It doesn't really matter how far away you can draw on the mana bonds from if the land you're bonded with doesn't have any mana in it any more.
Mana doesn't just go away though. It continues to produce mana because of the meaning attached to it. It takes ages or a MASSIVE upheaval to make a land change the mana it produces. You'd actually have to destroy the lands, not just move people out of their homes.
Going back to my metaphor, think of the mana as water. The lands are dams. The leylines are rivers. If someone had the power to re-arrange the rivers, they could make it so none of them flow to any of your dams. Even if you can access the dam from the other side of the planet, it doesn't do you any good if there's no water flowing to it.
The metaphor breaks down a bit because the lands aren't dams. They are springs. The rivers START at the those lands.
Ah. Yes, fair point. In that case, I have no idea.
It's a real-world term. A ley line is simply an alignment of locations of geographical and/or historical significance.
Since in the Magic storyline, mana comes from forming bonds with locations of geographical and/or historical significance and drawing on the energy (mana) of those lands through that bond, it follows logically that a leyline is an alignment of mana-rich lands. So, the relation leyline of anticipation and leyline of singularity have with Island on Ravnica is that the Islands are connected to each other via the Leylines. Think of it like a literal line tracing the flow of mana between the lands.
I haven't read the story you're talking about, but it sounds like Jace re-directed the leylines to cut off Vraska's mana bonds. Like diverting a stream to keep the water from reaching the dam where your enemies get their hydroelectric energy.
Oh, cool. Thanks, that does explain the first part. But The Gorgon and the Guildpact While if I recall, Doug had one time discussed there being few amateur mages with the necessity of being in proximity with a given land to access its mana, this should not be the case for the guilds' vital spellcasting forces, and Planeswalkers aren't limited as such either. I'm not sure what guild territory does to mana bonds o.O
It doesn't really matter how far away you can draw on the mana bonds from if the land you're bonded with doesn't have any mana in it any more.
Going back to my metaphor, think of the mana as water. The lands are dams. The leylines are rivers. If someone had the power to re-arrange the rivers, they could make it so none of them flow to any of your dams. Even if you can access the dam from the other side of the planet, it doesn't do you any good if there's no water flowing to it.
No, but a card does not have to break standard for development to decide not to let it see print. It just has to be un-conducive to what they think is a healthy, fun competitive environment.
It's a real-world term. A ley line is simply an alignment of locations of geographical and/or historical significance.
Since in the Magic storyline, mana comes from forming bonds with locations of geographical and/or historical significance and drawing on the energy (mana) of those lands through that bond, it follows logically that a leyline is an alignment of mana-rich lands. So, the relation leyline of anticipation and leyline of singularity have with Island on Ravnica is that the Islands are connected to each other via the Leylines. Think of it like a literal line tracing the flow of mana between the lands.
I haven't read the story you're talking about, but it sounds like Jace re-directed the leylines to cut off Vraska's mana bonds. Like diverting a stream to keep the water from reaching the dam where your enemies get their hydroelectric energy.
A lot of people think the new art has been homogenized but I think the main reason for this is that if the card on which the art will be placed is a green card, then many of the elements of the card will have a green hue. Same for all the colors. That's my only gripe. I would like to get some of my favorite cards done by the artists in a "non-magickified" format where they were allowed to use whatever hues they want and not just red for red cards and so forth. The trouble with this is that in game terms we need to have homogenized cards, it makes memorizing the pictures much easier. I'm sure you've all experienced that moment when you know every card and exactly what it does just by the blurry inch and a half picture sitting three or four feet away. I don't think this would be as easy without a somewhat homogenized approach.
@DA Any way to post a link or something? I'm sure I could find it if I google it or something, but I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for, other than what you've told me.
It's a podcast, it's free on itunes. Here is a link to it on the itunes website. Basically, it's a community talk radio show from the fictional town of Night Vale, where "mysterious sights that definitely no one saw, and strange thoughts that in no way occurred to anyone, because all of us are normal, and to be otherwise would make us outcasts from our own community" are commonplace, and an accepted part of everyday life. In my opinion it strikes the perfect balance between creepy, surreal, and humorous.
The issue here is that s/he, along with many other players, do not recognize limited as a valid niche.
But I do recognize limited as a valid niche. I just don't buy that limited has to be a weak format.
