Magic: The Gathering C/D

yeah i've probably rambled about this on here before but the foundation for mtg lore has shifted from bad fantasy novels to superhero comics. i spent my childhood reading the former and not the latter so it's a pretty negative change for me

i do think making the story much more tightly woven in with the game itself is a reasonable thing to do but it's extremely limiting. i would guess the current approach probably works for the kind of audience that the story is going to have a real impact upon, particularly younger players. i'd love them to actually take advantage of the limitations of the format for storytelling in a similar way that the dark souls series has but that would have a pretty narrow appeal.

I wonder if this has something to do w/ the superhero movie boom, the mtg movie has been in the works for years now and maybe they think there's some way to turn it into the next x-men franchise

imprisoned in the moon actually seems pretty strong fwiw, gives mono-u an answer to any creature/planeswalker/land across formats

they've moved back towards the approach they used in tempest thru invasion blocks where they show actual story moments on the cards (e.g. fall of the titans, anguished unmaking, tragic arrogance, why are they all removal spells idk), rather than just pure worldbuilding with the story as a supplemental thing which is what they did for a while. the difference is either that the story isn't as good now or we all grew up, probably some of both.

also the novelty aspect is gone

it's just funny cause maro seems to be so excited about all the work their writers have done and who knows maybe their market research supports that and there are a bunch of kitchen table types who are just thrilled every time they see jace and gideon on a card. I think an extended return to dominaria and the original urza/mishra storyline would probably be hugely successful. time spiral + coldsnaps were failures cause 1000 mechanics + poorly developed set not because of their flavor.

yeah i agree with that. i do think with 2 blocks a year that we'll see dominaria again before too long but i'm not sure at this point that they'd do an actual retro magic story rather than just send the planeswalker justice league there

I liked Time Spiral block a lot but it should've been clear to them that it wasn't going to appeal to anyone who wasn't a long-time player already and that's why it's looked upon as a 'failure'. I've found the #1 complaint from new players is that there are just too many words and terms to memorize and TSP block took that to a ridiculous degree. Plus Sprout Swarm which seemed like it was...not playtested at all

FWIW I thought Coldsnap was reasonably well developed, but 3x a small set isn't going to be a good format no matter what you do. The novelty of drafting it with Ice Age and Alliances wears off pretty quick when you realize how low the power level of those old cards really were - so many random downsides and cards with 6 lines of texts that ultimately don't do anything.

I'm not into the mock-superhero stuff at all but I'm not the target audience - I still find it less embarassing than the Weatherlight stuff, though, which really makes me feel bad about the hobby every time I encounter it. I did like the "self-contained sad stories" vibe they went with in between but it's not at all marketable and it's not like anyone was "engaged" with it, it just felt, like, non-awful.

Also Martin Shkreli <3 <3 https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/4rm2x6/advice_for_a_new_and_wealthy_player/ this game is home to so much beautiful stupidity i love itttttt

not sure he'll actually do it, but someone who really wants to mess w/ the secondary market could do wonders with $1m

I know, the whole idea is pretty funny

We already know he'd spend that much for a wu-tang album

there was a massive buyout of Lions Eye Diamonds which caused the price to spike a good amount

i have a playset of serra's sanctums which is suddenly worth $500 instead of $100 i dont know what happened there

theres some folks buying out a bunch of reserved list legacy cards

so my understanding is that some #mtgfinance zero orchestrated buyouts of (in order) led, city of traitors, serra's sanctum and gaea's cradle spurring ppl to call him the 'martin shkreli of mtg'. now thanks to google alerts weve got actual shkreli talking about buying up reserved list cards which is... idk what that is actually.

i thought during the period from og innistrad to serial killer garruk the mtg story was... not embarrassing. i feel like trying to squeeze 'story moments' into card art never works, even just visually? the scope is wrong, its too small and static and the cards look shitty fan art.

ive been slowly selling off my excess cards and foil modern cards and reserve-list-but-not-tournament-playable cards over the last year. ive used some of the money to get stuff like a mint library (only US$360 fourteen months ago!), bazaars and power and a full set of duals but ive also been cashing out a lot. i genuinely believe mtg is reaching a bad place financially although im not sure what the means, exactly. i think the short term result is increased pressure on dealers/stores who are holding way too much money in inventory as more players decide to cash out. i think vendors will be slow-ish to panic on singles but i worry about financial pressure effecting organized play negatively. i dont think tournament players (or maybe even wotc) realize who reliant the game is on stores being willing to run negative equity events like pptqs, wmcqs, even fnms &c

many posting on my phone is hard

i'm curious how the game is selling now, i remember from OG zendikar thru theros they made a big deal of showing how sales were growing rapidly year over year and then they kind of went quiet on that front circa khans

i don't know if legacy is fucked but if it is then that probably spills into modern too. standard has been mediocre for a few seasons now so i'm not really sure what constructed format people are digging if any. it honestly feels like they've overcompensated for the mistakes of the past at this point, with white and green and midrange creature decks being overpushed. they hit a good balance circa RTR and then blasted right on past it.

