Magic: The Gathering C/D

someone high up heard that mobile was the future and said "our site needs to look good on an ipad, do whatever it takes!"

wotc has never been very good at software but as of late they seem to be falling even further behind the curve, in addition to a sudden strange insistence at doing everything in-house with their underpaid devs - it seems pretty clear to me at this point that they either don't have money or someone at the top doesn't think any of this stuff is important

even duels, their one remaining successful software venture, seems to have crashed and burned this year, i haven't played it but saw bad reviews and negative feedback across the board

its troubling that a game that's claimed to have huge sales growth for the past 4 years is unable to reinvest any of those profits into the game but that seems to be what's going on

i impulse bought the new dotp the day it came out and it is super thin. i wondered if maybe they are going to add in some of the missing features and modes as dlc. but tbf, i did get something like the going rate for the amount of mtg entertainment 15 bucks buys!

I realize how tough it is to write a client for such a complex game - those who gripe about MTGO by pointing out that Hearthstone or SolForge have much better interfaces seem to be missing just how wide a lattitude of things have to be given in Magic (especially considering that it has to support like 10 years worth of cards that weren't designed with the rules being like they are now) - but what bothers me is just the easy design stuff, like how there's so much blankspace on the battlefield now and yet the colorless mana symbols are basically unreadable on a 19" monitor, or how hopeless it is to get the chat or preview panes to stay anywhere, like it's the kind of stuff you'd think would get immediately pointed out during testing. At least the life total isn't a Font Size 7 number off in the corner anymore.

the website has no similar excuses - a basic site where you can find and read articles w/ text and photos shouldn't take a company w/ the best programmers in seattle or w/e, it should be something any competent company can get done in 2014

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/2015-pro-tour-and-grand-prix-schedule-revealed-2014-08-02

so dumb, no more modern protours (at least next year)

Upset at that announcement - Of the three PT formats, Standard is my least favorite to watch and play (not that I'm likely to play in another Pro Tour again soon, heh). Also, are they just done having PTs in Asia?

i really wonder what prompted that decision - my first thought was 'wow you really dont want to have to reprint fetchlands' but maybe they just feel like standard is the most profitable/worthwhile format to promote? idk

i missed most of the video coverage of the pt but quickly glancing at the the top 8 records it looks like jund planeswalkers may have been the most successful deck which is kinda interesting

White seems to be really powerful in M15 draft. I thought it would be since White was so underpowered in M14 (similar to how Blue was nearly unplayable in M13 but a powerhouse in M14) but I think it's even better than it looked on the spoiler, Triplicate Spirits is maybe the best common in the set, and that + Raise the Alarm gives you plenty of Convoke fodder and as mentioned here that +2/+1 instant is such a killer, as iatee mentioned you can't play around it even though you pretty much always know when they have it

I'm really liking these planeswalker builds, they look like lots of fun. I'm hoping to play my own version at next FNM.

Between SCG Dallas and PTM15, I think I watched about 20 hours of mtg broadcasts this week, it was pretty crazy. I wanted to go to Dallas, but then forgot about it until like a day before and had to bail.

if the white token deck is open, it's def the best deck in the format, I've seen / played games that weren't far from being the b/w modern tokens deck

red is also very good. infero fist, l strike, forge devils, cone, enforcers. I have found lava axe to be very playable in this format.

i really wonder what prompted that decision - my first thought was 'wow you really dont want to have to reprint fetchlands' but maybe they just feel like standard is the most profitable/worthwhile format to promote? idk

it 'makes sense' if the protour is about advertising the set - born of the gods was a particularly bad set to release before a big modern event, but rarely will a set lead to new decks in the format. and standard post-release does reward the teams that have tested/brewed well.

but standard gameplay is pretty clearly not the highest level of play and that's supposed to be a big part of what a protour is

I've mainboarded 2 Festerglooms just to take care of the tokens deck, only to have White Paragon come down and destroy me :(

Just paging through the spoiler it really looks like White has the best ratio of great uncommons, lots of solid bears + benefits, and Heliod's Pilgrim which can be really great, especially since it grabs Opressive Rays in a pinch. Losing Pacifism kinda sucks but you can really beat through just about anything, even Selfless Cathar can be a killer in this deck.

