magic: the gathering poll

i gave up on the game (for like the 4th time) when planeswalkers came out.

invasion block was dope imo

i guess it's because i'm a bit younger than folks here and got to play w/ invasion, odyssey, etc when i was still a kid but i definitely like those sets just as much as the super-oldschool ones if not more

Way back in the day of NetDraft and Apprentice, we used to do Arabian Nights/Antiquities/Legends/The Dark drafts which were completely unplayable. You know all the overpowered stuff like Library of Alexandria, Mana Drain, Nether Void, etc. but you guys are right on with how incredibly bad the rest of those sets were. I remember the lands that just said things like "all your legends gain bands with other legends" and didn't even produce mana!

IMO set design only started to get "good" around Mirage. In fact Alliances is really the first expansion set that wasn't like, completely terrible. Even Ice Age had a ton of cards with these walls of text that ended up doing almost nothing. In fact I remember Necropotence going completely unnoticed because nobody could figure out what it actually did! (obviously it turned out to be the best card in the set and maybe one of the greatest cards ever)

yeah i think that's all pretty on-point.

yeah they were sorta designing sets on the fly until then, w/o really doing the leg-work to make sure things were balanced. even after they started doing it, people always found cards and combos to exploit that you wouldn't have thought of w/o a careful analysis.

Mirage was the first set they made with sealed/draft in mind iirc

mirage block was a blast to play

I actually liked the planeswalker idea a lot at first but they basically ruined it by A) making them all stupidly powerful, and B) making them "mythic rare", so there were much less to go around

Basically all my problems with the game now can be summarized with this card:

http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/EXID21272/images/Jace,_the_Mind_Sculptor.jpg

IIRC this thing went up to nearly $100 a pop before it got banned. I remember somebody showing me this on a spoiler list and thinking that it was one of the best cards they've ever printed, then actually seeing it and realizing that it actually costed four instead of five and was even better, needless to say every blue deck needed to play it

i just didn't get it--they were always so good at making powerful cards that were balanced and had some kind of drawback, and then they made planeswalkers which literally had no drawbacks.

yeah it's like someone just wanted to fuck up the game also it doesn't even make any sense, I thought you were a planeswalker, how can you have your own planeswalker pet

yeah jace tms was a mistake, they basically designed it to be an all-powerful card, and it was, and people started quitting the game over it so they had to ban it in t2.

the planeswalkers they've made since then are much more build-around cards and less general-utility have-to-play-it ones, which is a bit of an improvement. i don't really mind planeswalkers but they feel more like a marketing triumph than a game design triumph, since they finally managed to create cards that are techy enough to appeal to competetive players and splashy enough to appeal to casual players at the same time.

the drawback was that they can be attacked, but the best ones like the Jace above or the new Liliana could protect themselves.

also, this

http://magiccards.info/scans/en/m10/4.jpg

to me it seemed like some kind of ridiculous fantasy card that a 13-year old would design, but it was real and it sucked :(

its sad that they also printed Serra Angel in literally the same set

what's funny is how baneslayer angel was a $40 card that was in a ton of decks one year, and then a $5 card that saw almost no play the next year

i like the flavor of a lot of the early expansions but they are incredibly unbalanced. 'legends' in particular is a terrible set and all the legends are retarded, little attempt to think abt e.g. how casting costs should be balanced w/mana flow. according to the internet the early sets were developed half with the idea that they could be played as standalone so cards like camel or city or in a bottle make a lot more sense/are useful in that context.

banding can be really good but its sorta overused in the early expansions imo all those legends unique lands that granted banding &c

my least favorite thing abt the new sets is that they added 'equipment' instead of basic enchantments, i tried playing a sealed tournament early this summer with w/e expansion was coming out and i just didnt vibe it at all

oh also the newest set has double-sided cards, if you oldschool folks need more things to wtf at

yeah equipment is so not mtg

my least favorite thing abt the new sets is that they added 'equipment' instead of basic enchantments, i tried playing a sealed tournament early this summer with w/e expansion was coming out and i just didnt vibe it at all

