You're not obligated to say anything to your opponent in this situation. If they're not playing so slowly as to qualify as stalling or slow play, you're not required to do anything; otherwise there may be a requirement to report - ask a judge or check the tournament rules for that. Ethically, I think you're fine; it's your opponent's call whether they value playing correctly more than finishing their match in time, and it's your call whether you care more about finishing the match in time or getting a draw that's good for you.
If you do need to prod your opponent to play faster... the trick is to not phrase it as an accusation or as a demand and recognize that it's both players' responsibility to maintain the pace of play. "Hey, this first game took 20 minutes to complete, we should probably pick up the pace if we want to finish in time."
"Free" spells like this can't really be balanced because they don't really get worse as you tack on more mana symbols on them. This effect at six mana is broken (Time Spiral¹). So the only way to print a card like this is to make it so big that being able to even cast it in a typical game is a significant hurdle to clear.
This is still a powerful enough effect that it's not inconceivable that it might see play in Constructed; draw sevens are powerful, free draw sevens are very powerful, and hoops like "casting a ten mana card from your hand" have been jumped through previously to produce powerful effects. It's probably not going to come together, but it definitely provides a big incentive to try. This is a card designed for people who look at cards like this and go, "okay, how do I make this work?" rather than for people who look at sets and go "okay, what the nine best rate cards in this format and how do I jam them into the same deck?"
1: Yes, I know Time Spiral actually draws you cards while this impulsive draws them. But also, if you're resolving Time Spiral, the game is not going to another turn.
I was quoting the report from memory and you decided to nitpick instead of arguing the actual point:
1. the sharp drop in Q1 2018 was across the board at Hasbro, and out of trend with 2017 which saw a growth in profits
2. the data we have access to doesn't really evidence anything about wotc or magic specifically
3. it's pretty bad to cite a random headline number from the report (which wasn't even accurate to anything as far as I could tell), add in some random singles prices, and pretend this is an argument about how important it is that Guilds of Ravnica have enough money rares in it.
I am not going to express an opinion on how well WotC is doing financially because I can't make an argument either way. MaRo has stated that BfZ is the best-selling set of all time still today, implying that subsequent sets have sold worse. You can nitpick the details of what "best-selling" means, of course, but all the different metrics you could use are strongly correlated with each other anyway. But this factoid doesn't mean anything in particular other than that we're not at a peak in Magic booster release sales.
I get that competitive and enfranchised players, and particularly Standard players, are pissed off. But tournament attendance isn't a great indicator of sales. Point is: I don't have an opinion here, I just take issue with people making really weak arguments based on misinterpreting data to support their preexisting views that it's really important for the health of the game that wotc print enough money rares in a set (without understanding the systemic reasons why it's not possible to have every rare in a Standard booster set be a $10 card).
Point of fact. Franchise Brands for HASBRO include LITTLEST PET SHOP, MAGIC: THE GATHERING, MONOPOLY, MY LITTLE PONY, NERF, PLAY-DOH and TRANSFORMERS.
Gaming division is separate and is reported separately and took its own loss of 22%.
Franchise brands are down Q1 19% across all listed. There is no way to determine individual brand losses because they are not reported.
Emperical evidence shows that LGS play has been down and continues to waffle in the Standard segment of the game for the past 2 years. Modern and Legacy are up and healthy. How much product do Modern and Legacy players buy? Not much; standard drives box/pack sales. If people aren't playing as much (WotC has observed and admitted attendance at big events is down) they aren't buying as much. If people aren't buying as much prices for singles get worse because supply is low (oh look at the chase mythic prices for Dom).
RTR was when things were good and if they're smart, they'll stick to the block's strong points and balance across color combos help bounce back.
I'm more than fine going back to Ravnica but they need to get back to the balance and design choices they used in the past to make Ravnica just as good or better.
Sigh.
