To me, the best possible approach is to let opponents make their mistakes, then ask them if they're OK with having those errors pointed out afterward (I've played a few people that take having errors pointed out to them as "rubbing it in", which is a perfectly fair response). If they are, I explain the mistakes clearly and try to keep the advice framed in terms of "you'll get better" rather than "you played poorly", and I ALWAYS try to find something to compliment them on ("dude, you drafted a sick deck", "spending your removal on my beater that turn was definitely the right call; that really put me on the ropes and I wound up topdecking the thing that saved me", etc.).
This way, win or lose a player's accomplishment is their own - they had nobody offering advice, no helpful nudges, nobody who could say "well, you only won because I helped you". Also, this way a player is more likely to improve so that next time they'll be a stronger challenge and the game gets all the more intense. It's really for the best for everyone.
While another MaRo quote up-thread puts the nail in the coffin on the fall set being anything but The Large Set, it is worth pointing out that that doesn't necessarily mean that there can never be a small set released in autumn.
It's entirely possible that they could release two small sets simultaneously. This could be something especially doable in any storyline involving a Phyrexian invasion of a plane, where the idea would to show "before/after" or "Phyrexian forces" and "non-Phyrexian forces". Drafting could involve players drafting one set and playing against people who drafted the other. By the end of the block there could be six sets overall, with one side being three planes' worth of Phyrexian resistance versus a unified Phyrexian whole with three planes' worth of resources and corrupted magic.
To keep card pool or lopsided desirability concerns at bay, they could make it so that both sets have a shared pool of cards that are in both sets but with different art, so things like planeswalkers and dual lands won't tip the scales towards one set selling out while the other sits on store shelves, all without bloating the card pool since the total number of unique card names introduced to the card pool at a time would not be any different from normal.
Heck, it wouldn't even be out of the question for people to let slip that it's a "large set" when it's really two small sets that add up to a large set, especially if that tidbit is to be saved for a big reveal closer to release.
The language being on the card is the one thing I like about the new frame. For the average person it can be hard to know exactly what language a foreign card is, which might be relevant towards trading / selling cards - a certain language might have a smaller print run and could thus affect its value.
I've never understood the difficulty some people have in identifying different languages, especially when people are making a point of seeking out cards of a given language. The European languages are all extremely easy to tell apart for most Westerners. Printed Korean has little (if anything) in common with Chinese or Japanese. Japanese cards prominently use the hiragana and katakana alphabets in addition to kanji, and Chinese is printed exclusively in sinograms. It's the sort of thing that doesn't take any kind of specialized training to be able to do... fifteen minutes on wikipedia is all it takes to train yourself to be able to recognize which languages cards are printed in to an extremely high degree of accuracy.
Surely if organised crime gets into counterfeiting Magic cards, they will be producing fake Tarmogoyfs, Wastelands and Revised duals (and other cards of comparable value, not the $500+ cards that people inspect with a jeweller's loupe prior to buying) rather than whatever next year's Domri Rade/Mutavault chase cards are.
It gets easier and easier to counterfeit cards every year. If you're already counterfeiting Goyfs and such, it would only make sense to counterfeit whatever the current Standard chase rares are. This change does make sense as a way to head that off.
Eh... for changes this small, I feel like they may as well have not bothered. I'd have liked to see something much more bold, like going completely borderless except for the very bottom of the card.
EDIT: the holofoil stamp at least makes sense. Counterfeiting is getting to be a huge problem for the game's collectibility and something needed to be done. I wouldn't be surprised if that's one of the main reasons for the introduction of a proprietary font, too. It's a shame that it's not something they can really go back and apply to older cards, though.
I'm actually quite fond of Teysa's take on the original principles of the Orzhov. That is, rather than unfettered "well, you shoulda read the contract" exploitative banking and unethical business practices being permissible in the name of ever-more-important profits, it's all about the betterment of the entire community through strategic redistribution of wealth and ensuring that commerce benefits everyone rather than the handful of bankers at the top of the pyramid scheme.