You're going to have to explain what you mean by "weak format". Because as we've established, how "weak" or "strong" a card is is relative to the strength of the other cards around it. So you could certainly bring the baseline power level of Limited up by increasing the power of the average common. But you would have to bring up the power level of the average uncommon, rare, and mythic rare to compensate, because a certain degree of power variance is necessary for a healthy Limited format, for the reasons I discussed above. And then, as now, the top end of that power level would be the only cards playable in Constructed.
I once traded a Tarmogoyf for an Unyaro Bees. I was new, so I didn't quite grasp Tarmogoyf, and I only played mono color decks in those decks, so I highly overvalued off-color effects, and flying in green seemed incredibly powerful to me.
Some cards may always be above or below the baseline, but Wizards can create a mostly-flat powerlevel.
Granted, but this would have a lot of side effects that I think are being brushed under the rug a bit here. The most obvious is that it would make the top end feel less special. Whether that is a positive or a negative side effect is a matter of opinion, and I'm willing to bet pretty much everyone in the "flatten the power level" camp would consider it a positive, though many others would consider it a big negative. It might open the possibility for the competitive metagame a little bit more diverse, though probably not by much. All the same, I'm sure very few would disagree that that's a positive thing, even if the overall effect is fairly minor. It would hurt limited a lot. More on that later. Also, it would likely hurt the secondary market. If every card you open in a pack is at least playable in some deck or another, the average net value of the cards in a pack is going to go up. That seems nice at first, until you realize you're de-incentivising buying singles. The more value you can expect to get from a pack, the less you save by buying singles, and gaming stores typically make more of a profit off of singles sales than booster sales.
I remember reading that they deliberately balance sets so that every card is playable in Standard/Limite, then deliberately weaken cards. It brings the baseline down, and allows them to also create "pushed" cards. The reasons they give is that they want to make drafting and card evaluation skills matter more in drafting, but that always sounded a bit hollow to me. If the powerlevel was relatively flat, it would make evaluating cards MORE important, and make the ability to evalate synergies on the fly imoprtant as well: just taking "the good card" in the pack would be a lot more difficult if they were all fairly close, all playable in the right decks, and all useful to a strategy.
Yeah, I cannot believe that without a source citation. Not to say that I think you're being dishonest, I just don't believe that's something WotC would admit to even if it were true. Also, I don't believe it's actually possible to balance a set so that every card is playable. I mean, strictly speaking, every card is playable in limited if you count being in your sideboard as being played, but I assume by "playable in limited" you mean main-deckable in limited. And you're starting to get at the reason flattening the curve would hurt limited. Yes, it does make just taking "the good card" harder, and believe it or not that is bad for limited. It's important that there be strong early picks to steer you towards a color or colors, and it's important that there be weaker cards in your colors that you can more or less count on being passed all the way around the table so you can hold off on it for a bit. If every card in a given pack was of roughly similar playability, you'd have more options on pick one, but after that you would have a much harder time constructing a cohesive deck, because you can't rely on anything making it back around, and therefore can't plan out your late picks in advance.
I do think, however, that there's a place for silly/complex/unusual cards in the rare spot. Pyxis of Pandemonium is such a strange card that they HAD to make it an expensive effect. It belongs at rare, because of Limited (and NWO complexity rules.) This also should be the place for things printed for formats other than Standard: EDH cards, specifically, should be Uncommon or higher. The one thing that really bothered me about M14 was the combination of Stormbreath Dragon at rare and Fire Elemental at common. Same mana cost, same color, same set, and one is leagues beyond the other in power level. I dislike the whole idea that Rarity = Power.
Then I am sorry, but you are playing the wrong game. Like it or not, magic is a trading card game. In order for the cards to have collectors' value, there have to be people willing to pay for them, which is done by creating demand and limiting supply. If you want a game where you can just play the cards you want to play and not worry about rarity determining power level, there are plenty of living card games out there that you will probably enjoy more than magic. I particularly enjoy Android Netrunner. But in Magic, that hunt for the rare and powerful cards is part of the game. You can get used to it, or you can keep complaining, but that fact is not going to change.
