They need to review their product line. The Challenger decks are the first very solid product that will be released by them. I think they should be like Pokemon, ]because they actually reprint rares that are getting too expensive in Standard format because by doing this, they're bringing down the price and helping players on a budget such as me. Like reprint them in a box set, or holiday gift box even better, with 4-6 packs and a spindown die.
Do they? Tapu Lele GX and Shaymin EX (the version with the Setup ability) were the most expensive cards in Standard in the last few years by a considerable margin, being around $50. But Shaymin EX never got a reprint until after it had rotated out of Standard, by which time it had lost something like 2/3 of its value anyway. Tapu Lele GX hasn't gotten any kind of reprint either, though admittedly it's "only" been legal for 9 months in Standard.
Also worth noting though that Tapu Lele and Shaymin were expensive because they saw play in all decks. If you bought 2-3 of them, you basically had spent not only 75% of the cost of the deck you wanted, but 75% of any other deck in standard.
Having a non garbage story
Stop pandering to casuals. They've already moved onto DBZ battles.
Put value in sets to sell packs.
Take care of your most loyal fans...the ones that play eternal formats aka they people that has will always stick with the game and not go to DBZ on a whim.
Having a non garbage story
Stop pandering to casuals. They've already moved onto DBZ battles.
Put value in sets to sell packs.
Take care of your most loyal fans...the ones that play eternal formats aka they people that has will always stick with the game and not go to DBZ on a whim.
Games based on licensed properties are rarely more than a flash in the pan.
Having a non garbage story
Stop pandering to casuals. They've already moved onto DBZ battles.
Put value in sets to sell packs.
Take care of your most loyal fans...the ones that play eternal formats aka they people that has will always stick with the game and not go to DBZ on a whim.
Games based on licensed properties are rarely more than a flash in the pan.
That's fine except in my experience once casuals get lured away, they dont come back to Magic, there's a better chance they quit paper games in general and go to Hearthstone or boardgames. Thats why I think going all in to pander to casual player wont work out in the long run...they're very fickle.
Having a non garbage story
Stop pandering to casuals. They've already moved onto DBZ battles.
Put value in sets to sell packs.
Take care of your most loyal fans...the ones that play eternal formats aka they people that has will always stick with the game and not go to DBZ on a whim.
Games based on licensed properties are rarely more than a flash in the pan.
That's fine except in my experience once casuals get lured away, they dont come back to Magic, there's a better chance they quit paper games in general and go to Hearthstone or boardgames. Thats why I think going all in to pander to casual player wont work out in the long run...they're very fickle.
There are always more new casual players, just over the horizon. After all, MaRo said the average amount of time someone plays MtG is just 5 years. The grognards who have been playing for 10, 15, 20 years are the rare ones.
Having a non garbage story
Stop pandering to casuals. They've already moved onto DBZ battles.
Put value in sets to sell packs.
Take care of your most loyal fans...the ones that play eternal formats aka they people that has will always stick with the game and not go to DBZ on a whim.
Games based on licensed properties are rarely more than a flash in the pan.
That's fine except in my experience once casuals get lured away, they dont come back to Magic, there's a better chance they quit paper games in general and go to Hearthstone or boardgames. Thats why I think going all in to pander to casual player wont work out in the long run...they're very fickle.
There are always more new casual players, just over the horizon. After all, MaRo said the average amount of time someone plays MtG is just 5 years. The grognards who have been playing for 10, 15, 20 years are the rare ones.
Wow I never knew my LGS was filled with rare gems of players.... That kind of makes me feel alittle better about myself (and others I play with) I am one of the younger ones and I started at Ice Age....
Real talk, most Magic players do kitchen table stuff in private/casual groups, the LGS crowd is mainly more dedicated players. Hell, the forums crowd is pretty skewed towards long term players too.
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“Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.” Esmeralda Santiago Art is life itself.
Real talk, most Magic players do kitchen table stuff in private/casual groups, the LGS crowd is mainly more dedicated players. Hell, the forums crowd is pretty skewed towards long term players too.
Yea we dont casual around like all the random people out in the woods.
All the casuals for sure exist, but we never ever going to see them, hiding like the trolls in the dark under the bridges.