As for actually praying to a god... I think it's safe to say that as far as MTG is concerned, what is and is not a "god" is purely subjective, and there is little difference between most things that could be called gods and other things that are merely sufficiently powerful spirits or planeswalkers or what have you. Moreover, precious few entities in MTG really have any control over what happens after your death, and those that do only have such control in a limited manner generally requiring some sort of infrastructure maintenance to do its thing. If it truly is an apocalypse on whatever plane I'm on, there's not much point in worshiping anything since there would be no power in MTG that would have the power to change my fate. The best answer would be much the same as in real life - live a good life and your religious beliefs (or lack thereof) shouldn't matter in the end.
No point really. I just hear people say that he is too good for Standard often, which is weird, because without fetches in Standard, he isn't that amazing.
EDIT: I was actually talking about Goyf here, but honestly, my opinion stands with Deathrite as well.
He was absurd in Standard once people figured out he was good. With nothing but the Coldsnap/Time Spiral/Lorwyn/10th Ed card pool, Goyf was format-warping. Even faeries heavily splashed green simply to be able to cast goyf as early as possible. The only reason he wasn't a bigger factor in RAV/TSP standard was because it took a couple months for people to really figure out how good the card is. People were looking at it as some janky build-around timmy-fodder instead of 2CMC of pure, splashable value that needs absolutely no extra work to become amazing.
There are only two ways to really make an environment in which Goyf is OK for Standard: push repeatable creature removal and push graveyard removal. As long as it's worth running creatures, as long as graveyards are allowed to have cards in them, Goyf will run riot in any 60-card non-singleton format it's allowed in, fetchlands or not.
Everyone saying how Fateseal is so unfun, yet we have mill which does the same thing that Fateseal does (prevents opponent from drawing the *current* top card of library). Obviously having a repeatable Fatesealer in Jace is good, just like the continuous Scryer in Thassa (though obviously not as good as Jace..., but that's not because of Scry over Fateseal). I don't see they couldn't make a Destroy Target Creature, Fateseal 1 card. Would that seriously be more 'unfun' than Supreme Verdict? Really...
Fateseal and mill are NOT the same thing.
With mill, you rarely know what's on top of your opponent's library, which means it's completely random as to whether or not it hurts your opponent. Most mill also puts cards into your opponent's graveyard, where many decks are likely to WANT their cards because of graveyard recursion effects.
On the other hand, Fateseal does a couple of important things that mill doesn't do:
It lets you see the top of your opponent's library while they cannot see it. This is easily the least important part of the ability, but having more information about the game state than your opponent is ALWAYS useful.
It lets you decide whether or not the card stays there. They're screwed out of a color of mana they need and you're looking at a land that would get them out of the pit? Put it on the bottom. You have a clock on the board and you're looking at a removal spell that would buy your opponent time, or another creature that can out race your clock? Put it on the bottom. Your opponent's mana flooded and needs outs? Leave their land on top.
It's demoralizing. When someone fateseals you, you know for a fact that your odds of getting what you need to win just went down by a LOT. If they can repeatably fateseal you, you know you pretty much need to have the win in your hand because you essentially can't count on ever getting a relevant draw again.
I wish Wizards would pick up with the fact that players do not like Sol Ring, it creates broken starts (durr durr I have Grand Arbitrer Augustin IV on turn 2), is banned in duel and in most multiplayers playgroups I've seen. Just useless cardboard in every single deck.
On the other hand, I happen to like Sol Ring. Both my multiplayer groups allow its use since we want to be inclusive of any deck that might walk into the LGS going by the official banned list. We also find that it's not particularly degenerate in multiplayer where more than one player could drop one early (not to mention where the odds of someone removing it or simply answering whatever was powered out are ramped up). Moreover, having it in these decks will greatly help some friends of mine who are getting back into the game get their hands on a couple copies of Sol Ring.
I couldn't be happier that it's in there, and I'm saying that as a person who owns eight copies already and doesn't mind in the least that they're going to take a small hit to their value.
I couldn't care less about their rarity. I just want them because they look gorgeous. That's kinda the whole problem, really... They're not really worth what they're selling for to me or people like me, but that doesn't mean we don't want them.
House banned lists aren't a viable solution for the community at large. For people playing pickup games at their local game stores or at conventions, the official banned list is the one people go by. When people look for advice on their decks, people will make recommendations based on the global metagame that's established as a result of the official banned list and the online community. If a given card is banned by a small community, that results in the metagame for that community being completely different from the online community.