Okay, to quote the earnings report:
*Hasbro’s total gaming category, including all gaming revenue, most notably MAGIC: THE GATHERING and MONOPOLY, which are included in Franchise Brands in the table above, totaled $203.5 million for the first quarter 2018, down 20%, versus $253.3 million for the first quarter 2017. Hasbro believes its gaming portfolio is a competitive differentiator and views it in its entirety.
That is: Magic falls under both "franchise brands" and the broader umbrella category of "gaming," but not "Hasbro Gaming," which is a specific segment of the brand portfolio. I get that this is confusing. "Gaming" had a slightly bigger drop than "franchise brands," but Hasbro as a whole took a hit across all of its portfolio categories in Q1 2018, which the latest results report attributes to Toys R Us' death.
The constant mtgs narrative of Magic failing isn't supported by Hasbro earnings, as revenue was growing above the overall economy in both of those segments last year; it's only Q1 of 2018 that has this sharp drop. Also, the cited value is relative to Q1 2017 revenue. It's entirely plausible that WotC hasn't done as well in 2017 as it did in prior years, but nothing about the earnings report numbers people keep citing actually supports that conclusion.
One data point that DOES mean something is the assertion that BfZ is the best-selling set of all time - indicating that Magic sales are on a dip from that peak which hasn't been reached yet. But there's a difference between doing poorly and not doing unprecedentedly well like BfZ did; and without real marketing data, you might as well be cutting pigeons open and reading their entrails to make guesses about what causes Magic sales to ebb and flow.
Also, while singles prices are very perceptible for enfranchised players, they are not the only driver of pack sales. A lot of Magic packs are sold to people who don't really know or care about singles values and just want cards to play with in casual settings. A lot of packs are sold to people who want to draft them. And as Magic packs are sold in different kinds of businesses in different places, anecdotal reports from LGS about tournament activity aren't indicative of sales either.
The confusion and bad speculation around here w/r/t Magic, WotC's profitability, and secondary market prices is incredible.
You can go look at Hasbro's earnings reports for yourself. They're on the website. It's not a "rumor;" the "gaming" division had a pretty normal growth in profitability last year but a sharp dip in Q1 of this year. Gaming includes WotC but also a ton of tabletop game brands from the family/casual market (Monopoly) to stuff like Avalon HIll. Enfranchised Magic players have tunnel vision so they love to read into those numbers as confirmation that WotC is killing magic by not appeasing their particular pet issue (Art on new sets is bad! Pack value is too low! Standard is broken!), but most of those numbers are probably accounted for by the demise of Toys R Us and its impact not on domestic sales per se for Hasbro, but on things like retail stock overhang. I wouldn't be surprised if Rivals of Ixalan underperformed (Dominaria sales wouldn't show up on Q1 numbers) but looking at Hasbro-wide numbers and singles prices and making WILD-ASS GUESSES is really really not contributing to any kinda discussion.
I appreciate what is going on with Rushblade Commander (she's moving so fast that the world around her is a blur) but I think at card size it reads as just "we didn't do a background for this one." So that specific card doesn't work for me, but it's certainly different and I appreciate them taking risks with the art. Battlebond in general is taking a lot of interesting creative and execution risks with its art, just not in directions that the grognards of mtgs appreciate. Not all of it works, but some of it definitely does for me (Again, I like Fan Favorite a lot).
I'm not saying Magic wouldn't be successful if it looked completely utilitarian. I'm saying that making the game look prettier to the detriment of gameplay isn't a good use of resources.
It's the same thing in video games all the time - You can make scenes prettier by turning up post-processing effects really high, or by making them very very contrasty, but that will often make it hard for players to make out what is actually happening in game (especially in an action game that requires quick reactions). Visual design in any game is about balancing attractiveness/beauty versus the utilitarian needs of playing the game.
Old art from 90s magic cards has a lot of personality but a lot of it is... lacking in execution. Like if the problem is execution, there's a lot of work from that era that looks rushed, low-detail, or downright amateurish.
Also, I like Fan Favorite. It's a funny concept and the execution is great. Sylvia Brightspear also has fantastic art. I think some people just recoil at illustration that has that kind of clean, photorealistic style.
