#2 there will be more older cards in circulation, how do you reason that won't increase accessibility? There will be more cards to access. ergo they will be more accessible.
If they were using the old art and a normal card layout, making no differences other than the set symbol (and holographic), I would buy into that arguement right away. Because these cards are super-rare artful masterpieces, however, collectors and investors who already have the original cards have a good incentive to buy these as well. If a collector who already has a mana crypts double up and purchase super-special mana crypt, that second mana crypt isn't going towards accessibility.
To be clear:
-Quite a few masterpieces will end up in the hands of casual players who don't want to trade or sell them. While I can't dismiss this group, saying that it accounts for a large percentage of the 1 in 144 pack (1 in 4,320 for any given masterpiece) is a bit optimistic.
-In spite of meager increases in general accessibility for these cards, that might not be the accessibility you should focus on. If people keep cracking boxes to get these cards, the price of singles for the rest of the set goes down.
-I am in the group who sees the overall quality of Kaladesh so far as being pretty high (even if I think that energy is parasitic), making the "lottery instead of good sets" argument something that I don't quite agree with.
</blockquote>Let's assume that most of these cards end up in the hands of collectors, for the reasons you stated...say 60%, 40% still get to the hands of other players thus increasing availability.
Will these make a dent on the prices of the other printings of the cards? Definitely No, but that was never the intention of these (neither for MM, EM or any other premium product by the way), the intention is putting more copies in circulation to be used, if people want them, there are now more in circulation if you are willing to pay the price for them, that's all there is to it.
French commander get's played and it's "competitive", note the quotes, people being competitive about someting doesn't make that something competitive, I'm not saying people aren't competitive about the format (Legacy), I'm saying it's not played enough (not enough tournaments, not enough players, and no big pro player teams trying to break it) to be as broken as it would be if it evolved at the peace standard or modern does.
Now comming back to the point, instants and sorcerys are inherently less interactive than permanents, and out of the permanent types, the ones that are easier to interact are creatures and planeswalkers, you might be tempted to argue that instants and sorcerys are better and I would argue they are just more powerful because they are harder to interact with, thus worse from a game design point of view, I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, I'm saying R&D have to be careful about how many and how powerful they make them because they have the very real risk of making the game worse, even if it's objetively more powerful, and R&D knows this, as evidenced with the shift on design philosophy of the last few years, they do make powerful non-permanent spells, just not as many, often or powerful as they used to, and that's ok.
Your argument regarding Legacy doesn't make any sense. There aren't ******* GPs / SCG Opens for French Commander. There ARE those types of events for Legacy. It's not a casual format being played competitively, it's a format being run at high level events for thousands of dollars in prizes. People who play it take it much more seriously than commander.
Also, just throwing this out there, this design philosophy is what brought us Caw Blade Standard. It also gave us the single most broken Modern season in the entire history of the format via Eldrazi, and given that 53% of Day 2 decks in SCG Columbus (Standard) were Bant Company, it seems likely that Standard is also headed down the same trajectory.
I'm obviously exagerating with the french commander comparision, people do take it seriously, but you don't see teams of 15+ pro players spend 2 weeks to a month testing for legacy, do you? And the number of people in any given legacy tournament has a lot to do with how few there are, if you have 3 gp's a year, you can be sure that every legacy player is gonna try to show up to the ones they can, that's not the case with standard and to a certain extend modern, you can argue all you want, legacy is played "competitively" but is not anywhere near modern or standard, not by a long shot (at least seven times less than modern, just to point it out again).
As for your comment on caw blade and eldrazi, sure, those were bad formats, but if you compare them with say... old storm, or combo winter, you really don't have an argument there, the difference is abysmal. Even if we assume the formats you cited are equally broken (I assure you, they are not even close), the difference between playing say.... a storm mirror to a caw blade mirror is abysmal, storm mirror is a race with little to no interaction, meanwhile the caw blade mirror is a highly interactive matchup, the same can be said about eldrazi, those 2 were "broken" because of the lack of diversity in the metagame, not lack of interaction, as opposed to (lets say, even if they are not) equally broken non-permanenet-spell based metagames.
