MTG Salvation

Quote from FlossedBeaver »

Yeah, more options are always just so frustrating. I hate it when companies make things I totally don’t have to buy.

the fear of missing out mentality is strong here. their business model this year exploits the hell out of that. i might not buy it, you might not buy it, but a ****ton of other people might buy it because otherwise poof its gone. is that the culture we want around the game? if it works here, how many other products can it work with? then there's just the general feeling of being overwhelmed and fatigued through product bombardment. the idea that you're missing out is very real, and very legitimate, even if its products you wouldn't normally get.

decent picks, bad arts.

were these supposed to be crossover arts again? i'm tired of that gimmick already.

product fatigue is extremely real now. so i don't have any energy left to care at all and certainly won't be spending money on these.

edit: these look like left over art for something transformers related. that's lazy.

these look ******* awful.

3 secret lairs announced in one day, sandwiched inbetween heaps of product. like, i get it, times are tough, stock is down... but come the **** on here.

yeah yeah, not every product is for everyone, sure fine great, but bombarding your customers with products intended for that particular audience or not burns people out really quick.

i want reasons to buy product longer, not have something new thrown in my face every week. i want my decks to feel finished, to hone them, to actually play them for awhile. instead we're stuck on this perpetual treadmill of buy buy buy buy buy buy buy!

edit: oh, and on top of the bad art these choices aren't really enticing because while they're not bad cards... they're also not good cards, and they're extremely cheap right now.

oh hooray, another product! again, going with a hard nope. we've hit a critical mass of products. two secret lairs announced in the same day is just absurd.

the art here... i like the tattoo style aesthetic, i just don't like any of the arts here except inkmoth.

the choices also seem kind of all over the place. they're good, highly played cards but there's no theme here. its just crank out a product with some alternate art. given that... what exactly is the point other than to try to pump every single dollar out of us?

edit: oh i get it, they all have to do with tattoo'ing, needle, pierce, blood, ink, artist... that's ******* weak at best.

this is a neat one, with some spiffy art

that said, noping right the **** out because of how many products are in the pipe hot on the heels of ikoria

define cedh here.

i've been in pods where acidic sliming a coffers is considered "too competitive"
i've been in pods where just running a coffers is considered "cedh scumbaggery"
counterspell? you're a try hard cedh'er
fast mana? cedh
any combo including noninfinite synergistic ones? cedh
attacking with a big creature? cedh
board wipes? cedh

the list goes on... it varies from player to player that doesn't like cedh. honestly my take aways from 10 years of edh play, well, most of the people who make these claims level them the minute they start to lose. you're not suffering from losing are you? are you trying to adapt with the other decks you face?

so just what exactly is your definition of cedh. lets start there.

no one is going to change your opinions, you've made that clear by your post, but maybe we can at least define what you think of as cedh and try to help your deck and gameplay improve

Quote from SpeedGrapher »

I can't get excited about any new magic cards due to corona virus. I get to look at the new cards. Then not buy them. Previews will be a nice little surprise for the day. But then I'll again be reminded of wizards crazy number of products. Their business model is differentiated now for sure between low margin standard sets and high margin special products. I can't imagine a teenager getting into the game anymore. If anything the card pool is just too big.
They need to change their plan up. Retire Vintage. Retire Legacy. If commander is going to be a thing going forward. They insist on keeping the reserved list after all this time, ban all of those cards. M sets /core sets get 2-3 high end reprints to sell them. Then nothing. Core sets have lost their purpose of reprinting cards forever ago.
Brawl was a stupid invention to sell even more products. Brawl needs be Retired.
Thanks Corona Virus for saving me a ton of money! I'll be having my next booster draft sometime in 2021!

I agree 100%.

And because so many formats other than standard pull from so many sets youre pigeonholed into standard, or dumping a lot of money just to keep up even with friends

Its no longer a sustainable model

Quote from schnerbst »

Quote from Xcric »

Its hard to be excited about this so soon after ikorias release, and hot on the heals of double masters announcement, and knowing commander legends is coming, with secret lairs and more commander precons mixed in too

Not for me. Spoiler season best season.