Blue on the other hand seems just not good, lots of overcosted flyers and some okay bounce but not much else. I've heard a number of good players say Black was the worst color in M15 but I think it's Blue. Black gets a lot of solid uncommons and I think the Rotfeaster is quite underrated.

blue is not a good core color for a deck but throwing some bounce/terns/illusory angels to an otherwise good deck is v good

maybe not saying much because red and white are already good but WU fliers and UR tempo/artifacts seem like p good archetypes in m15. my wins to date have been those two and GW.

jund will always be at the top as long as they continue to be more willing to ban 'unfair' cards than 'fair' ones

Thinking about this a bit over the past couple of days, I've realised a card I really don't like is abrupt decay - I'm not really a Johnny at all and I can see that it could be positive for Legacy as an answer to Counterbalance but in Modern it's just a silent death-knell to so many fun and interesting cards.

yeah there was a time not too long ago when people had to play Smother if they wanted to be able to kill tarmogoyfs and dark confidants with the same card, now they get to hit all the artifacts/enchantments that used to be blind spots too

the card itself doesn't seem oppressive (wasn't it mostly designed to give legacy people a break from top-locks?) it just sucks that it fits so well into the already best decks in modern

oh gravel basically said the legacy thing oops

I have been playing delver in modern w/ illusory angel it's really sweet

man i forgot that wasn't a 'real' card until m15, i get it mixed up with Illusory Demon for some reason

modern pro tours back already

i'm fine with them locking in standard for all large-set PTs but they should let small-set PTs be other formats at least some of the time

which seems to be what they're doing here so props

you guys are probably up to date on all this but
RWB clan mechanic: http://media-dominaria.cursecdn.com/attachments/130/837/635436027465518449.jpg
UWR clan mechanic: http://media-dominaria.cursecdn.com/attachments/130/914/635439531581439469.png

and the completely unsurprising tri-lands:
http://media-dominaria.cursecdn.com/attachments/130/915/635439535566463578.png
http://media-dominaria.cursecdn.com/attachments/130/916/635439535594972038.png

neither mechanic is particularly linear so my fears of getting a gatecrash style limited format are hopefully unfounded

had not seen those. the mechanics seem pretty mild but make for interesting play decisions, which sounds good to me tbh

Prowess seems like a rather dangerous mechanic should they push a card hard for Standard play

i think they're supposed to be mild, much like the ravnica guild mechanics. the block has morph in it already, which is one of the weirder mechanics that exist in this game, so you can't go too hard on the other ones

i really like how raid is the rare 'attacking matters' mechanic that doesn't actually scale in effectiveness with the aggressiveness of your deck; maybe we can finally get a limited format where RW aggro isn't capable of snowballing

ha yeah r/w has had quite the run hasn't it

my favourite reimbursement claim to date, a triple whammy of sorts:

During pack 1 of this draft, on two occasions the draft froze for an extended period with 0:00 on the clock for the pick and then jumped ahead, by one pick first time and two picks second time, adding random cards to my deck. I pressed ahead anyway and got to deck building. I tried to submit and was told I could not and had to log back in. When I did, several of my cards were missing, replaced by basic lands.

something similar happened to me once where it gave me a 70 card deck with a ton of extra basic lands but not the cards that I wasn't playing. I have no clue what happened but it was as if the submit didn't take and it just gave me the standard 80 (or whatever) card deck that's every card you drafted plus an "auto" assortment of lands, but then it took out every non-land I didn't submit. I don't even know how a glitch like that could happen.

new archetype discovered by draft opponent

http://i.imgur.com/m4K9oHU.png

that seems fine if his deck is full of like wall of mulch & hornet nest & red removal

that is fair. it did make me lol tho. and...it wasn't.

any thoughts on the maro bomb?

you'll have to explain

no more core sets, all blocks will be 2 sets

wow, that's nuts. I guess that solves the "3rd set problem" huh?

what's the release schedule for these going to be? it's not gonna be every 3 months now is it?

standard rotates spring and fall with each block, 18 month cycle instead of 24

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mm/metamorphosis

that's pretty big news, but as someone who plays 95% limited I do find it rather exciting, drafting one set for an entire year is boring and I always found full-block draft to be a little awkward

yeah I think it's pretty tricky to design in a way to ensure drafting both the first set and full block will create coherent/dynamic limited metas

it's pretty hard to ensure that full block 'does something' cause the variance between pools is always so high

yeah this is a pretty universally positive change imo. more 'expert-level' limited formats and more standard rotations is exactly what the game needs to stay fresh in the twitch.tv era

especially since people are figuring out very very quickly what the best decks are and fine-tuning them into oblivion, reducing the amount of time something like Caw-blade or Monoblack devotion would be in Standard is probably a good thing

I'm sure it's a good change, but I suspect it will end up making it that much more expensive to keep up with standard

my fuzzy logic suggests that it'll be around 10% more expensive to keep up with standard, which is worth it for a more dynamic format imo

http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/25/amazon-will-officially-acquire-twitch/?ncid=rss