French commander get's played and it's "competitive", note the quotes, people being competitive about someting doesn't make that something competitive, I'm not saying people aren't competitive about the format (Legacy), I'm saying it's not played enough (not enough tournaments, not enough players, and no big pro player teams trying to break it) to be as broken as it would be if it evolved at the peace standard or modern does.
Now comming back to the point, instants and sorcerys are inherently less interactive than permanents, and out of the permanent types, the ones that are easier to interact are creatures and planeswalkers, you might be tempted to argue that instants and sorcerys are better and I would argue they are just more powerful because they are harder to interact with, thus worse from a game design point of view, I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, I'm saying R&D have to be careful about how many and how powerful they make them because they have the very real risk of making the game worse, even if it's objetively more powerful, and R&D knows this, as evidenced with the shift on design philosophy of the last few years, they do make powerful non-permanent spells, just not as many, often or powerful as they used to, and that's ok.
How about the number of tournaments? The number of players in those tournaments? I know there's some people trying to break it, and I don't want to diminish their efforts, but the numbers are not remotely close to modern's or standard's numbers. Without a pro-tour and a bigger gp circuit, there's not enough incentive for big teams to "break the format" like they do on standard or modern (I guess modern less so now because there's no PT). Then there's the issue with card availability, even if WotC decided that there should be a PT or more GP's, there's just not enough cards for everyone to play the deck they want to play.
Just to give you a number, just for 2016-2017 there are/have been 21 Modern GPs, there have been (will be) 24 Legacy GP's since 2004 up to 2017, if we just count the ones for 2016-2017 there are just 3, that's seven times more modern GP's than legacy GP's, and don't even try to compare it to standard.
I'm not mixing up anything, I know workshop isn't legal and because of that, Trinisphere it's not a factor in Legacy, ther might be fringe playable decks in the format, but they are just that they are ceirtanely not cards that really factor (or should factor) in the evaluation of Legacy. You might want to go take a look at MTGTop8, other than wasteland there's nothing that remotely resembles LD in the first 2 or 3 pages of the most played cards in legacy for 2016 or 2015... and let's face it, even if it was, does it really help your argument? Does Trinisphere make Legacy better? Having a player being unable to cast spells makes better gameplay? Let's face it, if you are dropping Trinisphere later than turn 1 or 2, it has a relative low impact, AND if you drop it on turn one or 2, you usually have very loopsided games, if you can even call it a game.
So... no, legacy is not really a better format than modern, or standard, it doesn't have better gameplay, it doesn't have more interaction, and whenever a legacy deck "wants" to interact with it's opponent (besides FoW), it's usually a soft lock like miracles or trinisphere, or in the best case scenario, something like thoughtseize from a combo deck so it can stop you from interacting with them and just "do it's thing".
So... back to the point, the problem with instants and sorcerys, is that they can only be interacted with either before you cast them, or on the stack, they just do it's thing and if you can't either discard them or counter them, that's it. That makes for poor gameplay, that's why they prefer to use creatures and/or planeswalkers.
You correctly pointed liliana out, that's a great example, compare it to sinkhole for example... sinkhole just destroys a land and that's it, unless you counter it or discard it before your opponent can play it, you are a land down, and that might cost you the game (obviously this is hipotetical, as I said earlier, isn't competitive other than wasteland), compare it to liliana, liliana can take down one or more lands, but the opponent can, discard it, counter it, attack it so it doesn't get to it's ultimate, destroy it, deal damage to it, etc. Now imagine a 2 or 3 mana creature that when it hits, it destroys a land, again you can discard, counter, destroy or block it, yes sinkhole is much more powerful, but it being more powerful doesn't make it have better gameplay or be more interactive, objetively you could argue that being interactive, makes it less powerful, and that's not where a game wants to be.