Actually, now that you mention it I don't think anyone I've played with is actually a new player. Even the ones who were newish already played the game before and were at most returning players. I know one person was surprised to find out his Faeries deck went up in value from Lorwyn. Also, he and I had pulled a lot of Sensei's divining Top and both of us picked up the rat precons that had Umezawa's Jitte in it.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
I think another thing wizards could do to improve magic is better templating on certain cards. Soulflayer is actually a pretty good card, just that it should be "has the abilities of all creature cards exiled with this card" instead of specifically a few abilities. That way it can expand or make use of older abilities like land walk or protection from X. It doesn't impact the standard environment and makes the card infinitely more modern and legacy playable.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
I think another thing wizards could do to improve magic is better templating on certain cards. Soulflayer is actually a pretty good card, just that it should be "has the abilities of all creature cards exiled with this card" instead of specifically a few abilities. That way it can expand or make use of older abilities like land walk or protection from X. It doesn't impact the standard environment and makes the card infinitely more modern and legacy playable.
But "all abilities" would include a lot of other abilities that simply make the card too strong.
They intentional use the wording to "control" what the card is able to do and keep it fair.
Allowing for more and degenerate stuff to happen is cool for any Jonny player that enjoys tinkering and exploring whats possible, but WotC really dislikes it, as it makes it almost impossible for them to keep a very tight fist around what will happen (as they badly "try" to predict formats to avoid cards to get out of hand, but even then they still do).
----
In the end, almost any card in modern could be classified as some kind of "mistake" by design or simply making a card too strong, so the balancing of the card is off and its just way too cheap for what it does.
A pile of mistakes still makes for a somewhat enjoyable format, so theres that ...
I think another thing wizards could do to improve magic is better templating on certain cards. Soulflayer is actually a pretty good card, just that it should be "has the abilities of all creature cards exiled with this card" instead of specifically a few abilities. That way it can expand or make use of older abilities like land walk or protection from X. It doesn't impact the standard environment and makes the card infinitely more modern and legacy playable.
But "all abilities" would include a lot of other abilities that simply make the card too strong.
They intentional use the wording to "control" what the card is able to do and keep it fair.
Allowing for more and degenerate stuff to happen is cool for any Jonny player that enjoys tinkering and exploring whats possible, but WotC really dislikes it, as it makes it almost impossible for them to keep a very tight fist around what will happen (as they badly "try" to predict formats to avoid cards to get out of hand, but even then they still do).
----
In the end, almost any card in modern could be classified as some kind of "mistake" by design or simply making a card too strong, so the balancing of the card is off and its just way too cheap for what it does.
A pile of mistakes still makes for a somewhat enjoyable format, so theres that ...
It would be more like all non-activated abilities of creatures. Basically protection from X, shroud, etc. They need to generalize the abilities like this because otherwise they will keep making different versions of the same thing over and over again. If they make one ability that gets non-activated abilities from creatures in a graveyard and have it defined by keyword, they can change the rules on that specific ability whenever they want. So if they make a creature like Soulflayer have some ability called Soul Forge that gives creatures all non-activated abilities of creatures exiled from a graveyard or something, than it can be modified later via a rules change.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Modern is filled with all sorts of things that Wizards constantly claims is "too powerful" or not fun to have in Standard. Blood Moon, Mana Leak, Path to Exile, Thoughtseize, Tier 1 combo decks, land destruction decks, prison decks (well, a prison deck), etc. These are all things that supposedly people don't like having around in Standard.
But... Modern is, by various accounts, way more popular than Standard right now, and it seems like it's eclipsed Standard in popularity for a while now. However, Modern has all of those things. I don't know, maybe they should be strongly re-examining those various assumptions they had? Maybe it's time to start re-introducing those sorts of things to Standard? It's not like Standard seems to have been particularly unpopular back when those kinds of things were legal in it.
Yeah if we're just going by personal experience the most popular format is multiplayer EDH, because that's all I see when I go to my flgs for EDH Afternoon. (lol)
Seriously 60 card casual is probably the most popular format overall, with Standard or Draft as the most common sanctioned formats, just because there are a huge number of flgs's in the world and most of them host Friday Night Magic and a weekend tournament or two.
Also: because Modern and Legacy don't rotate and also have pretty cutthroat power levels, it's hard not to bounce off the scene.
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“Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.” Esmeralda Santiago Art is life itself.