This is a bug, not a feature. If you can't take a deck from one group to another, if you can't meaningfully talk about the format with other people online, there is no broader community. Asking people to brew house rules to fix things they don't like about the format is effectively asking those people to turn their back on game stores, conventions, and the online community because they disagree with the RC.
It's not the RC's responsibility to bend to every little complaint, of course, but the best interests of the community aren't being served when the RC dismisses valid criticism with "well, you can just house rule what you don't like".
Answers are key in EDH yes, but certain decks/color combinations fall flat at being able to answer certain cards outside of very expensive artifacts or eldrazi.
"Certain colors have trouble dealing with different things" isn't something unique to EDH. It's one of the main features of the color wheel, and it's something people have been dealing with for twenty years now. If you really, really, really want to be able to interact with your opponent's enchantments, then you need to figure out if that interaction is important enough for you to play Green or White cards or if you're fine with running expensive colorless removal instead. The people running Olivia Voldaren decks chose to play colors that give them fewer options for dealing with enchantments than other color combinations in exchange for having top-notch creature removal, solid artifact destruction, great tutors, amazing reanimation, and loads of effects in both colors that put games on a VERY short clock.
Moreover, EDH reduces the importance of this feature of the color pie since the core assumption is that you're playing at least 3-player games, so at the bare minimum there's double the odds that one of your two opponents will have ways of disrupting your stuff. That same Olivia Voldaren player can be fairly secure in the fact that their enchantment removal plan involves recurring Spine of Ish Sah in the late game because odds are the Teysa, Orzhov Scion player to their left will be running Austere Command and Disenchant and the Sigarda player to their right will be running everything from Paraselene to Fracturing Gust.
So am I the only one that heard "minor rules changes" and was hoping they were finally fixing the whole color identity thing so that hybrid spells that you can hardcast using the mana colors available to your commander's color identity would be allowed? I mean, the intention with hybrid spells from the beginning was that a hybrid W/R spell could go in a any deck with access to either white or red without requiring both, and the EDH RC is actively going against the stated design goals of MTG R&D by treating them just like multicolored spells with restrictive costs.
Triad of the Fates would make SO MUCH MORE SENSE as 1WUB, and there'd even be some decent untap mechanics available in those colors to open up some options in EDH. But nope... just pure BW, and the more I look at it the less I like what it does.
This way, win or lose a player's accomplishment is their own - they had nobody offering advice, no helpful nudges, nobody who could say "well, you only won because I helped you". Also, this way a player is more likely to improve so that next time they'll be a stronger challenge and the game gets all the more intense. It's really for the best for everyone.
It's entirely possible that they could release two small sets simultaneously. This could be something especially doable in any storyline involving a Phyrexian invasion of a plane, where the idea would to show "before/after" or "Phyrexian forces" and "non-Phyrexian forces". Drafting could involve players drafting one set and playing against people who drafted the other. By the end of the block there could be six sets overall, with one side being three planes' worth of Phyrexian resistance versus a unified Phyrexian whole with three planes' worth of resources and corrupted magic.
To keep card pool or lopsided desirability concerns at bay, they could make it so that both sets have a shared pool of cards that are in both sets but with different art, so things like planeswalkers and dual lands won't tip the scales towards one set selling out while the other sits on store shelves, all without bloating the card pool since the total number of unique card names introduced to the card pool at a time would not be any different from normal.
Heck, it wouldn't even be out of the question for people to let slip that it's a "large set" when it's really two small sets that add up to a large set, especially if that tidbit is to be saved for a big reveal closer to release.
I've never understood the difficulty some people have in identifying different languages, especially when people are making a point of seeking out cards of a given language. The European languages are all extremely easy to tell apart for most Westerners. Printed Korean has little (if anything) in common with Chinese or Japanese. Japanese cards prominently use the hiragana and katakana alphabets in addition to kanji, and Chinese is printed exclusively in sinograms. It's the sort of thing that doesn't take any kind of specialized training to be able to do... fifteen minutes on wikipedia is all it takes to train yourself to be able to recognize which languages cards are printed in to an extremely high degree of accuracy.
It gets easier and easier to counterfeit cards every year. If you're already counterfeiting Goyfs and such, it would only make sense to counterfeit whatever the current Standard chase rares are. This change does make sense as a way to head that off.