Legacy is better because I can play decks in any color / combination of colors and decks of basically every strategy that's ever existed, including ones that aren't really playable elsewhere like Death and Taxes, Pox, or Lands.
Modern is reasonably close to this level of diversity, but you're presently limited to ~3 viable decklists in Standard right now. If you don't like W/x creature based aggro, Standard is ******* miserable to play.
You should probably go back and check my original post, Legacy does have "many" "viable decks" (notice the quotation marks) but if we are completely honest, the only reason that it does, is because there's not really enough people trying to break the format, you could argue the same about EDH or pauper, or any other casual format, because legacy is just a glorified casual format at this point, there's really no incentive to break it, and even under those conditions, it has been broken in the recent past, if you want to spend tousends of dollars in such a format, then by all means do so, but do so knowing what you are actually getting into, and don't come here trying to "evangelize" poor standard players, legacy would be the crapiest format ever, if it ever became an actual competitive format, because the card pool, power level and types of cards available in legacy naturally lean towards uninteractive "do my own thing and hope you don't get there first" type of gameplay.
I'm not mixing up anything, I know workshop isn't legal and because of that, Trinisphere it's not a factor in Legacy, ther might be fringe playable decks in the format, but they are just that they are ceirtanely not cards that really factor (or should factor) in the evaluation of Legacy. You might want to go take a look at MTGTop8, other than wasteland there's nothing that remotely resembles LD in the first 2 or 3 pages of the most played cards in legacy for 2016 or 2015... and let's face it, even if it was, does it really help your argument? Does Trinisphere make Legacy better? Having a player being unable to cast spells makes better gameplay? Let's face it, if you are dropping Trinisphere later than turn 1 or 2, it has a relative low impact, AND if you drop it on turn one or 2, you usually have very loopsided games, if you can even call it a game.
So... no, legacy is not really a better format than modern, or standard, it doesn't have better gameplay, it doesn't have more interaction, and whenever a legacy deck "wants" to interact with it's opponent (besides FoW), it's usually a soft lock like miracles or trinisphere, or in the best case scenario, something like thoughtseize from a combo deck so it can stop you from interacting with them and just "do it's thing".
So... back to the point, the problem with instants and sorcerys, is that they can only be interacted with either before you cast them, or on the stack, they just do it's thing and if you can't either discard them or counter them, that's it. That makes for poor gameplay, that's why they prefer to use creatures and/or planeswalkers.
You correctly pointed liliana out, that's a great example, compare it to sinkhole for example... sinkhole just destroys a land and that's it, unless you counter it or discard it before your opponent can play it, you are a land down, and that might cost you the game (obviously this is hipotetical, as I said earlier, isn't competitive other than wasteland), compare it to liliana, liliana can take down one or more lands, but the opponent can, discard it, counter it, attack it so it doesn't get to it's ultimate, destroy it, deal damage to it, etc. Now imagine a 2 or 3 mana creature that when it hits, it destroys a land, again you can discard, counter, destroy or block it, yes sinkhole is much more powerful, but it being more powerful doesn't make it have better gameplay or be more interactive, objetively you could argue that being interactive, makes it less powerful, and that's not where a game wants to be.
Red can't interact? Pyroblast and REB would like a quiet word with you......
There are plenty of cards preventing blue interacting- Cavern, Vial, Chalice, Trinisphere, Thalia and Leylines when they come down T0, discard is very strong in the format too.
Land hosing Choke also exists (Boil not getting much love), Blood Moon of course. Plenty of lands slip under the instant stack as well. Cards like Defense Grid, City of Solitude, Xanthid Swarm and even Mulitani's Presence can all fill niche roles in sideboards too. The US and Japanese seem way more blue than Europe. Online is different to all of them. I would have thought Modern has far more interaction issues than Legacy. Of course it all depends on your definition of "interaction". For some people it is a synonym for combat and creature kill, for others it includes land destruction and cards like Trinisphere. There are often debates about what interaction means on the Modern ban-list thread, it is an ill-defined concept.