Is Modern really more popular than standard? do you have any reliable numbers on that? I think "my lgs has only modern players" is not enough for that assumption to be correct, but only if this assumption is correct there might be a lesson about it.
I know my store barely fires Standard events at FNM anymore while Modern regularly gets 20+ players. They were starting to fire Standard events again (with something like 6 players), but then the recent batch of bannings happened and that kind of killed it again.
Obviously, that's not sufficient to conclude. But I've seen a lot of other people make similar statements... and not to see anyone who claims the opposite. Then you look at how SCG doesn't have any Standard-only Opens for the rest of this year; Standard is only represented in mixed format events like team or the Invitational. They have more Legacy Opens coming up this year than Standard ones!
As for nonrotating, you may have a point, but let's remember that when Legacy was the big nonrotating format, Standard was still more popular than that. And this wasn't the fault of Legacy not being popular, the format was pretty darn popular in the past. Of course, this was also back when cards like the ones I cited were more common in Standard, lending further credence to the idea that people prefer that kind of Standard format.
Oh, yeah, and one other thing Wizards of the Coast should do to improve Magic: Ban cheaters for life. Don't let them come back to cheat even more like they've been letting them doing.
WotC needs to stop underpaying their employees and used merchandise as a form of compensation to offset all their current problems with MTG. It's pretty scummy when you think about it because the pay rate isn't competitive with that of the surrounding area, there's no real opportunity within the company for a promotion, and the different divisions have little interaction between them making deadlines harder than it needs to be in order to maintain. The chaotic workplace that WotC enables through it's workplace practices is indicative of an upper management that doesn't seem qualified to manage.
Force of Will TCG was forced to cut all their print runs in an attempt to save their own game and even publicly acknowledged it which is more than what I can say for WotC in regards to MTG since they'd probably get sued into oblivion. There's a paradigm shift occurring where the internet has enabled people to shift power away from companies over to themselves where these companies end up making less money. People are buying less product because they can constantly get away with adding pressure against greedy companies in collective effort.
This has created a digital space for people who no longer have to play by the U.S. Government's rules of fear and misinformation anymore. Tie this in with the fact that the average gamer has less disposable income in their household as their adult responsibilities have become more important than luxury cardboard rectangles because the money is slim and the cost needs to be mitigated. This could also be a sign that the Trading Card Game/Collectible Card Game financial bubble is about to burst much like what happened with the 1990's Sports Card collapse.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Force of Will TCG was forced to cut all their print runs in an attempt to save their own game and even publicly acknowledged it which is more than what I can say for WotC in regards to MTG since they'd probably get sued into oblivion.
What for problems did force of will experience? Whenever someone brings that tcg up, its usually how well they do, how awesome the game is, and what a good reprint policy they have.
They didnt do anything wrong. The Tcg market in general isn't doing good at the moment.
Also, I was wrong on that statement I made earlier. The reason print runs got cut for that game is due to a misprint issue, so they had to cut the Time Spinning Witch run short. They actually have a second wave coming in June that has the issue fixed. The game is doing fine given the market right now.
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
The main reason for Force of Will's decline was how long they delayed banning Reflect/Refrain. I know that was back in 2016, but the game really hasn't been able to recover from that, which reversed what previously had been fairly impressive growth for it.
For those unaware of what I'm talking about: In Force of Will, each deck has a Ruler card, which functions similar to your Commander. However, one of the Rulers, Reflect/Refrain, was insanely powerful and decks using that as their Ruler utterly dominated events; I remember there was one Grand Prix where, of the Top 16 decks, only one wasn't running that card as their Ruler (it might have actually been top 32, not sure). To be fair to Reflect/Refrain, it worked in a wide variety of decks, so it's not like you had a field of the same decks, just the same Ruler. Still, it did have the effect of pushing out any strategies that depended on using any different Ruler and it was just kind of annoying to have around. While not quite a perfect comparison, the best Magic analogy I can think of was the time when Mental Misstep was legal in Legacy.