My main complaint is with commons that are so weak that they're almost automatically last-pick, alongside others that are so good, they're first-picked over anything else. Look at Asphyxiate compared to Weight of the Underworld. One's so good that it can be first-picked over many rares and uncommons, and one's a mid-pack "I'll take it just because its in-color, but I might not play it." They exist at the same rarity in the same set, but one is an "A" and one is a "C", and it's arbitrary. Would drafting be better, more fun, if Weight of the Underworld cost 2B? Would it make drafting more interesting if there were more choices that weren't obvious "Take this, not that?"
I talked briefly about this earlier in the post, but to answer this question directly, no, it would not. This can be hard for players who are inexperienced at limited to grasp, but it's not just a process of picking the best on-color card in the pack every time. That really only works for the first couple of picks in the first pack, when you're still figuring out what you want to draft. You have to read the signals that are sent in those early picks based on what strong cards are getting passed, and what weaker cards are getting snatched up quickly, and actually plan out your picks in advance as best you can. You don't win by drafting cards, you win by drafting decks. A good drafter knows the format and can actually decide based on those signals what's going to be the most viable strategy that there will be cards available for, and pick cards that support that strategy. If you take away the power variance, you make that task much harder, and ironically the format becomes more about picking the best on-color card, because you can no longer make those predictions reliably and are forced to just draft a pile of good cards instead of a deck that has a cohesive strategy incorporating cards of different power levels.
The flip side of the argument is that if they're lessening the gap between the top and bottom, they'd have to stop releasing things like Brimaz, because he's pretty obviously too good for his mana cost. They'd have to stop printing chase mythics/rares, in order to keep powerlevels fairly consistent.
Eh, I don't see that as a particularly strong argument in favor of keeping the variance as-is. I guess it's one more factor, but it's far less important than the other things I mentioned.
That seems pretty silly, really. A lot of older iconic art cards look great. It's more a personal opinion, I don't think it has to do with being digital vs non-digital.
I don't think the comment was about quality of the art, it was about the fact that a lot of older cards tend to be underpowered by today's standards, or to be Legacy staples and therefore prohibitively expensive. Incidentally, older cards also tend to be more likely to have traditional media art. The OP has observed this correlation, and while not necessarily assuming causation, has pointed out that in his/her experience the correlation is strong enough that s/he feels comfortable using the art as a shortcut when evaluating cards.
Bad rares are a bit of a different story. Some designs just fall short. Some cards go through some really weird changes in development and in the end they opt to err on the side of weak but safe, particularly with certain types of effects that are known to cause problems when not handled with care. Some are designed for specific kinds of players. Whims of the Fates is an example. It's one of those chaotic red rares that doesn't really do much besides be weird. But I know there are players out there that love those kinds of effects. One of my best friends has no interest in winning at Magic, she just likes doing random stuff like that.
Ooh, are you starting to see weird stuff yet? I hear shadow people is a common one with sleep deprivation.
Ah. Yes, fair point. In that case, I have no idea.
It doesn't really matter how far away you can draw on the mana bonds from if the land you're bonded with doesn't have any mana in it any more.
Going back to my metaphor, think of the mana as water. The lands are dams. The leylines are rivers. If someone had the power to re-arrange the rivers, they could make it so none of them flow to any of your dams. Even if you can access the dam from the other side of the planet, it doesn't do you any good if there's no water flowing to it.
Unfortunately, the people over at Magic's development team do not agree with you.
No, but a card does not have to break standard for development to decide not to let it see print. It just has to be un-conducive to what they think is a healthy, fun competitive environment.
Same reason Counterspell does. The folks responsible for printing the cards say so.
Since in the Magic storyline, mana comes from forming bonds with locations of geographical and/or historical significance and drawing on the energy (mana) of those lands through that bond, it follows logically that a leyline is an alignment of mana-rich lands. So, the relation leyline of anticipation and leyline of singularity have with Island on Ravnica is that the Islands are connected to each other via the Leylines. Think of it like a literal line tracing the flow of mana between the lands.
I haven't read the story you're talking about, but it sounds like Jace re-directed the leylines to cut off Vraska's mana bonds. Like diverting a stream to keep the water from reaching the dam where your enemies get their hydroelectric energy.
Well, I don't think we should do anything util we figure out how to make it stop glowing and making that god awful shrieking noise. Any ideas?
Umm... They don't do that.
Happy birthday!