You just listed a crapton of sideboard cards... and maybe 2 or 3 that can be maindecked, and not in all colors, so if your argument about how other colors (other than blue) should interact in legacy is maindecking a bunch of otherwise sideboard only cards, then you are making my case for me, and by the way, there's no LD worth running in legacy other than wasteland, trinisphere is only playable in tandem with workshop, and then it becomes completely broken, and again, not fun or interactive in any way. You are free to like legacy all you want, the truth remains, the format's only real meaningful interaction is FoW, yes, there are other ways to interact in the format, but against all the broken combo decks out there, as good as discard can be , it just doesn't cut it, leaving FoW as the one card keeping the format from breaking in half... and that's again only because there's not enough people trying to break it.
The amount of salt in this thread is unbelievable, yes, instants are better than sorcerys, we know that, why do we not get everything at instant speed? Because things being instant speed actually remove some of the skill in the game, there, I said it, when things are instant speed, barring some specific circumstances you always wait until the very last possible moment to cast your spell/use your ability, when playing a mix of instant and sorcery speed, you actually have to choose whether to tapout or leave mana open, yes I know you can play your instants in your main phase when it's correct to do so, but that's beside the point.As for creatures... again, creatures and planeswalkers are now the heart and soul of the game, they are much more interactive than spells, because they can be interacted with both on the stack and on the battlefield, where as spells are counterspell or bust, There are and there will be good spells, just not as many as there used to be, if you can't or won't accept that well, what can I tell you? There are other games I guess, it's not me being an ass, it's just the way things are, and for good reason, the reason being better gameplay.
Tell that to Legacy players. People don't buy 400$ lands to get rubbish game play. And Legacy is full of instants, tutors, efficient draw and land destruction- all things that are not in vogue in current Mtg. Plenty of decks are critter free. Plenty are walker free too. And most of the games are brilliant. You don't need another card game, you just need to play Legacy- where spells matter and the game is not designed to be newbie friendly critter fests or to pull in people who want a "story". Creatures and especially Walkers will never be the heart and soul of the game for me, except at the limited tables.
And your point is? Yeah sure, legacy is spell based, it's fun and interactive... or is it? You like legacy, and that's fine, but the sad truth about legacy is that the format is only "fun and interactive" despite being full of powerful instants and sorcerys, only because (And I know this is gonna piss a lot of legacy players off) not enough people are trying to break it, if there were, it would be a miserable format, and it would be so, because of all of those "features" you listed.
There are probably too many tools in Legacy for players to break it, it self-balances largely, although it is rather a moot point as the player numbers are the player numbers and there are, as you say, not enough trying to "break it". My point is that saying the Standard game today has better game play is simply not true, and it is not true to me because it is all about combat and Planeswalkers and not much else- all the matches feel the same. It is highly subjective, of course.
For me Standard is a one dimensional snooze-fest that is designed to sell boosters and nothing more. It does not have to be good because there will be a new (or indeed new old) standard around the corner, where the names change but it feels the same going through the same cycles doing the same things. If you disagree then fair enough- it is subjective as to what good gameplay is. But either way, if people don't like Standard or where it is going they don't need a different game, merely a different format.
Instant/Sorcery-based gameplay it's fine, but it's never really been the hearth of the game and it's not particularly fun o or interactive, specially when only one color (blue) can meaningfully interact in that axis, yes there's discard, but that has it's limits, and they are fairly low really, red, white and green can't interact in those formats like at all, so all they have left is "do it's thing" and hope for the best, that's honestly not the definition of good game play, but ohh well, let's agree to disagree, Legacy is a fine format, it's obviously imbalanced and relatively easily to break, but as long as it remains semi-competitive, it won't show it's cracks too much or too often.
To be fair, we did just get black bordered Big Furry Monsters...
This isn't exactly a point in contraptions' favor. The Meld mechanic is stupid as all hell.
