Not sure I will include anything from this set for my 360/450/540 Powered Cube. I think the only one that really may cut the mustard is Baleful Mastery and I am not even entirely sure I want that card.
I haven’t personally encountered any old school Commander jank either.
I mean, it is an evolving equation right? At one point in the format - things were not solved. people didn't have a greater understanding of toolbox loops, the density of counters to conquer a stack to combo. People were winging a lot of things, which inherently leads to scenarios where something like Uril, the Miststalker could just run over a table. Fast forward a couple of years and people start having a better understanding of not only the concepts I just mentioned, but also what Commanders are naturally capable of crossing a general playability threshold. Fast forward a few more years and even those Commanders have fallen behind to ones that better lend themselves to core concepts and even finer tuning. People have a greater understanding of what to do in any color combination now than they have ever had before, regardless of who the commander is... and the result of that is that the ceiling is significantly higher, as is the floor.
Die-hards wanting to go back to those days, are going to need to curate environments where everyone is in agreement of where the floor and ceiling are and that is simply impossible to do in open play no matter how 'casual' people say they may be (because it is different for everyone). No amount of banning is going to change that, and I would argue that it really only just makes the format less approachable for folks.
The early days of Commander allowed for the kind of play you are looking for because people didn't just walk into a game store with the expectation that they could openly sit down and play a game with just about anyone. Open play and the fact that players have had years to explore the format and discover interactions has led Commander to where it is today.
Don't want to play modern era Commander? Curate a play group of close players and get back to the spirit of the format in an more controlled setting where things can be regulated as a group.
In an era where people understand the value of decentralized currency like Bitcoin, I am not sure why they cannot reverse engineer the concept to understand why decentralized play is warping Commander into something other than what it once was when it was more centralized around close groups.
Yeah... can we collectively agree as a community that if a creature not only needs removal... not only needs to be exiled... not only needs this to happen at instant speed... not only needs to have all of its abilities negated... but needs to be actively punished by a card that would make the "good answers" of yesteryear blush to stop that card from suffusing every format in which it is legal... that the card was probably a mistake?
There is a point at which the tried truism of asking wizards to "add good answers" to add safety valves for good threats is no longer a practical response. I feel that Uro has passed that point by a good margin.
I think it is pretty clear that Uro was intentional and how it could be an *accident* is beyond me.
That being said, I love seeing cards like this where I can play them in Cube, Commander, Casual, or wherever. They really need to figure out where it is appropriate to put cards like this and where it is not, and unfortunately I think the issue is that they don't care if it is appropriate or not they want to make the money off it and that is dictating where something like this goes and they are leveraging frequent bans to allow them to do that.
In the end, they can totally produce OP cards, as long as they put in some proper answers to these cards, so a metagame can evolve around them.
If every deck plays Uro as green can splash any color without a problem and not playing Uro becomes a "mistake" , the only decks not running the stupid card are decks that intentionally try to work under it (like red aggro decks).
If a card can warp a format so hard around itself, it simply means the answers are crap and the format is not equipped to work with its pushed cards.
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Every time you make something powerful, produce a properly powerful answer to it (and put some form of answer in every color).
If each color has something powerful decks will naturally evolve around these cards, so a format can become stale quickly, if anything else lacks behind in power level.
Putting a card in your deck should have a reason and a cost, being ALL upside and good in every situation is producing cancerous cards and it becomes almost impossible to print any proper answer to such cards.
You don't encounter situations where your cards consistently trip bans by accidently pushing cards too far. Design is an iterative process and even when you are designing a backlog of product in advance - you only get to ride the "oops" train for so long before it is either apparent that the oops are deliberate or that your design process is a wreck. In this particular case, the bans have gone on long enough and with such frequency that whoever is in charge of it should have recognized their mistakes by now and addressed them or embraced them.
You're fighting against Hanlon's razor.
There is an entire team working on these sets. It isn't stupidity past a certain point. The likely hood of it being a mistake drops dramatically as time increases and as the number of designers involved increases.
People need to realize that they intend to keep doing this. Their goal is to keep printing cards they can ban.
Banning cards isn't really in WotC's interest. Big money cards like Oko and Uro have lost value as a result of being banned.
It's more that it is in WotC's interest to push the envelope with big money cards like Oko and Uro to make sure they are highly sought after, and as a result, a number of such cards have been over the top. If you're deliberately aiming for top of the pack, sometimes they fall under and are more mediocre, sometimes they go over.
I'd say it's a case of WotC taking too many risks with these cards without enough playtesting to make sure they're in line.
Plus, WotC works on a delay between finalising the set and printing, so banning have flow-on effects of throwing off the balancing of the metagame that future sets were developed around. So banning can end up chaining like that.
I will preface this with the statement that I am a designer by profession.
You don't encounter situations where your cards consistently trip bans by accidently pushing cards too far. Design is an iterative process and even when you are designing a backlog of product in advance - you only get to ride the "oops" train for so long before it is either apparent that the oops are deliberate or that your design process is a wreck. In this particular case, the bans have gone on long enough and with such frequency that whoever is in charge of it should have recognized their mistakes by now and addressed them or embraced them.