You're grossly underestimating the time it takes to lay out cards. If every card was full art, they would all have to be individually checked for the readability of the text and either given a card-specific text treatment to make it readable, or art would constantly have to be sent back to be altered to fit those constraints. Is that impossible? No, but WotC would have to dedicate more person-hours to it and therefore more of the budget of the set, which would have to come from somewhere. They could do it, the question is whether it's a good use of resources.
Ultimately Magic is a game and games are meant to be played. Making the cards prettier while making them less readable (and full-art cards are invariably less readable) isn't good for the long term health of the game as you're creating a worse experience particularly for the people who need to read the cards, new players first sitting down to play a game. Having things like the Amonkhet masterpieces or full-art promos exist as promos lets enfranchised players who don't need to read the cards have access to those things without impacting the experience for newer players.
Grand Warlord Radha along with some kind of filtering effect (like Orochi Leafcaller) is probably the most reliable combo. Just because all of the combo pieces (other than the commander) are green creatures (the easiest permanents to tutor for in Commander) and you can go off even on the turn when you cast Radha.
It's possible to ensure that cards would be legible if they all used the full-art promo frame, sure. But, contrary to what 90% of gamers seem to believe, games are made by flesh and blood people that you have to pay to do things. If Wizards wanted every card to be full art they'd have to devote more individual attention to each card during layout, which would require more resources to do (=money). Those resources would be better spent elsewhere, like on paying designers to make the game actually play well, or paying artists to make the art on the cards actually good.
But the real reason is just legibility. You're never going to make text over an image as legible as text over a clean background, and the more legible the cards can be the better. Yes, the full art promos aren't outright unreadable, but they do require more squinting and looking at them more closely than a regular card, and if all cards looked like that it would quickly snowball over the course of any game with lots of complicated cards being played, or any game between two players that are still learning the cards (say, at a prerelease). Vision impairments and dyslexia are also things that exist, and having the text be as readable as possible also makes the game more accessible.
Besides, yes, Wizards wants to preserve the "specialness" of full art promos so those cards functions... as promos. Otherwise they'd have to come up with some other thing to do to make those cards special. There's a concern about "wow creep" as much as power creep.
Now on the "borderless" style used in Unstable lands and contraptions, I could definitely see a variation of that becoming the norm in the future. The reason why it's not the norm is that the black border around cards is, on an uncut sheet, literally contiguous between one card's border and another, so the small inconsistencies in how cards are cut (inevitable, no machine is perfectly precise) don't create a misprint. I'm not sure how the Unstable sheets get around that, but I suspect it probably involved either printing technology that wasn't available until relatively recently, or making the sheets slightly bigger and giving the cards a bigger "bleed," which is costly.
Please look at Soulblade Renewer or Stunning Reversal and tell me that they don't look very similar to something like Hearthstone art. It's definitely "cartoony" if you're defining that as close to what Blizzard does.
"Worst looking mtg set that has ever been created and it's not even debatable" is grotesque hyperbole. For one thing, it's not unless every pack of Battlebond secretly contains nothing but commons from The Dark. For another, the set is mostly reprints so even if you don't like the art direction in Kylem, most cards in the set don't have that art direction.
The art direction on Battlebond seems to basically fit what the set is about; the idea of "Magic does gaming, esports, and sports" is very clearly matched by the clean realistic style and bright colors. It's for the same reason Dominaria has a sort of glossy oil-painting look: to complement the themes of the set. Like with every set there's a range; Dominaria had some medium pieces (Cloudreader Sphinx), and Battlebond has shown some great ones so far (Spellseeker, Game Plan).
LGBTQ people existing in a fictional universe is "ideology". WotC stating a character is trans or nonbinary is "forcing it into the discussion" which "provokes conflict" even though "nobody cares."
That is: LGBTQ people shouldn't be represented in fiction; fiction should be a whitewashed portrayal of the world with only "normal" (ie, white and straight) people in it. This is what's "accurate" and it's important to do it because it keeps "politics" out of the game.