The right thing to do would have been, once its dominance was obvious, to simply ban it and move on. But instead, they kept trying various half-measures to avoid doing so, like issuing errata to weaken it (which did lessen the dominance a little but it was still the norm to see 7/8 of Top 8 decks have that as their Ruler), printing possible answer cards (which Reflect/Refrain decks just adopted themselves), and even switching Grand Prix formats from Standard to their equivalent of Block Constructed to try to fix the stagnate metagame (unfortunately, Reflect/Refrain was from the most recent "block" and thus was still legal and kept on dominating). Actually, the format switch might have been worse than not doing anything at all. At any rate, eventually they banned the card. But waiting so long to get rid of the card hurt the game considerably. Yes, people can point to other things that hurt the game, but those probably would have just been small bumps in the road if not for the entire Reflect/Refrain debacle.
The main reason for Force of Will's decline was how long they delayed banning Reflect/Refrain. I know that was back in 2016, but the game really hasn't been able to recover from that, which reversed what previously had been fairly impressive growth for it.
For those unaware of what I'm talking about: In Force of Will, each deck has a Ruler card, which functions similar to your Commander. However, one of the Rulers, Reflect/Refrain, was insanely powerful and decks using that as their Ruler utterly dominated events; I remember there was one Grand Prix where, of the Top 16 decks, only one wasn't running that card as their Ruler (it might have actually been top 32, not sure). To be fair to Reflect/Refrain, it worked in a wide variety of decks, so it's not like you had a field of the same decks, just the same Ruler. Still, it did have the effect of pushing out any strategies that depended on using any different Ruler and it was just kind of annoying to have around. While not quite a perfect comparison, the best Magic analogy I can think of was the time when Mental Misstep was legal in Legacy.
The right thing to do would have been, once its dominance was obvious, to simply ban it and move on. But instead, they kept trying various half-measures to avoid doing so, like issuing errata to weaken it (which did lessen the dominance a little but it was still the norm to see 7/8 of Top 8 decks have that as their Ruler), printing possible answer cards (which Reflect/Refrain decks just adopted themselves), and even switching Grand Prix formats from Standard to their equivalent of Block Constructed to try to fix the stagnate metagame (unfortunately, Reflect/Refrain was from the most recent "block" and thus was still legal and kept on dominating). Actually, the format switch might have been worse than not doing anything at all. At any rate, eventually they banned the card. But waiting so long to get rid of the card hurt the game considerably. Yes, people can point to other things that hurt the game, but those probably would have just been small bumps in the road if not for the entire Reflect/Refrain debacle.
I've been having fun with it now. The main problem is still the vingolf 3 supply issue and the dominance of green with the counter magic + ramp. Still don't like how they went cheap on the box for the Time Spinning Witch when they did great hard case boxes that work as storage boxes for the first two sets in the new block.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
From what I've been hearing Force of Will TCG's upper management are as incompetent as WotC's upper management for MTG. Their CEO did posts on their website about the current state of the game and the future, most of the articles were about his "Globalism" and using the game to jet set across the world, and that the quality of the game was a footnote. Worse yet? He explicably said he'd only listen to who he wanted to listen to regarding the quality of the game and what needs to be done, instead of listening to everyone and reflecting on what the most common complaints are.
The game is going to die because it's been terrible since Valhalla 1 and only got progressively worse since Alice 1. None of these people have any place running a game. The game has always had anecdotal reports of 20 man ARG's, tournaments not reported on numbers outside of anecdotes. While Time Spinning Witch might be a good set the reality is that the Force of Will TCG community hasn't been happy with the state of the game for quite some time now. Of course I haven't really been keeping up with the game since the Reflect/Refrain debacle and have been tempted to get back into it recently.
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America Bless Christ Jesus
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Make a list of hoser cards that can be made legal at anytime in standard. Cards like;
Rest in peace
stony silence
nihil spellbomb
eidilon of rhetoric
Have them randomly replace the token or basic land in packs so that supply is plenty and everybody has easy access to them. This way if a format needs a problem solved in a pinch they can just make a card legal on short notice. If something like delirium had become to powerful, just make RIP or nihil spellbomb legal. This way we don't have to wait for new sets to come out to fix issues in case wizards makes a mistake again.
Make a list of hoser cards that can be made legal at anytime in standard. Cards like;
Rest in peace
stony silence
nihil spellbomb
eidilon of rhetoric
Have them randomly replace the token or basic land in packs so that supply is plenty and everybody has easy access to them. This way if a format needs a problem solved in a pinch they can just make a card legal on short notice. If something like delirium had become to powerful, just make RIP or nihil spellbomb legal. This way we don't have to wait for new sets to come out to fix issues in case wizards makes a mistake again.