I like the equipment. The problem with creature enchantment is that your opponent can just destroy the creature and kill two cards for the price of one. I loved the ones that were "living weapons", that was a super cool idea.

what's funny is how baneslayer angel was a $40 card that was in a ton of decks one year, and then a $5 card that saw almost no play the next year

here's why:
http://d28yjzray7dvaa.cloudfront.net/mtg-cards/new-phyrexia/dismember.jpg

Basically, as long as this card is legal, no creature w/ 5 toughness that doesn't protect itself will ever be truly "broken". This gives them the freedom to print stuff that seems really stupidly powerful (like the Phyrexian Obliterator, WTF) without having to worry about things running away from them. Now the big beaters of choice are the Titans which is almost certainly because they are 6/6s

I think the problem is there's this idea that you always have to give people something fresh and different and inevitable you're gonna run into diminshing returns w/ new ideas that can fit within what 'works' within the dynamics of mtg

equipment doesn't make sense, how can a pile of sludge have a battle axe or whatever and again, it's just not-mtg, artifacts already played that role

and it's inevitable*

i think my biggest issue with planeswalkers is that they're so big and obvious. a lot of the strongest cards in magic's history look completely innocuous the first time you see them. like, for example, this card:
http://magiccards.info/wwk/en/20.html
spent the first year or so of its existence as a bargain bin rare. then one day some pro players decided to try it in their blue-white control deck. 6 months later, it's in every deck in t2 and gets banned.

i really like the idea that there are these awesome cards lurking out there that no one's figured out yet, and planewalkers really play against that discovery process by coming with hype already attached

equipment doesn't make sense, how can a pile of sludge have a battle axe or whatever and again, it's just not-mtg, artifacts already played that role

― iatee, Thursday, December 8, 2011 12:03 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

isn't this like a classic fantasy-rpg trope/suspension of disbelief thing?

equipment doesn't make sense, how can a pile of sludge have a battle axe or whatever and again, it's just not-mtg, artifacts already played that role

ehhh, that kind of plausability went out the window from the very first set. when you had Merfolk that lived underwater yet could still block land creatures. or the infamous Whooperwill, the bird without flying

i think my biggest issue with planeswalkers is that they're so big and obvious. a lot of the strongest cards in magic's history look completely innocuous the first time you see them. like, for example, this card:
http://magiccards.info/wwk/en/20.html
spent the first year or so of its existence as a bargain bin rare. then one day some pro players decided to try it in their blue-white control deck. 6 months later, it's in every deck in t2 and gets banned.

i really like the idea that there are these awesome cards lurking out there that no one's figured out yet, and planewalkers really play against that discovery process by coming with hype already attached

I think the game can exist with both. Stoneforge is a weird case because it really was not good when it first game out as there really wasn't any good equipment. I think it was pretty evident that it was going to be amazing if playable equipment was printed - it never should have dipped to only a buck.

In general I think it's not too tough to figure out what these cards are. I stocked up on Entombs because it was very efficient (one mana instant) and did something no other card did even though it didn't have a use in Type 2 - now it's $40. There were a bunch of Future Sight cards like that too, which were so unique and interacted with other cards in such strange ways that it's no surprise that some of them jumped so high. Tarmogoyf was the ultimate example, that thing went from $3 to about $80 in less than a year!

damn looking at prices right a good portfolio of magic cards was a better investment than the stock market

its insane how much Alpha/Beta duals go for, especially the Underground Sea, which is now worth more than any card sans Black Lotus

no but even like tempest rares or whatever are going for pretty good money

http://www.amazon.com/Force-Will-Magic-Gathering-Alliances/dp/B0030IW4GM/ref=pd_sim_sbs_t_3

I had like 6 of these ffs. someone who bought boxes of cards and sat on them could have made a killing.

i don't understand how most of these new cards being posted work, like not even close (especially whatever mechanics are supposed to be involved with that planeswalker).

iirc i started right when antiquities came out, and stopped right before fallen empires. a friend of mine and i managed to get all of 'the dark' cards together, no idea what happened to those.

quick google search shows that if i had kept it, i could turn it into a cool hundred bucks now

i still have 3 or 4 force of wills--probably my most valuable card and also the card that rules the most.

