• mickey [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    8·
    2 months ago

    Tolarian Community College had a good video on this last month, he was making the case that WotC can still put out great sets like Edge of Eternities that just came out or last year’s Dragons of Tarkir, but they get shoved out of the limelight by all these crossover sets. And that the Universe Beyond sets also being at a premium price point as well as Standard format legal both push up the price of playing Standard and incentivize Wizards to eventually jack up the price of regular sets while they’re at it.

    Magic: The Gathering Is Out Of Control

    • somename [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, Edge of Eternities is the sort of IP bending “non-traditional” magic I’d be fine seeing. That was a set you could feel the designer’s creativity and exploration, and the art was fantastic.

      • mickey [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        Yeah I haven’t actually played around with it other than see a couple cards trickle into my preferred format, but I hear the Limited environment is a lot of fun, and from what I’ve seen and heard it still feels very much in the spirit of M:tG while being in spaaaAAAAaaace.

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      push up the price of playing Standard

      This is probably what pisses me off the most. I hate Standard as a format. The only thing I hate more is Sealed. But Standard is a necessary evil that exists to bring new players into the game and put them on equal footing as people playing longer than they’ve been alive. The old design team understood this over 30 years ago when they split Magic into Type 1 (later renamed to Vintage) and Type 2 (Standard) after Black Lotus hit $100 on the secondary market.

      Flash forward to today, and there are multiple cards in Standard commanding $75+ price tags due to increased costs of boosters and the introduction of the Mythic rarity in Shards of Alara. Now it’s a $2000 format that rotates, coupled with more and more necessary bans because fuck balancing the game I guess so you end up with a format that’s inaccessible to anyone who isn’t playing Magic as a part-time job.

      This created a feedback loop where people are moving to EDH as their main format, so WotC is designing cards for EDH, which means they have to be viable in the $5000 turn two format EDH players are in denial about, which means they’re overpowered in Standard, which means more bans in Standard/Pioneer/Modern, which means more players are funneled into EDH, which means we have an infinite combo of bullshittery.

      And I haven’t even told you about why we need Extended to be brought back and the Reserve List should have been destroyed decades ago.