creatures to matter more and the Voltron-esque Limited environment.
Chicken little? I mean, I guess I can get on board with the fact that it won't ruin the game, but the frames ARE horrible.
The new card frame looks fine on black cards, and hideously ugly on at least red cards. That tapering off to black before the bottom of the text box is really apalling from a graphic design standpoint, it definitely affects the aesthetic appreciation of the card. The new anti-counterfeit measures seem long overdue though, especially with the recently discovered counterfeit ring in China.
I've just put some stats together for my next article, and it's even gotten worse in the last week. Imo, we're actually at a point where the format is so broken that a ban would be justified (>70% of the metagame is naya or GW), but of course we're about to get a new set so that's pointless. It's interesting to speculate what you target for a ban if you really wanted to fix the meta (stormbreath dragon is my #1 target, as disappointing as that would be), basically though the problem isn't the threats, it's the poor answers they've given us in this set (no sweepers, not enough good creature removal, only one non-creature answer to planeswalkers).
The thing about rarities—
Nowadays a set will have a weak 5-mana common creature and a strong 5-mana rare creature in the same set, but they didn't really do much of that back then. If you don't believe me, just... scroll up. Almost the only time multiple creatures with the same cmc would be printed within a color would be if they were doing two different things, like Abomination and Fallen Angel, or Pit Scorpion and Lost Soul.
So looking at a Cyclopean Mummy as a representative for the two-mana black slot isn't as misleading as it looks, even though he was common. That is what the power level for 1B was back then, no matter what rarity we were looking at.
I've definitely had to work to remain a bad player. :p
I agree with the Facebook comment: I just realized that you mostly disregard rarity in your comparisons (at least here: didn't you take that into account in past articles of the series?).
Now, back in Legends times they didn't design with limited play in mind; but they do now, and we should pretend the rarity distribution made sense back then, too. Plus, with that logic, you can compare stuff in the same set as well: why should you play Siege Mastodon when you can play Archangel of Thune?
"During controller's next upkeep Giant Slug gains landwalk ability of controller's choice". As told by someone who just learned the rudiments of English. In the same set where other cards had wordings that essentially sounded like, "Hey fella, put a bunch of these counter thingies on some creature or other, would you?"
Wall of Tombstones: The flavor starts failing when you consider that the fact that the wall is made of tombstones rather than regular stones doesn't amount to anything (shouldn't scare the enemies or something, at least?).
Fallen Angel-Shadowbord Demon is a strange comparison. They don't seem to do anything alike. The Angel was about "I attack with her, sac my 5 saproling tokens, good game". The modern equivalents are Bloodthrone Vampire and Vampire Aristocrat, but none of them flies (which is crucial), so it's medium nerfing.