The underlying ideology here is that LGBTQ people existing is some political extreme; that LGBTQ people shouldn't be allowed to exist in public. The only people outraged by stuff like Alesha are bigots, and if it causes them to leave the game, good riddance. The majority of Magic players actually doesn't care; it's just a minority of hateful people who insist they don't care even as they complain endlessly about this stuff that's upset.
If you do need to prod your opponent to play faster... the trick is to not phrase it as an accusation or as a demand and recognize that it's both players' responsibility to maintain the pace of play. "Hey, this first game took 20 minutes to complete, we should probably pick up the pace if we want to finish in time."
This is still a powerful enough effect that it's not inconceivable that it might see play in Constructed; draw sevens are powerful, free draw sevens are very powerful, and hoops like "casting a ten mana card from your hand" have been jumped through previously to produce powerful effects. It's probably not going to come together, but it definitely provides a big incentive to try. This is a card designed for people who look at cards like this and go, "okay, how do I make this work?" rather than for people who look at sets and go "okay, what the nine best rate cards in this format and how do I jam them into the same deck?"
1: Yes, I know Time Spiral actually draws you cards while this impulsive draws them. But also, if you're resolving Time Spiral, the game is not going to another turn.
1. the sharp drop in Q1 2018 was across the board at Hasbro, and out of trend with 2017 which saw a growth in profits
2. the data we have access to doesn't really evidence anything about wotc or magic specifically
3. it's pretty bad to cite a random headline number from the report (which wasn't even accurate to anything as far as I could tell), add in some random singles prices, and pretend this is an argument about how important it is that Guilds of Ravnica have enough money rares in it.
I am not going to express an opinion on how well WotC is doing financially because I can't make an argument either way. MaRo has stated that BfZ is the best-selling set of all time still today, implying that subsequent sets have sold worse. You can nitpick the details of what "best-selling" means, of course, but all the different metrics you could use are strongly correlated with each other anyway. But this factoid doesn't mean anything in particular other than that we're not at a peak in Magic booster release sales.
I get that competitive and enfranchised players, and particularly Standard players, are pissed off. But tournament attendance isn't a great indicator of sales. Point is: I don't have an opinion here, I just take issue with people making really weak arguments based on misinterpreting data to support their preexisting views that it's really important for the health of the game that wotc print enough money rares in a set (without understanding the systemic reasons why it's not possible to have every rare in a Standard booster set be a $10 card).
Sigh.
Okay, to quote the earnings report:
That is: Magic falls under both "franchise brands" and the broader umbrella category of "gaming," but not "Hasbro Gaming," which is a specific segment of the brand portfolio. I get that this is confusing. "Gaming" had a slightly bigger drop than "franchise brands," but Hasbro as a whole took a hit across all of its portfolio categories in Q1 2018, which the latest results report attributes to Toys R Us' death.
The constant mtgs narrative of Magic failing isn't supported by Hasbro earnings, as revenue was growing above the overall economy in both of those segments last year; it's only Q1 of 2018 that has this sharp drop. Also, the cited value is relative to Q1 2017 revenue. It's entirely plausible that WotC hasn't done as well in 2017 as it did in prior years, but nothing about the earnings report numbers people keep citing actually supports that conclusion.
One data point that DOES mean something is the assertion that BfZ is the best-selling set of all time - indicating that Magic sales are on a dip from that peak which hasn't been reached yet. But there's a difference between doing poorly and not doing unprecedentedly well like BfZ did; and without real marketing data, you might as well be cutting pigeons open and reading their entrails to make guesses about what causes Magic sales to ebb and flow.
Also, while singles prices are very perceptible for enfranchised players, they are not the only driver of pack sales. A lot of Magic packs are sold to people who don't really know or care about singles values and just want cards to play with in casual settings. A lot of packs are sold to people who want to draft them. And as Magic packs are sold in different kinds of businesses in different places, anecdotal reports from LGS about tournament activity aren't indicative of sales either.
