I think a part of it is the limitations of the way they do batching mechanics, your party isn't chosen/static and all the mechanics do is check if things fit basic criteria. What I mean is, the way party was designed doesn't allow for things like "When a creature joins your party" "When ~ dies, if it was a member of your party, " or "Members of your party have lifelink." They were limited to counting roles filled, but even that could have been explored in more dynamic ways than basic scaling with some bonuses for a full party.
Caring if your party has other members ("If your party has two or more creatures in it, ") or more interesting cross-class encouragement ("Target creature gets +1/+1 until end of turn. if it's a Warrior, it gains lifelink until end of turn." on a Cleric or "When ~ attacks, it gains flying until end of turn if you control a Wizard." on a Rogue) may have helped. As it stands, party is quite a binary mechanic, you either want full party to maximize everything or you don't want it at all. I respect that WotC was pushing for that (much the same way Domain was intended to be maximized and encouraged five color play and didn't bother with half steps), I just think it made for a less dynamic, less interesting mechanic.
I think the flavor was well-received, so hopefully they bring party back and expand on how it is explored.
I fully agree. Party being so completely binary means there is no early or even mid-game advantage to running a Party deck, but at the same time there’s no real late-game advantage either because having a full party doesn’t really ever pay off. It’s just a completely failed attempt and it’s baffling to me that it was allowed to proceed this way.
I really don’t understand why they removed the Ally mechanic to make room for the Party mechanic when that would have obviously been more appropriate for the D&D set.
They bent over backward to turn Zendikar into a plane of D&D adventures and basically took out all of the stuff we liked about Zendikar except for Landfall. Zendikar was about unlocking a mystery, not going on fun adventures with your bro to find treasure.
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I fully agree. Party being so completely binary means there is no early or even mid-game advantage to running a Party deck, but at the same time there’s no real late-game advantage either because having a full party doesn’t really ever pay off. It’s just a completely failed attempt and it’s baffling to me that it was allowed to proceed this way.
They bent over backward to turn Zendikar into a plane of D&D adventures and basically took out all of the stuff we liked about Zendikar except for Landfall. Zendikar was about unlocking a mystery, not going on fun adventures with your bro to find treasure.