EDIT: the holofoil stamp at least makes sense. Counterfeiting is getting to be a huge problem for the game's collectibility and something needed to be done. I wouldn't be surprised if that's one of the main reasons for the introduction of a proprietary font, too. It's a shame that it's not something they can really go back and apply to older cards, though.
As for actually praying to a god... I think it's safe to say that as far as MTG is concerned, what is and is not a "god" is purely subjective, and there is little difference between most things that could be called gods and other things that are merely sufficiently powerful spirits or planeswalkers or what have you. Moreover, precious few entities in MTG really have any control over what happens after your death, and those that do only have such control in a limited manner generally requiring some sort of infrastructure maintenance to do its thing. If it truly is an apocalypse on whatever plane I'm on, there's not much point in worshiping anything since there would be no power in MTG that would have the power to change my fate. The best answer would be much the same as in real life - live a good life and your religious beliefs (or lack thereof) shouldn't matter in the end.
He was absurd in Standard once people figured out he was good. With nothing but the Coldsnap/Time Spiral/Lorwyn/10th Ed card pool, Goyf was format-warping. Even faeries heavily splashed green simply to be able to cast goyf as early as possible. The only reason he wasn't a bigger factor in RAV/TSP standard was because it took a couple months for people to really figure out how good the card is. People were looking at it as some janky build-around timmy-fodder instead of 2CMC of pure, splashable value that needs absolutely no extra work to become amazing.
There are only two ways to really make an environment in which Goyf is OK for Standard: push repeatable creature removal and push graveyard removal. As long as it's worth running creatures, as long as graveyards are allowed to have cards in them, Goyf will run riot in any 60-card non-singleton format it's allowed in, fetchlands or not.
Fateseal and mill are NOT the same thing.
With mill, you rarely know what's on top of your opponent's library, which means it's completely random as to whether or not it hurts your opponent. Most mill also puts cards into your opponent's graveyard, where many decks are likely to WANT their cards because of graveyard recursion effects.
On the other hand, Fateseal does a couple of important things that mill doesn't do:
On the other hand, I happen to like Sol Ring. Both my multiplayer groups allow its use since we want to be inclusive of any deck that might walk into the LGS going by the official banned list. We also find that it's not particularly degenerate in multiplayer where more than one player could drop one early (not to mention where the odds of someone removing it or simply answering whatever was powered out are ramped up). Moreover, having it in these decks will greatly help some friends of mine who are getting back into the game get their hands on a couple copies of Sol Ring.
I couldn't be happier that it's in there, and I'm saying that as a person who owns eight copies already and doesn't mind in the least that they're going to take a small hit to their value.
This is a bug, not a feature. If you can't take a deck from one group to another, if you can't meaningfully talk about the format with other people online, there is no broader community. Asking people to brew house rules to fix things they don't like about the format is effectively asking those people to turn their back on game stores, conventions, and the online community because they disagree with the RC.
It's not the RC's responsibility to bend to every little complaint, of course, but the best interests of the community aren't being served when the RC dismisses valid criticism with "well, you can just house rule what you don't like".
"Certain colors have trouble dealing with different things" isn't something unique to EDH. It's one of the main features of the color wheel, and it's something people have been dealing with for twenty years now. If you really, really, really want to be able to interact with your opponent's enchantments, then you need to figure out if that interaction is important enough for you to play Green or White cards or if you're fine with running expensive colorless removal instead. The people running Olivia Voldaren decks chose to play colors that give them fewer options for dealing with enchantments than other color combinations in exchange for having top-notch creature removal, solid artifact destruction, great tutors, amazing reanimation, and loads of effects in both colors that put games on a VERY short clock.
Moreover, EDH reduces the importance of this feature of the color pie since the core assumption is that you're playing at least 3-player games, so at the bare minimum there's double the odds that one of your two opponents will have ways of disrupting your stuff. That same Olivia Voldaren player can be fairly secure in the fact that their enchantment removal plan involves recurring Spine of Ish Sah in the late game because odds are the Teysa, Orzhov Scion player to their left will be running Austere Command and Disenchant and the Sigarda player to their right will be running everything from Paraselene to Fracturing Gust.