It never ends these days, how do your shorts ever dry out?

Its hard to be excited about this so soon after ikorias release, and hot on the heals of double masters announcement, and knowing commander legends is coming, with secret lairs and more commander precons mixed in too

Edit: forgot zendikar and jumpstart are coming too. Ffs spoiler season never ends.

Quote from Semoreh »

Quote from WarMachinePrime »

[quote]
Since this set wasn't released at box stores. My LGS hoarded them, asked for 8 to 9 dollars a pack, even for the free boxes they got. Reprints were good but they did not get into the hands of people like you and me, so that is a total fail in my opinion in that aspect.

That's a problem with your LGS, or on a wider scale the absence of MSRP, but the set itself at the price it was intended to be sold (let's call it "theoretical msrp") was great. My LGS at least didn't gouge us, and the box I'm getting soon is part of a new restock we're still being sold at normal price (120€).

</blockquote>

okay but like, if enough stores do it its not a store level problem, that makes it a higher level problem to do with distribution, demand, and a lack of msrp.

...a lot of stores did this.

on top of that a lot of stores didn't get much in the way of product, and had difficulty getting replenished

ah, trotting out the mana crypt to make the set sell. classic.

my wallet is so fatigued by these product releases i don't even care about this one. its just nonstop bombardment now. there needs to be breathing room.

stupid name.

normally, i'm all for a good masters set, however i have to wonder if there'll be enough value. a lot of higher valued cards that see a ton of play just keep getting ignored in favor of reprinting the same things over and over. that they have to advertise this one as potentially having 3 rares per pack, and every pack comes with 2 foils instead of 1... that makes me even more reluctant to be excited about it because it gives the impression of a set that can't sell itself on its own merit.

suppose we'll just have to wait and see

i appreciate that they're doing something to help out the lgs right now, however i feel this is another one of those things in the long list of things that sound good but aren't actually that great.

lets break it down for a minute. you buy a qualifying product and you get a reliquary tower promo, that in itself is cool. how many are stores actually getting though? if its a limited quantity, people will rush out to buy product but not for very long. if its a print to abundance promo then its worthless and theres no incentive to go buy.

then there's that new godzilla that comes with a box. that's cool. its not the highest value thing in the world and isn't useable in standard but its still a good card and a godzilla... except that hype has already begun to dwindle. on top of that, that's more boxes cracked, so everything else in the set will continue to dwindle in value

but lets also not forget that big box stores are still open and selling. so now the lgs has to go out of its way to let people know they're open while trying to push sealed product, while also not necessarily having events or allowing people inside, if that lgs is even open... while a big box store keeps selling.

they also announced this after many people ran out to the big box stores, and ordered on amazon, because the local store was closed. meaning people already got their packs and boxes and whatever, so is there a demand to run out and buy more? not as much as their could have been, plus its established that stores generally don't make a killing on boxes.

after all of that, to me it seems like a half measure that looks good but actually does very little to support the local store. i think it'll also help contribute to the continued decline of value in packs too, and a certain point people stop buying because the contents are worthless.

its something, and i appreciate seeing the effort... but i still feel they could do so much more. when the lgs dies the game dies.




but cool, neat promos

Edit: ive also been told by multiple store owners they only found out about this promo through social media, and not through official communication. So uh... good job asshats.

Edit2: i've also been told by various sources they won't even be available until june. so we've gotten pretty much a full month of sales through big box stores, pre-orders are done, demand dwindles, players don't wait. so will these promos actually be a driver of sales at all at that point? we'll see, but the effect seems negligible.

Quote from NGW »

Quote from schnerbst »

Quote from NGW »

If your deck completely falls apart because you do not have access to your commander you made a bad deck, plain and simple. You can certainly build a deck that's primary strategy involves your commander, in fact I much prefer decks that do (or at the very least benefit greatly from their commander), but you should always have a contingency plan. Removing the tuck rule simply encouraged bad deck building by removing a check for decks that were overly reliant on a single card they always have access to.