To you, I've seen it be a fairly well received mechanic, I personally liked it in small numbers (like it was made), the mechanic was done in a way that fit both the mechanics of the set and the creative, thus made sense to put it there, the same goes for contraptions, if and when it gets made, it will be because it makes sense in the set it's put in, that's all there is to it, the world doesn't end because it wasn't put in this particular set (or block).
The amount of salt in this thread is unbelievable, yes, instants are better than sorcerys, we know that, why do we not get everything at instant speed? Because things being instant speed actually remove some of the skill in the game, there, I said it, when things are instant speed, barring some specific circumstances you always wait until the very last possible moment to cast your spell/use your ability, when playing a mix of instant and sorcery speed, you actually have to choose whether to tapout or leave mana open, yes I know you can play your instants in your main phase when it's correct to do so, but that's beside the point.As for creatures... again, creatures and planeswalkers are now the heart and soul of the game, they are much more interactive than spells, because they can be interacted with both on the stack and on the battlefield, where as spells are counterspell or bust, There are and there will be good spells, just not as many as there used to be, if you can't or won't accept that well, what can I tell you? There are other games I guess, it's not me being an ass, it's just the way things are, and for good reason, the reason being better gameplay.
Tell that to Legacy players. People don't buy 400$ lands to get rubbish game play. And Legacy is full of instants, tutors, efficient draw and land destruction- all things that are not in vogue in current Mtg. Plenty of decks are critter free. Plenty are walker free too. And most of the games are brilliant. You don't need another card game, you just need to play Legacy- where spells matter and the game is not designed to be newbie friendly critter fests or to pull in people who want a "story". Creatures and especially Walkers will never be the heart and soul of the game for me, except at the limited tables.
And your point is? Yeah sure, legacy is spell based, it's fun and interactive... or is it? You like legacy, and that's fine, but the sad truth about legacy is that the format is only "fun and interactive" despite being full of powerful instants and sorcerys, only because (And I know this is gonna piss a lot of legacy players off) not enough people are trying to break it, if there were, it would be a miserable format, and it would be so, because of all of those "features" you listed.
On Contraptions: MaRo Stated that, the challenge was to make contraptions work with steamflogger boss AS IT IS PRINTED, He also said he wouldn't limit himself to black border, and he's also stated that NO ONE in R&D is interested... let alone working on contraptions, Contraptions will be made when they find a mechanic that fits the bill and it will be put in a set when they find a place that fits the flavor and the mechanics. It not being in Kaladesh means only that either the mechanic hasn't been solved, or the place didn't fit the mechanic... or a host of other design-related reasons that might be unknown to us.
As for a return to Dominaria, it's been said that we'll probably go there eventually, but Dominaria has the "small" issue of having no real identity, it has too many things going on, and no real identity to it, that makes a return very tricky, so in order to go back to Dominaria, a significant number of stars have to align.
Meld would have been a good way to do contraptions btw.
No It wouldn't be, the main challenge of contraptions is the wording on steamflogger boss, it says "If a Rigger you control would assemble a Contraption", if you notice, the rigger is the one assembling, not you.
Steamfolgger boss was never intended to work with anything, it was a joke, and making a functional design that works with that wording is very tricky.
The amount of salt in this thread is unbelievable, yes, instants are better than sorcerys, we know that, why do we not get everything at instant speed? Because things being instant speed actually remove some of the skill in the game, there, I said it, when things are instant speed, barring some specific circumstances you always wait until the very last possible moment to cast your spell/use your ability, when playing a mix of instant and sorcery speed, you actually have to choose whether to tapout or leave mana open, yes I know you can play your instants in your main phase when it's correct to do so, but that's beside the point.
As for creatures... again, creatures and planeswalkers are now the heart and soul of the game, they are much more interactive than spells, because they can be interacted with both on the stack and on the battlefield, where as spells are counterspell or bust, There are and there will be good spells, just not as many as there used to be, if you can't or won't accept that well, what can I tell you? There are other games I guess, it's not me being an ass, it's just the way things are, and for good reason, the reason being better gameplay.