the game is still good though, don't wanna be all doom and gloom, but competitive constructed definitely has some issues to sort out. modern's prob the healthiest constructed format overall right now but still has some core issues re: card availability and combo deck matchups

i havent particularly enjoyed the current standard but like the format generally. i think modern is garbage but thats a personal thing. i do think the secondary market as a whole is in a really bad place though and i think players dont realize how much that impacts the ecosystem no matter how good or bad certain formats are

players need to want to own cards more than they want to sell them basically

I think legacy is healthyish though a lot of people grumble about miracles. eldrazi is pretty dumb and I think they need to ban chalice, kinda expect it to happen one day.

modern is in a wild west state, though I have a feeling that nahiri control might end up 'the best deck' once it's solved. I think there's debate as to whether a format that's been solved and has best decks is 'healthier' than one that doesn't. I always feel like I have the least competitive advantage playing modern, my modern win % has always been way lower than my win % for every other format. (though I don't play standard.)

players need to want to own cards more than they want to sell them basically

people also refuse to take losses on anything other than standard cards and don't like trading away any of their high value stuff ever. I think this leads to a situation where all 'high value cards' end up even more expensive than they should be. e.g. nobody wants bitterblossom but nobody trades their bitterblossoms.

standard is my favorite format historically, just think it's a bit less diverse/balanced lately than usual

looks like they took EMA down. what did you guys think overall? I drafted it ~25 times online and wasn't completely sick of it yet. kinda was MM-style limited where you pick a lane and go with it but there were a lot of fun strategies and a lot of ways to build a 4/5c deck. I was always scared someone would be clever enough to price of progress me when I drafted 11 dual decks but it never actually happened.

Apparently Shkreli a lead bought a bunch of Black Lotuses. I find the whole situation pretty hilarious.

I think standard is a bit better now than during BFZ, but not great. I really enjoyed it during Khans block.

a lead = already

e.g. nobody wants bitterblossom but nobody trades their bitterblossoms.

Yeah I feel intuitively that this is very bad, but it's hard for me to articulate exactly why?

I feel like "format diversity" is what everyone wants but there's massive dishonesty re: admitting that format diversity is often to a large degree a financial effect, like in Modern people keep playing "their deck" even when it's tier 2.5 or whatever because acquiring another is just this impossible shuddering effort. So I don't know if there's a way to have both "access" and "diversity".

thats definitely the case for modern/legacy, but in standard we've had formats with as many as a dozen 'top tier' decks at once, and right now it feels really skewed towards green midrange and collected company decks which is only a few decks

i think what i dislike is more the color imbalance than the number of archetypes tbh. i didn't mind caw-blade standard since there was a good RB deck on the next step down rather than another UW deck

I'm FB friends with the dude who did the LED and Moat buyouts, used to see him a lot at PTQs. He's gotten SO much hate for buying like 40 copies of these cards, and I think maybe 0.5% of the complainers had any intention to buy these cards, if that. He not only got comparisons to Shkreli, but Hitler as well. And death threats. I'm finding it pretty hilarious and I think he is too. Now that the real Shkreli is involved I can't wait to see what happens

40 copies, really? That's all it takes to move the price that much?

There's not a ton on the tcgplayer market at any one time so if you buy that many people see them 'sold out' and panic

really feel like I ought to sell out right now, Library of Alexandria is hitting a grand

i've been trying to downsize my collection for a while but a big chunk of it is old standard staples that are marginal in modern and thus have low demand, i've found a lot of these cards aren't actually worth nearly the amount they're supposedly selling for when you look at tcgplayer price. e.g. restoration angel is $12 median currently but no one actually needs them.

yeah that's the issue I'm gonna have to. my collection is supposedly worth like 20k or something according to these websites but I can't imagine anyone giving me more than 5k or 6k in a single shot. like someone is telling me "SELL YOUR CRADLES NOW!" which I get, it's over $200 now, but is there really any liquidity at that price?

you could look at the major vendor online buylist prices or do it at the next big event near you

i'd like to go down to 1 deck per format but ever since the birthing pod ban i haven't been able to figure out the 1 modern deck that i'd be happy running forever. i was playing scapeshift for a while but the emergence of infect as a popular deck has made that kind of frustrating

i've been waiting for someone to come up with a good thopter foundry list since i love thirst for knowledge decks but that doesn't seem to be happening

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/card-image-gallery/eldritch-moon

first thing i noticed is common removal is total garbage. murder and exile lightning strike at uncommon feel like bombs

also, the missing zombies from SOI have arrived

i just want to kill people with Stensia Banquet, that concept is really funny to me

xp yeah he's only buying from tcgplayer, not eBay, so yeah 40 copies is everything available

i'm playing dredge in Modern and this deck should not exist. highly recommended

I have yet to see modern dredge in action...how fast does it goldfish? I hate dredge btw

its pretty wildly variant depending on how many prized amalgams you hit off your first couple dredges but it's enough to overwhelm all the fair decks

also i play burning inquiry in my list which is a card that will sometimes just make your opponent concede on turn 1

ha that's pretty mean

a typical start might look something like t1 insolent neonate, discard and dredge a stinkweed imp or grave troll, t2 dredge something and play a land returning 1-2 bloodghasts and 1-2 prized amalgams, maybe you have a narcomoeba in play too, if your draw is real good you can maybe even get some more stuff into play off a faithless looting but the point is you're putting as much as 10 power into play on turn 2 and it's mostly guys that will come right back turn 3 if they get removed

Interesting changes announced for the next year, especially the change to top 8 bracket. What do y'all think?