You can go look at Hasbro's earnings reports for yourself. They're on the website. It's not a "rumor;" the "gaming" division had a pretty normal growth in profitability last year but a sharp dip in Q1 of this year. Gaming includes WotC but also a ton of tabletop game brands from the family/casual market (Monopoly) to stuff like Avalon HIll. Enfranchised Magic players have tunnel vision so they love to read into those numbers as confirmation that WotC is killing magic by not appeasing their particular pet issue (Art on new sets is bad! Pack value is too low! Standard is broken!), but most of those numbers are probably accounted for by the demise of Toys R Us and its impact not on domestic sales per se for Hasbro, but on things like retail stock overhang. I wouldn't be surprised if Rivals of Ixalan underperformed (Dominaria sales wouldn't show up on Q1 numbers) but looking at Hasbro-wide numbers and singles prices and making WILD-ASS GUESSES is really really not contributing to any kinda discussion.
It's the same thing in video games all the time - You can make scenes prettier by turning up post-processing effects really high, or by making them very very contrasty, but that will often make it hard for players to make out what is actually happening in game (especially in an action game that requires quick reactions). Visual design in any game is about balancing attractiveness/beauty versus the utilitarian needs of playing the game.
Also, I like Fan Favorite. It's a funny concept and the execution is great. Sylvia Brightspear also has fantastic art. I think some people just recoil at illustration that has that kind of clean, photorealistic style.
Ultimately Magic is a game and games are meant to be played. Making the cards prettier while making them less readable (and full-art cards are invariably less readable) isn't good for the long term health of the game as you're creating a worse experience particularly for the people who need to read the cards, new players first sitting down to play a game. Having things like the Amonkhet masterpieces or full-art promos exist as promos lets enfranchised players who don't need to read the cards have access to those things without impacting the experience for newer players.
But the real reason is just legibility. You're never going to make text over an image as legible as text over a clean background, and the more legible the cards can be the better. Yes, the full art promos aren't outright unreadable, but they do require more squinting and looking at them more closely than a regular card, and if all cards looked like that it would quickly snowball over the course of any game with lots of complicated cards being played, or any game between two players that are still learning the cards (say, at a prerelease). Vision impairments and dyslexia are also things that exist, and having the text be as readable as possible also makes the game more accessible.
Besides, yes, Wizards wants to preserve the "specialness" of full art promos so those cards functions... as promos. Otherwise they'd have to come up with some other thing to do to make those cards special. There's a concern about "wow creep" as much as power creep.
Now on the "borderless" style used in Unstable lands and contraptions, I could definitely see a variation of that becoming the norm in the future. The reason why it's not the norm is that the black border around cards is, on an uncut sheet, literally contiguous between one card's border and another, so the small inconsistencies in how cards are cut (inevitable, no machine is perfectly precise) don't create a misprint. I'm not sure how the Unstable sheets get around that, but I suspect it probably involved either printing technology that wasn't available until relatively recently, or making the sheets slightly bigger and giving the cards a bigger "bleed," which is costly.
"Worst looking mtg set that has ever been created and it's not even debatable" is grotesque hyperbole. For one thing, it's not unless every pack of Battlebond secretly contains nothing but commons from The Dark. For another, the set is mostly reprints so even if you don't like the art direction in Kylem, most cards in the set don't have that art direction.
LGBTQ people existing in a fictional universe is "ideology". WotC stating a character is trans or nonbinary is "forcing it into the discussion" which "provokes conflict" even though "nobody cares."
That is: LGBTQ people shouldn't be represented in fiction; fiction should be a whitewashed portrayal of the world with only "normal" (ie, white and straight) people in it. This is what's "accurate" and it's important to do it because it keeps "politics" out of the game.
The underlying ideology here is that LGBTQ people existing is some political extreme; that LGBTQ people shouldn't be allowed to exist in public. The only people outraged by stuff like Alesha are bigots, and if it causes them to leave the game, good riddance. The majority of Magic players actually doesn't care; it's just a minority of hateful people who insist they don't care even as they complain endlessly about this stuff that's upset.