Will these make a dent on the prices of the other printings of the cards? Definitely No, but that was never the intention of these (neither for MM, EM or any other premium product by the way), the intention is putting more copies in circulation to be used, if people want them, there are now more in circulation if you are willing to pay the price for them, that's all there is to it.
As for your comment on caw blade and eldrazi, sure, those were bad formats, but if you compare them with say... old storm, or combo winter, you really don't have an argument there, the difference is abysmal. Even if we assume the formats you cited are equally broken (I assure you, they are not even close), the difference between playing say.... a storm mirror to a caw blade mirror is abysmal, storm mirror is a race with little to no interaction, meanwhile the caw blade mirror is a highly interactive matchup, the same can be said about eldrazi, those 2 were "broken" because of the lack of diversity in the metagame, not lack of interaction, as opposed to (lets say, even if they are not) equally broken non-permanenet-spell based metagames.
Now comming back to the point, instants and sorcerys are inherently less interactive than permanents, and out of the permanent types, the ones that are easier to interact are creatures and planeswalkers, you might be tempted to argue that instants and sorcerys are better and I would argue they are just more powerful because they are harder to interact with, thus worse from a game design point of view, I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, I'm saying R&D have to be careful about how many and how powerful they make them because they have the very real risk of making the game worse, even if it's objetively more powerful, and R&D knows this, as evidenced with the shift on design philosophy of the last few years, they do make powerful non-permanent spells, just not as many, often or powerful as they used to, and that's ok.
Just to give you a number, just for 2016-2017 there are/have been 21 Modern GPs, there have been (will be) 24 Legacy GP's since 2004 up to 2017, if we just count the ones for 2016-2017 there are just 3, that's seven times more modern GP's than legacy GP's, and don't even try to compare it to standard.
So... no, legacy is not really a better format than modern, or standard, it doesn't have better gameplay, it doesn't have more interaction, and whenever a legacy deck "wants" to interact with it's opponent (besides FoW), it's usually a soft lock like miracles or trinisphere, or in the best case scenario, something like thoughtseize from a combo deck so it can stop you from interacting with them and just "do it's thing".
So... back to the point, the problem with instants and sorcerys, is that they can only be interacted with either before you cast them, or on the stack, they just do it's thing and if you can't either discard them or counter them, that's it. That makes for poor gameplay, that's why they prefer to use creatures and/or planeswalkers.
You correctly pointed liliana out, that's a great example, compare it to sinkhole for example... sinkhole just destroys a land and that's it, unless you counter it or discard it before your opponent can play it, you are a land down, and that might cost you the game (obviously this is hipotetical, as I said earlier, isn't competitive other than wasteland), compare it to liliana, liliana can take down one or more lands, but the opponent can, discard it, counter it, attack it so it doesn't get to it's ultimate, destroy it, deal damage to it, etc. Now imagine a 2 or 3 mana creature that when it hits, it destroys a land, again you can discard, counter, destroy or block it, yes sinkhole is much more powerful, but it being more powerful doesn't make it have better gameplay or be more interactive, objetively you could argue that being interactive, makes it less powerful, and that's not where a game wants to be.
As for a return to Dominaria, it's been said that we'll probably go there eventually, but Dominaria has the "small" issue of having no real identity, it has too many things going on, and no real identity to it, that makes a return very tricky, so in order to go back to Dominaria, a significant number of stars have to align.
No It wouldn't be, the main challenge of contraptions is the wording on steamflogger boss, it says "If a Rigger you control would assemble a Contraption", if you notice, the rigger is the one assembling, not you.
Steamfolgger boss was never intended to work with anything, it was a joke, and making a functional design that works with that wording is very tricky.
As for creatures... again, creatures and planeswalkers are now the heart and soul of the game, they are much more interactive than spells, because they can be interacted with both on the stack and on the battlefield, where as spells are counterspell or bust, There are and there will be good spells, just not as many as there used to be, if you can't or won't accept that well, what can I tell you? There are other games I guess, it's not me being an ass, it's just the way things are, and for good reason, the reason being better gameplay.