It's a podcast, it's free on itunes. Here is a link to it on the itunes website. Basically, it's a community talk radio show from the fictional town of Night Vale, where "mysterious sights that definitely no one saw, and strange thoughts that in no way occurred to anyone, because all of us are normal, and to be otherwise would make us outcasts from our own community" are commonplace, and an accepted part of everyday life. In my opinion it strikes the perfect balance between creepy, surreal, and humorous.
You're going to have to explain what you mean by "weak format". Because as we've established, how "weak" or "strong" a card is is relative to the strength of the other cards around it. So you could certainly bring the baseline power level of Limited up by increasing the power of the average common. But you would have to bring up the power level of the average uncommon, rare, and mythic rare to compensate, because a certain degree of power variance is necessary for a healthy Limited format, for the reasons I discussed above. And then, as now, the top end of that power level would be the only cards playable in Constructed.
Granted, but this would have a lot of side effects that I think are being brushed under the rug a bit here. The most obvious is that it would make the top end feel less special. Whether that is a positive or a negative side effect is a matter of opinion, and I'm willing to bet pretty much everyone in the "flatten the power level" camp would consider it a positive, though many others would consider it a big negative. It might open the possibility for the competitive metagame a little bit more diverse, though probably not by much. All the same, I'm sure very few would disagree that that's a positive thing, even if the overall effect is fairly minor. It would hurt limited a lot. More on that later. Also, it would likely hurt the secondary market. If every card you open in a pack is at least playable in some deck or another, the average net value of the cards in a pack is going to go up. That seems nice at first, until you realize you're de-incentivising buying singles. The more value you can expect to get from a pack, the less you save by buying singles, and gaming stores typically make more of a profit off of singles sales than booster sales.
Yeah, I cannot believe that without a source citation. Not to say that I think you're being dishonest, I just don't believe that's something WotC would admit to even if it were true. Also, I don't believe it's actually possible to balance a set so that every card is playable. I mean, strictly speaking, every card is playable in limited if you count being in your sideboard as being played, but I assume by "playable in limited" you mean main-deckable in limited. And you're starting to get at the reason flattening the curve would hurt limited. Yes, it does make just taking "the good card" harder, and believe it or not that is bad for limited. It's important that there be strong early picks to steer you towards a color or colors, and it's important that there be weaker cards in your colors that you can more or less count on being passed all the way around the table so you can hold off on it for a bit. If every card in a given pack was of roughly similar playability, you'd have more options on pick one, but after that you would have a much harder time constructing a cohesive deck, because you can't rely on anything making it back around, and therefore can't plan out your late picks in advance.
Then I am sorry, but you are playing the wrong game. Like it or not, magic is a trading card game. In order for the cards to have collectors' value, there have to be people willing to pay for them, which is done by creating demand and limiting supply. If you want a game where you can just play the cards you want to play and not worry about rarity determining power level, there are plenty of living card games out there that you will probably enjoy more than magic. I particularly enjoy Android Netrunner. But in Magic, that hunt for the rare and powerful cards is part of the game. You can get used to it, or you can keep complaining, but that fact is not going to change.
I talked briefly about this earlier in the post, but to answer this question directly, no, it would not. This can be hard for players who are inexperienced at limited to grasp, but it's not just a process of picking the best on-color card in the pack every time. That really only works for the first couple of picks in the first pack, when you're still figuring out what you want to draft. You have to read the signals that are sent in those early picks based on what strong cards are getting passed, and what weaker cards are getting snatched up quickly, and actually plan out your picks in advance as best you can. You don't win by drafting cards, you win by drafting decks. A good drafter knows the format and can actually decide based on those signals what's going to be the most viable strategy that there will be cards available for, and pick cards that support that strategy. If you take away the power variance, you make that task much harder, and ironically the format becomes more about picking the best on-color card, because you can no longer make those predictions reliably and are forced to just draft a pile of good cards instead of a deck that has a cohesive strategy incorporating cards of different power levels.
Eh, I don't see that as a particularly strong argument in favor of keeping the variance as-is. I guess it's one more factor, but it's far less important than the other things I mentioned.
I don't think the comment was about quality of the art, it was about the fact that a lot of older cards tend to be underpowered by today's standards, or to be Legacy staples and therefore prohibitively expensive. Incidentally, older cards also tend to be more likely to have traditional media art. The OP has observed this correlation, and while not necessarily assuming causation, has pointed out that in his/her experience the correlation is strong enough that s/he feels comfortable using the art as a shortcut when evaluating cards.