I understand you argument, but that is a very spikey perspective. What about the Jhonnies and Timmies? Commander allows me to build decks around mechanics unique to specific legendary creatures, decks that could never funcion in a format where i don't have guaranteed avaiability of a certain card. Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer is a prime example of this. Would that deck work once the commander is tucked? Definately not. But why should that make it a bad deck? It plays well (in the absence of tuck), its fun, its unique and it has cool flavor. Now YOU may not care about any of these things, but a lot of people do, and in my perspective that makes it a pretty good deck. Maybe putting together a deck that is filled with options to wiggle out of every corner is super fun to you, but thats not true for everyone. I don't want to fill half my deck with tutors and counters, both of which make commander games unfun (for me) in large numbers. Point is, preventing tuck opens up a lot of interesting deck builds and that is a good thing imo. My Commander playgroup nearly died because tuck was so frustrating and it flourished since the tuck change.

We'll take your Brudiclad example. So it is a red/blue token deck, while yes the ability to have your tokens become copies of another is really cool, is it really nonfunctional without that? You can't still just swing with a token army or make use of them in some other form?

That's where it goes into "poorly built", if you answer no to that.

so here's where i take issue with the whole thing. it really doesn't have to do with bad build or good build because a few different factors unique to edh.

we can all come up with examples of decks that will be crippled by a commander getting tucked, and examples where the deck runs just fine. let's say i'm playing feldon, i know if he gets tucked because of the colors i'm in (monored), i will never see that commander again this game. my options were run subpar tutors because of my colors, or just never see him. the subpar cards don't do anything outside of a tuck situation, or you can run things that just hone the deck better in their place. the deck can function just fine without him, but with him locked out like that you're removing half of what the build does, half that deck's purpose - there are tons of commanders that are built around like that and are further limited by color - its not really fair to remove half of a deck's capabilities so easily.

by the same token, if i'm running let's say a zegana build, and she gets tucked, well given what the build does, and the colors its in, i'll either tutor her up efficiently, or just draw into her within a turn or two if the deck is working. we can all come up with builds and commanders where this is true. so now accessibility to certain cards not only improves what the deck inherently does, but also gives it an advantage in a tuck situation. there's no downside for these colors/builds.

additionally, there's the problem of resources. you tuck someone's commander, now they have to spend time and resources to get that commander back. that sets them behind. that gives you an even bigger advantage over decks that need their commander to function. it becomes even riskier to play those commanders at all because they just won't be able to keep up. what you're doing is reducing the commander card pool even further without realizing it. when players feel certain commanders just won't ever be able to keep up in the face of that - they just don't build them. this was a phenomenon i definitely observed when tucking was a thing. the array of decks showing up weekly exploded just after the tuck rule changed because suddenly there was a fighting chance.

so the point i'm making here is that you can't really blame it on poor deck building every time. there are major limitations to some colors, and some commanders are just not going to be as competitive as others. on top of that, some commanders really want the deck built around them and that's going to change the nature of the entire deck reducing ability to deal with a tuck potentially even further.

now here's where it all differs from cranking the tax up. with the tax, you need multiple ways to remove the commander to keep cranking that tax up. on top of that, i can still produce mana. there are points where i can recast my commander, or maybe i go infinite and it doesn't matter anyway. the point is the options are still there, they're never really completely eliminated through a tax increase. i'm sure we've all seen games where the commander tax for someone is 10+ and they still manage to win by sticking their commander back in play.

all of this means, and i feel this is really important to consider in all things edh, that if someone sits down at a table and has half their deck neutered consistently chances are they just aren't going to come back. that's not a fun experience, and there are minimal ways to get around it if you want to play certain commanders. personally i feel that at the end of the day the format is a social one. anything that increases breadth of deck building and helps bring players back every week is more important than the competitive edge.

Quote from Ryperior74 »

Will find out any Ikoria cards perhaps

enough preorders have moved and enough people have purchased singles, i'm sure there'll be more than 1 ikoria card banned.