Not sure what you think WOTC has to lose from banning cards. The adjustment to their ban schedule has suggested they realized it is only upside for them. They get to push product short term, wait for print runs or demand to dwindle, then address the card. A classic bait and switch we have seen in video games for years now, where they release characters then power them down later.
Relax, he didn't say anything about not using tropes. He's just saying it's not a reskin of an existing property. Like how Theros is a reskin of greek mythology rather than being their own take on mythology as a medium.
Will it have deus ex machina spells, and important objects to drive the story, and guilds/houses/dark wizards/fantastic beasts? Yes. Because this is their take on the genre and those are tropes that exist in the genre. He just literally means (and literally says) there isn't going to be reskins aka intentional parallel versions of any one of the existing magic school takes.
The problem here is that people already associate wizard schools with things outside of MTG. I am reluctant to say that this won't feel like Harry Potter or something similar, because humans are creatures that observe patterns and make associations based on them.
Really, there isn't a good way to do this without it having a Harry Potter feel anymore than it is possible to remove Mindflayers from the feel of Cthulu, Theros from Greek Mythos, Ixalan from Un'Goro, etc.
Also, Teferi isn't back. In fact, he never left.
He does however excuse that your linear understanding of space and time might lead you to such a flawed perception or premature conclusion.
He was absent from the story for years lol. He is back in the story, your block of text was WAY too long my man.
Kaya is my favorite MTG character atm, and I am loving that Teferi is back. it is really nice having people of color represented in MTG.
I just wish there was not the showboating to go with all of it, and that things like this could be done in silence and everyone who makes the game and plays the game not bat an eye about it.
I mean, it is an evolving equation right? At one point in the format - things were not solved. people didn't have a greater understanding of toolbox loops, the density of counters to conquer a stack to combo. People were winging a lot of things, which inherently leads to scenarios where something like Uril, the Miststalker could just run over a table. Fast forward a couple of years and people start having a better understanding of not only the concepts I just mentioned, but also what Commanders are naturally capable of crossing a general playability threshold. Fast forward a few more years and even those Commanders have fallen behind to ones that better lend themselves to core concepts and even finer tuning. People have a greater understanding of what to do in any color combination now than they have ever had before, regardless of who the commander is... and the result of that is that the ceiling is significantly higher, as is the floor.
Die-hards wanting to go back to those days, are going to need to curate environments where everyone is in agreement of where the floor and ceiling are and that is simply impossible to do in open play no matter how 'casual' people say they may be (because it is different for everyone). No amount of banning is going to change that, and I would argue that it really only just makes the format less approachable for folks.
Don't want to play modern era Commander? Curate a play group of close players and get back to the spirit of the format in an more controlled setting where things can be regulated as a group.
In an era where people understand the value of decentralized currency like Bitcoin, I am not sure why they cannot reverse engineer the concept to understand why decentralized play is warping Commander into something other than what it once was when it was more centralized around close groups.
I think it is pretty clear that Uro was intentional and how it could be an *accident* is beyond me.
That being said, I love seeing cards like this where I can play them in Cube, Commander, Casual, or wherever. They really need to figure out where it is appropriate to put cards like this and where it is not, and unfortunately I think the issue is that they don't care if it is appropriate or not they want to make the money off it and that is dictating where something like this goes and they are leveraging frequent bans to allow them to do that.
It is predatory.
But answers to powerful cards are... unfun teehee
There is an entire team working on these sets. It isn't stupidity past a certain point. The likely hood of it being a mistake drops dramatically as time increases and as the number of designers involved increases.
I will preface this with the statement that I am a designer by profession.
You don't encounter situations where your cards consistently trip bans by accidently pushing cards too far. Design is an iterative process and even when you are designing a backlog of product in advance - you only get to ride the "oops" train for so long before it is either apparent that the oops are deliberate or that your design process is a wreck. In this particular case, the bans have gone on long enough and with such frequency that whoever is in charge of it should have recognized their mistakes by now and addressed them or embraced them.
Not sure what you think WOTC has to lose from banning cards. The adjustment to their ban schedule has suggested they realized it is only upside for them. They get to push product short term, wait for print runs or demand to dwindle, then address the card. A classic bait and switch we have seen in video games for years now, where they release characters then power them down later.
The problem here is that people already associate wizard schools with things outside of MTG. I am reluctant to say that this won't feel like Harry Potter or something similar, because humans are creatures that observe patterns and make associations based on them.
Really, there isn't a good way to do this without it having a Harry Potter feel anymore than it is possible to remove Mindflayers from the feel of Cthulu, Theros from Greek Mythos, Ixalan from Un'Goro, etc.
He was absent from the story for years lol. He is back in the story, your block of text was WAY too long my man.
I just wish there was not the showboating to go with all of it, and that things like this could be done in silence and everyone who makes the game and plays the game not bat an eye about it.
Man what a world that would be.