I dunno about that one. That kind of distribution and logistics would be a nightmare for everyone involved. The scenario isn't too far removed from Masterpieces and is one of the reasons I disliked the Masterpiece cards so much. So instead of handing candy out to every 52nd child and telling them they can't eat it (see how I worked they?), you're handing candy out to every 2nd or 3rd child and telling them they can't eat it.
Then there's draft, draft and draft. As much as I dislike draft, I can see it now. A big sign at the back of the LGS. "Legal draft card(s) of the day...."
WotC has already proven they can do zero hour substitutions and fixed "randomizations" with their packs. Your idea might work by setting aside 5 "wild card" common slots, one for each color and colorless. When a new set is printed, they can swap out the tagged jank common for an answer card. The tagged jank is set aside for a later set. So instead of "Rendered Flesh" or whatever, you get "Rest in Peace".
He explicably said he'd only listen to who he wanted to listen to regarding the quality of the game and what needs to be done, instead of listening to everyone and reflecting on what the most common complaints are.
Well, thats actually a good thing. I see it in this forum all the time. The people who complain about the game, are often not interested in the well-being of the game at all, but have an agenda how they like the game to be.
A producer always has to find the middle ground, a compromise, that gives the most people what they want. But since most people have only their own intrests in mind, they dont care about that, and thus, are never satisfied. Why listen to them at all?
That's an assumption and doesn't take into account context. You're not taking into account a narrow meta, power creep, and poor design decisions. All reasons people complain. Someone once brought up a question on a different message board forum, "You complain all the time, you clearly hate the game, why are you here?" Well the answer is simple, and it's true for many people who aired their grievances at one point in time:
We complain because we care.
We complain because despite liking the core mechanics, a narrow meta, poor design decisions, or power creep has reduced our enjoyment of or straight up removed any enjoyment we can have from the game. Yes it is an agenda on how we want the game to be, but it's wanting a diverse meta with either no or minimal unfair cards or mechanics. That's really it, that's the agenda. If someone wasn't interested in the well being of the game, they would just leave, because they wouldn't care.
Trolling and getting people really triggered which admittedly is easy for a lot of Trading Card Game/Collectible Card Game players is the only reason they stay. The lead designer/publisher/producer does have to find a middle ground or a compromise that pleases most people. It's kind of their job to know how loud the concern truly is and given that most Trading Card Game/Collectible Card Game players, especially Mods, are easily triggered, especially regarding game health and enjoyment of the game, how much concern is being suppressed.
It's easy to be biased toward others when it interferes with game diversity. Someone who likes Control and wants a Control meta isn't going to like Combo or Aggro being remotely viable, then fine feel free to ignore. But when your Trading Card Game/Collectible Card Game has been terrible like Force of Will TCG where it's only been getting worse as time goes on, you need to listen. When sales plummet? That's when you need to listen. Most of Force of Will TCG's complaints come down to one problem:
The card balance and color pie is absolutely atrocious. It needs fixing.
Everything else? Superfluous. When every single complaint echoes this in some form and the game is hurting as bad as it is due to people giving up on it, they should be listening. This is what I mean about making your own judgment. There are a lot of complaints about Force of Will TCG just as there are for MTG currently, ranging from art, to story, rarity, to how support is distributed. But this key one about color balance and color pie when it comes to Force of Will TCG is the loudest. MTG has it's own set of problems that differs from Force of Will TCG that we've already been discussing.
It's up to you If you choose not to listen. Go listen to cultivated communities where complaints are shunned by the 'community leaders' because the game will die immediately that second If they're not suppressed. Only means the game dies much faster. As for the assumption that people only have their own interests in mind and that they're never satisfied are really just more assumptions on people's motives, nothing more. It's not a personal agenda If everyone is saying the same thing.
Sure some people will have dumb ideas, but when it is nearly every player presenting the same problems, it's very unlikely that the players are wrong. 9/10, when you have a majority like that the developers are actually screwing up. What kills Trading Card Games/Collectible Card Games are the people who wear rose-colored glasses while refusing to acknowledge that there's a serious problem and continue to buy into it because they're afraid of change, being wrong, thinks their game will die otherwise, or a combination of any of those and more.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
WOTC could start by including more value in packs. Has anyone seen the Professor's videos on opening Masters 25 for the booster box game?