xxp Basically that one starts with 3 counters (the number in the lower right corner), then each turn you can use one ability by adding or subtracting the "cost" on the left. It can also be attacked and directly damaged as though it was a player. Kinda weird but overall pretty neat

yeah the ultimate ace in the hole xp

o apparently my bazaar of baghdad may be worth more?

damn these prices seem like theyve blown up since i last checked.

so it gains counters by looking at the other player's cards? and can it take damage equivalent to the number of counters or something?

yeah Bazaar of Baghdad is definitely worth a bunch now since you can do so much with your graveyard now.

Wasteland was a surprising one, that was a $1/$1.50 uncommon back in the days of Tempest (quite expensive for an uncommon I might add!), now it's over $30

so it gains counters by looking at the other player's cards? and can it take damage equivalent to the number of counters or something?

right - if you do the first ability, you add two. if you do the third, you subtract one. when a player attacks you, they can now "attack" Jace, and for each damage it takes it loses a counter

so absurd

the funniest price spike was definitely Necropotence, a card that nobody wanted because A) it had way too many words on it and was really confusing, and B) players hated paying life and didn't really care about card advantage, then some guys started winning tournaments with it and everyone realized "wait, this card basically says you can draw as many cards as you want, that's really good" as it jumped from $5 to like $25

yeah that was really the first era of higher-level analysis w/r/t playing dynamics. after that the mirage era prosperous bloom deck really took the game somewhere else - before that you couldn't imagine a deck that sophisticated that actually functioned and wasn't just for fun.

my friend has most of the mox gems and every og dual land in both alpha/beta and unlimited and when we first playing i couldnt believe how much they were worth. his arent in perfect condition or anything cuz he played with most of them but the prices for old rare magic cards are o_O

also going back but i object to equipment more on game flavor than mechanics, some of the actual cards are p rad, i just dont like how rpg-ish it is, i guess? tbh my real problem is just the too slick and heavy card art and the stupid sci fi dystopia concept

the sci-fi dystopia stuff was just the setting for one block though (last year's)

the new one they just started is a sort of colonial/gothic horror theme, v. different

I think the problem is there's this idea that you always have to give people something fresh and different and inevitable you're gonna run into diminshing returns w/ new ideas that can fit within what 'works' within the dynamics of mtg

I dunno, the Time Spiral block seemed to indicate that they aren't even close. Basically the "theme" of the set was the game itself, so a bunch of cards would reference older cards, and old mechanics like flanking and shadow came back, plus each pack had a random card out of a set of old cards throughout the game's history, with the old art and card face and everything, and were all legal to play even if they were horribly out of flavor. Then Planar Chaos came along as was like this "alternate reality" of magic, where white had burn and green had card draw. And Future Sight blew the doors off everything, adding another new card face, like a dozen new keyword mechanics, a bunch of cards that did things no other card had done before, cards that made no sense under current rules, and a card that referenced Planeswalkers even though they hadn't been printed yet. The whole block seemed like it was a clear "jump the shark" moment for the game but they handled it really well and demonstrated that there was a lot of design space left.

if you have a moment just revel in the bizarreness of this set, where like half the cards seem like outliers:

http://mtgsalvation.com/future-sight-spoiler.html

I'd like to try out cockatrice if someone is free and bored sometime in the next few hours

this is pretty entertaining

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_QYXXhXthM

haha I feel 30% draw to that 70% repulsed

"an unstoppable army of infinite fairies"

And I was wondering why Kraftwerk's 'Autobahn' was being used for background music, but I guess that Ralf is a serious Magic player. Or maybe Florian is.

I thought it was just classic geek rock

oh wow sad i missed all the good discush in this thread

at the height of my powers i was playing a p aggressive green/white deck that did well for me at middle school but was consistently getting my ass kicked when i went to HEAD GAMES or the other comic shop in my town, the name of which i cant remember, but which had like a super extensive hentai collection

thing is i mostly played some combination of red/green/white aggro/beatdown decks but i always really wanted to a blue control kind of guy. story of my life i guess.