After leaning from my mistake with the priest, well, I'm not discarding any bulk magic cards.
Eh, sometimes bulk is exactly that. Devoted Druid having an infinite mana combo was more a matter of time than anything else because it's a mana dork that untaps itself. Heck, it already had an in-block combo with Quillspike.
But the point of playing the game is to have fun, for entertainment, correct? If people enjoyed the game more with those cards, it would stand to reason that cards of a similar effectiveness should be printed. If the game is unhealthy, then inherently people wouldn't enjoy the game.
Again, your logic is flawed. In an earlier post you stated confidence in keeping power levels constant, but that task is far more difficult (and ineffective) than you describe. Power level is often difficult to measure in this game because the game can be played in so many different ways. How, specifically, would you design a set at the same power level while feeling unique? If you can't, who can?
Additionally, your assertion that player want power levels to be stable want is flat-out wrong. What people want is power creep; consumers want to buy a new product because it is better than whatever came before. The problem is that power creep risks sending a game into a death spiral that makes it hard to keep up with. The theoretical solution is to have an MC Escher-style infinite staircase in which new products create enough of an illusion of power creep to be effective, but the success of that policy's implementation has been mixed at best recently.
Your connection between enjoyment and a health is overly simplistic. Standard being unhealthy right now doesn't affect the enjoyment of modern players, who have a superbly healthy format right now. A bad limited format only bothers those who play draft or sealed. EDH communities self-police problems. Many people only play casual "kitchen table" Magic can have fun even if Wizards makes a mistake that turns every competitive format into a tire fire.
Nostalgia should never be used to inform current policies. Nothing good comes of it. Nostalgia is a seeping poison that corrupts the mind and muddles the senses. It's rarely accurate, and it frequently leaves out crucial details.
That's not necessarily true. If someone was nostalgic for something that means it provided some benefit to them over a long time. If someone was nostalgic for older cards, it would likely mean those older cards were more fun or there were more people playing with more fun decks that utilized those cards.
Sometime, but not always. The key pitfall of nostalgia is that everybody tends to notice external changes much more than internal ones. Comments on how much the game has changed are very common. Comments on how much individuals enjoy playing the game changed over time are much rarer, but they are equally, if not more, important as whatever changes the game sustained. Preference for one's early days playing the game are often entirely independent of how healthy the game actually was at that point in time. The not-always-true equivalency you stated hides serious negatives.
Nostalgia should never be used to inform current policies. Nothing good comes of it. Nostalgia is a seeping poison that corrupts the mind and muddles the senses. It's rarely accurate, and it frequently leaves out crucial details.
Expensive cards also hurt the integrity of the game too. What if you've been drafting esper etb value in mm17 drafts and in your last pack your rare is Séance and your foil is scalding tarn. Seance is a literally unbeatable magic card that costs less than toilet paper and foil Tarn is foil Tarn.
To be fair, Séance does have a chance to wheel because is a very narrow card that won't be picked by anyone outside of a white flicker archetype. It's not even an easy splash. Not that it isn't a strong card in the right deck, mind you, but your example leaves something to be desired.
Most of the people on this site who rail against card prices do so from the point of view of the purchaser, the "buy low" counterpart to the "sell high" perspective of players who want to buy products with good EV. Going after draft strategy is much more difficult because your examples are self-defeating. You treat opening a card worth more than your draft and picking it over a bomb as an inherently feel-bad moment, which it most certainly is not for many people. After all, selling an expensive card will always net you value, while even powerful bombs depend on the luck of the draw to win the draft.
Good luck trying to organize a boycott. Keep in mind that the stores that sell Modern Masters products would be hit far earlier and far harder than the company itself, so you might want to find stores that are willing to not sell Masters products in addition to players not willing to buy them. It would also be more effective if the people who participate are otherwise the kind who buy a lot of sealed product or play a lot of limited. A boycott composed of people who only buy singles or don't spend much at all on the game wouldn't be that effective.
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Eh, sometimes bulk is exactly that. Devoted Druid having an infinite mana combo was more a matter of time than anything else because it's a mana dork that untaps itself. Heck, it already had an in-block combo with Quillspike.
Again, your logic is flawed. In an earlier post you stated confidence in keeping power levels constant, but that task is far more difficult (and ineffective) than you describe. Power level is often difficult to measure in this game because the game can be played in so many different ways. How, specifically, would you design a set at the same power level while feeling unique? If you can't, who can?
Additionally, your assertion that player want power levels to be stable want is flat-out wrong. What people want is power creep; consumers want to buy a new product because it is better than whatever came before. The problem is that power creep risks sending a game into a death spiral that makes it hard to keep up with. The theoretical solution is to have an MC Escher-style infinite staircase in which new products create enough of an illusion of power creep to be effective, but the success of that policy's implementation has been mixed at best recently.
Your connection between enjoyment and a health is overly simplistic. Standard being unhealthy right now doesn't affect the enjoyment of modern players, who have a superbly healthy format right now. A bad limited format only bothers those who play draft or sealed. EDH communities self-police problems. Many people only play casual "kitchen table" Magic can have fun even if Wizards makes a mistake that turns every competitive format into a tire fire.
Sometime, but not always. The key pitfall of nostalgia is that everybody tends to notice external changes much more than internal ones. Comments on how much the game has changed are very common. Comments on how much individuals enjoy playing the game changed over time are much rarer, but they are equally, if not more, important as whatever changes the game sustained. Preference for one's early days playing the game are often entirely independent of how healthy the game actually was at that point in time. The not-always-true equivalency you stated hides serious negatives.
To be fair, Séance does have a chance to wheel because is a very narrow card that won't be picked by anyone outside of a white flicker archetype. It's not even an easy splash. Not that it isn't a strong card in the right deck, mind you, but your example leaves something to be desired.
Most of the people on this site who rail against card prices do so from the point of view of the purchaser, the "buy low" counterpart to the "sell high" perspective of players who want to buy products with good EV. Going after draft strategy is much more difficult because your examples are self-defeating. You treat opening a card worth more than your draft and picking it over a bomb as an inherently feel-bad moment, which it most certainly is not for many people. After all, selling an expensive card will always net you value, while even powerful bombs depend on the luck of the draw to win the draft.