WOTC could also completely scrap their NWO card design. I only started playing MtG in Theros block, but I love the old style of play with more emphasis on the stack, heavy countermagic, heavy card draw, land destruction and answers stronger than threats. One actually feels like a wizard or planeswalker instead of only a creature summoner.
To those who say I should play legacy of vintage if I don't like the NWO I would direct you to my first point while also mentioning the reserve list. It is stupid that only those who like NWO crap get to play affordable magic. I don't mind that people like NWO cards, but I want the old style to be close to equally viable financially (not multiple orders of magnitude more expensive).
Also worth noting though that Tapu Lele and Shaymin were expensive because they saw play in all decks. If you bought 2-3 of them, you basically had spent not only 75% of the cost of the deck you wanted, but 75% of any other deck in standard.
Stop pandering to casuals. They've already moved onto DBZ battles.
Put value in sets to sell packs.
Take care of your most loyal fans...the ones that play eternal formats aka they people that has will always stick with the game and not go to DBZ on a whim.
Games based on licensed properties are rarely more than a flash in the pan.
That's fine except in my experience once casuals get lured away, they dont come back to Magic, there's a better chance they quit paper games in general and go to Hearthstone or boardgames. Thats why I think going all in to pander to casual player wont work out in the long run...they're very fickle.
There are always more new casual players, just over the horizon. After all, MaRo said the average amount of time someone plays MtG is just 5 years. The grognards who have been playing for 10, 15, 20 years are the rare ones.
Wow I never knew my LGS was filled with rare gems of players.... That kind of makes me feel alittle better about myself (and others I play with) I am one of the younger ones and I started at Ice Age....
Art is life itself.
Yea we dont casual around like all the random people out in the woods.
All the casuals for sure exist, but we never ever going to see them, hiding like the trolls in the dark under the bridges.
Be proud to be part of the Magic elite ;P
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
But "all abilities" would include a lot of other abilities that simply make the card too strong.
They intentional use the wording to "control" what the card is able to do and keep it fair.
Allowing for more and degenerate stuff to happen is cool for any Jonny player that enjoys tinkering and exploring whats possible, but WotC really dislikes it, as it makes it almost impossible for them to keep a very tight fist around what will happen (as they badly "try" to predict formats to avoid cards to get out of hand, but even then they still do).
----
In the end, almost any card in modern could be classified as some kind of "mistake" by design or simply making a card too strong, so the balancing of the card is off and its just way too cheap for what it does.
A pile of mistakes still makes for a somewhat enjoyable format, so theres that ...
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
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It would be more like all non-activated abilities of creatures. Basically protection from X, shroud, etc. They need to generalize the abilities like this because otherwise they will keep making different versions of the same thing over and over again. If they make one ability that gets non-activated abilities from creatures in a graveyard and have it defined by keyword, they can change the rules on that specific ability whenever they want. So if they make a creature like Soulflayer have some ability called Soul Forge that gives creatures all non-activated abilities of creatures exiled from a graveyard or something, than it can be modified later via a rules change.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Modern is filled with all sorts of things that Wizards constantly claims is "too powerful" or not fun to have in Standard. Blood Moon, Mana Leak, Path to Exile, Thoughtseize, Tier 1 combo decks, land destruction decks, prison decks (well, a prison deck), etc. These are all things that supposedly people don't like having around in Standard.
But... Modern is, by various accounts, way more popular than Standard right now, and it seems like it's eclipsed Standard in popularity for a while now. However, Modern has all of those things. I don't know, maybe they should be strongly re-examining those various assumptions they had? Maybe it's time to start re-introducing those sorts of things to Standard? It's not like Standard seems to have been particularly unpopular back when those kinds of things were legal in it.
Seriously 60 card casual is probably the most popular format overall, with Standard or Draft as the most common sanctioned formats, just because there are a huge number of flgs's in the world and most of them host Friday Night Magic and a weekend tournament or two.
Also: because Modern and Legacy don't rotate and also have pretty cutthroat power levels, it's hard not to bounce off the scene.
Art is life itself.
Obviously, that's not sufficient to conclude. But I've seen a lot of other people make similar statements... and not to see anyone who claims the opposite. Then you look at how SCG doesn't have any Standard-only Opens for the rest of this year; Standard is only represented in mixed format events like team or the Invitational. They have more Legacy Opens coming up this year than Standard ones!
As for nonrotating, you may have a point, but let's remember that when Legacy was the big nonrotating format, Standard was still more popular than that. And this wasn't the fault of Legacy not being popular, the format was pretty darn popular in the past. Of course, this was also back when cards like the ones I cited were more common in Standard, lending further credence to the idea that people prefer that kind of Standard format.
Oh, yeah, and one other thing Wizards of the Coast should do to improve Magic: Ban cheaters for life. Don't let them come back to cheat even more like they've been letting them doing.
Force of Will TCG was forced to cut all their print runs in an attempt to save their own game and even publicly acknowledged it which is more than what I can say for WotC in regards to MTG since they'd probably get sued into oblivion. There's a paradigm shift occurring where the internet has enabled people to shift power away from companies over to themselves where these companies end up making less money. People are buying less product because they can constantly get away with adding pressure against greedy companies in collective effort.
This has created a digital space for people who no longer have to play by the U.S. Government's rules of fear and misinformation anymore. Tie this in with the fact that the average gamer has less disposable income in their household as their adult responsibilities have become more important than luxury cardboard rectangles because the money is slim and the cost needs to be mitigated. This could also be a sign that the Trading Card Game/Collectible Card Game financial bubble is about to burst much like what happened with the 1990's Sports Card collapse.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
They didnt do anything wrong. The Tcg market in general isn't doing good at the moment.
Also, I was wrong on that statement I made earlier. The reason print runs got cut for that game is due to a misprint issue, so they had to cut the Time Spinning Witch run short. They actually have a second wave coming in June that has the issue fixed. The game is doing fine given the market right now.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
For those unaware of what I'm talking about: In Force of Will, each deck has a Ruler card, which functions similar to your Commander. However, one of the Rulers, Reflect/Refrain, was insanely powerful and decks using that as their Ruler utterly dominated events; I remember there was one Grand Prix where, of the Top 16 decks, only one wasn't running that card as their Ruler (it might have actually been top 32, not sure). To be fair to Reflect/Refrain, it worked in a wide variety of decks, so it's not like you had a field of the same decks, just the same Ruler. Still, it did have the effect of pushing out any strategies that depended on using any different Ruler and it was just kind of annoying to have around. While not quite a perfect comparison, the best Magic analogy I can think of was the time when Mental Misstep was legal in Legacy.
The right thing to do would have been, once its dominance was obvious, to simply ban it and move on. But instead, they kept trying various half-measures to avoid doing so, like issuing errata to weaken it (which did lessen the dominance a little but it was still the norm to see 7/8 of Top 8 decks have that as their Ruler), printing possible answer cards (which Reflect/Refrain decks just adopted themselves), and even switching Grand Prix formats from Standard to their equivalent of Block Constructed to try to fix the stagnate metagame (unfortunately, Reflect/Refrain was from the most recent "block" and thus was still legal and kept on dominating). Actually, the format switch might have been worse than not doing anything at all. At any rate, eventually they banned the card. But waiting so long to get rid of the card hurt the game considerably. Yes, people can point to other things that hurt the game, but those probably would have just been small bumps in the road if not for the entire Reflect/Refrain debacle.
I've been having fun with it now. The main problem is still the vingolf 3 supply issue and the dominance of green with the counter magic + ramp. Still don't like how they went cheap on the box for the Time Spinning Witch when they did great hard case boxes that work as storage boxes for the first two sets in the new block.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
The game is going to die because it's been terrible since Valhalla 1 and only got progressively worse since Alice 1. None of these people have any place running a game. The game has always had anecdotal reports of 20 man ARG's, tournaments not reported on numbers outside of anecdotes. While Time Spinning Witch might be a good set the reality is that the Force of Will TCG community hasn't been happy with the state of the game for quite some time now. Of course I haven't really been keeping up with the game since the Reflect/Refrain debacle and have been tempted to get back into it recently.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Rest in peace
stony silence
nihil spellbomb
eidilon of rhetoric
Have them randomly replace the token or basic land in packs so that supply is plenty and everybody has easy access to them. This way if a format needs a problem solved in a pinch they can just make a card legal on short notice. If something like delirium had become to powerful, just make RIP or nihil spellbomb legal. This way we don't have to wait for new sets to come out to fix issues in case wizards makes a mistake again.
We will rebuild.
I dunno about that one. That kind of distribution and logistics would be a nightmare for everyone involved. The scenario isn't too far removed from Masterpieces and is one of the reasons I disliked the Masterpiece cards so much. So instead of handing candy out to every 52nd child and telling them they can't eat it (see how I worked they?), you're handing candy out to every 2nd or 3rd child and telling them they can't eat it.
Then there's draft, draft and draft. As much as I dislike draft, I can see it now. A big sign at the back of the LGS. "Legal draft card(s) of the day...."
WotC has already proven they can do zero hour substitutions and fixed "randomizations" with their packs. Your idea might work by setting aside 5 "wild card" common slots, one for each color and colorless. When a new set is printed, they can swap out the tagged jank common for an answer card. The tagged jank is set aside for a later set. So instead of "Rendered Flesh" or whatever, you get "Rest in Peace".
We complain because we care.
We complain because despite liking the core mechanics, a narrow meta, poor design decisions, or power creep has reduced our enjoyment of or straight up removed any enjoyment we can have from the game. Yes it is an agenda on how we want the game to be, but it's wanting a diverse meta with either no or minimal unfair cards or mechanics. That's really it, that's the agenda. If someone wasn't interested in the well being of the game, they would just leave, because they wouldn't care.
Trolling and getting people really triggered which admittedly is easy for a lot of Trading Card Game/Collectible Card Game players is the only reason they stay. The lead designer/publisher/producer does have to find a middle ground or a compromise that pleases most people. It's kind of their job to know how loud the concern truly is and given that most Trading Card Game/Collectible Card Game players, especially Mods, are easily triggered, especially regarding game health and enjoyment of the game, how much concern is being suppressed.
It's easy to be biased toward others when it interferes with game diversity. Someone who likes Control and wants a Control meta isn't going to like Combo or Aggro being remotely viable, then fine feel free to ignore. But when your Trading Card Game/Collectible Card Game has been terrible like Force of Will TCG where it's only been getting worse as time goes on, you need to listen. When sales plummet? That's when you need to listen. Most of Force of Will TCG's complaints come down to one problem:
The card balance and color pie is absolutely atrocious. It needs fixing.
Everything else? Superfluous. When every single complaint echoes this in some form and the game is hurting as bad as it is due to people giving up on it, they should be listening. This is what I mean about making your own judgment. There are a lot of complaints about Force of Will TCG just as there are for MTG currently, ranging from art, to story, rarity, to how support is distributed. But this key one about color balance and color pie when it comes to Force of Will TCG is the loudest. MTG has it's own set of problems that differs from Force of Will TCG that we've already been discussing.
It's up to you If you choose not to listen. Go listen to cultivated communities where complaints are shunned by the 'community leaders' because the game will die immediately that second If they're not suppressed. Only means the game dies much faster. As for the assumption that people only have their own interests in mind and that they're never satisfied are really just more assumptions on people's motives, nothing more. It's not a personal agenda If everyone is saying the same thing.
Sure some people will have dumb ideas, but when it is nearly every player presenting the same problems, it's very unlikely that the players are wrong. 9/10, when you have a majority like that the developers are actually screwing up. What kills Trading Card Games/Collectible Card Games are the people who wear rose-colored glasses while refusing to acknowledge that there's a serious problem and continue to buy into it because they're afraid of change, being wrong, thinks their game will die otherwise, or a combination of any of those and more.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
WOTC could also completely scrap their NWO card design. I only started playing MtG in Theros block, but I love the old style of play with more emphasis on the stack, heavy countermagic, heavy card draw, land destruction and answers stronger than threats. One actually feels like a wizard or planeswalker instead of only a creature summoner.
To those who say I should play legacy of vintage if I don't like the NWO I would direct you to my first point while also mentioning the reserve list. It is stupid that only those who like NWO crap get to play affordable magic. I don't mind that people like NWO cards, but I want the old style to be close to equally viable financially (not multiple orders of magnitude more expensive).
Modern: URW Madcap Experiment
Pauper: MonoU Tempo Delver
My EDH Commanders:
Aminatou, The Fateshifter UBW
Azami, Lady of Scrolls U
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed B
Edric, Spymaster of Trest UG
Glissa, the Traitor BG
Arcum Dagsson U
Art is life itself.