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Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2024-05-04 11:19:58)
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2024-05-04 11:19:58)
I always design with NWO. I'll never play with any of the cards I make, so I have no reason to not make them technically correct. Plus, most of the time NWO just makes the card better anyway.
Humans relate better to other humans. Yeah, the names are arbitrary, but guess what? All words are arbitrary! Language is supposed to facilitate communication and the psychographics are supposed to help game designers design games. I admit that their being western names isn't very inclusive, but Wizards is a western game company.
My point is that the psychographics are known and definable and not actually in need of human names. You could call Johnny/Jenny something like "papaya" and the name would be equally as meaningless. The psychographic names are constructs that suffer the problem of carrying the baggage of having already existed outside of the Magic world (save Vorthos). If the names of the psychographics had all been original conceptions unique to Magic (or at least predominantly absorbed by them) then there would be a reason to keep them. Instead we accept preexisting human names (that are exclusive to only some cultures) to describe player types based on the whims/intuitions of naming conventions.
To clarify: Spikes care about proving themselves. Tournaments are an easy way to do this, but it isn't the only way. You can have a Spike that only plays multiplayer Commander, but plays to win. You can even have a Spike Vorthos, who tries to be better at flavor than other people.
Spike doesn't refer to competitive tournament players; they're only a sub-group of Spikes. The psychographics give names to the three types of player, which gives Wizards a specific thing to design cards for; it gives them a goal. It makes card designing a lot easier and a lot better for the consumer. As a card maker, you're screwing yourself over if you don't familiarize with them. They also predate the cards in the Un-sets.
Why are there names the psychographics? I had to look up what a Spike was when I first heard it. Is "competitive tournament player" that much of a hassle? Two silver-bordered cards aside the names mean nothing in actuality any more than ana, necra, ceta, etc. did.
I also think having two names is too many. It's wordy and not conducive to verbal discussion. Mel was changed to gender neutral rather than male.
I often worry there's a tension between the first steps toward inclusiveness and further steps. Having gender neutral names would be better than having male and female names, you're right, and I'm sad I didn't think of that :( But female names at least make people aware that "male is not the default": gender neutral ones most players would simply read as male :( So I feel like some sort of compromise is necessary (especially to be more culturally diverse), but I'm not sure what.
I don't like it. It still reinforces the gender binary. There should be a single, gender-neutral name for each of them.
Good point, that could be a good start.
I know our visitor here is making a joke, but the female Muslim name 'Jani' works well here, too...
lets be even more inclusive. why only english/ western names? moreover why are these human sounding names? what about my dogs and cats that play magic? my plants like to debate magic as well. should they be included?
I advocate alternatives only for the sake of brevity and efficiency, not for nefarious ideological purposes. Like to shorten the mouthful phrase 'he or she', 'his or her'.
thus I propose the shortest and easiest to pronounce and spell and remember. "e, em, er" respectively for subject, object, and possessive. 'em' is already contraction of 'them': eg. let 'em.
X has no standard sound in English, and looks unnatural since so few words start with it.
I think, to me, it's easier to parse as one ability, so I'd rather write it the way I expect it to work and add reminder text if necessary.
There are permanents that say things like "Exile target creature, return it to the battlefield at the beginning of the next end step" without clarification.
Or, you could sidestep the templating problem by having this sacrifice.
Personally, I would think you'd have to include "(This ability continues to trigger even if Apocalypse Chime is no longer on the battlefield)".
I mean, we know that connecting the two sentences together makes it part of the same ability, and the ability is ongoing independent of what's on the battlefield. But I would assume most players up to 5 years of experience wouldn't make that connection (and even some veteran players wouldn't immediately notice the distinction.)"
For what it's worth, I did make the activation high so that there would be a solid period of recovery. Theoretically, you could ramp back up to 9, but then you'd just end up exiling your ramp anyway.
Hmm. Maybe I'll just mock up both designs and show them to people off the server and ask them which they prefer. We'll probably get a better reaction from side by side comparisons of uninvested people then by arguing (reasonable) semantics here.
I really don't like an indestructible, repeatable Armageddon. I don't see how connecting the two abilities would be confusing or busy; in fact, I think it's cleaner. "Exile all permanents. At the beginning of each player's upkeep, that player may return a land they own exiled this way to the battlefield under their control."
That's pretty cool.
Was thinking that something like this would do:
It wipes the board, but sticks around after. It also blasts the lands, but they can recover over time.
I tossed around making it indestructible, then decided against it. But the non-indestructible version of this card doesn't do what you'd want it to do if any player cast Smelt after it was activated. I had the 'return a land' be part of the ability and be independent of whether the Chime is in play, but that's confusing (and, at the very least, busy since it requires reminder text.) In the end, I decided it was better to leave indestructible on and let players deal with that.
First thing I thought of was an updated Nevinyrral's Disk, but Perilous Vault is good too. Exile might be better.
Sounds to me like a Perilous Vault functional reprint...
Apocalypse Chime is a card from Homelands. It looks like this:
![[[Apocalypse Chime]]](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/named?format=image&version=normal&exact=apocalypse+chime)
In Homelands Restored, my goal is to do the least to update the cards to feel like they're modern. Most times that means that if a Modern card can do something, and it doesn't interfere with the needs of the set, then the only thing I do is alter the casting cost to be appropriate to modern standards.
Not knowing quite what to do with the chime, I just increased the cost and the activation by one and called it a day. But this still bugs me. For what I assume would be obvious reasons to a modern player, Wizards doesn't print cards like this anymore.
So I need to update the Apocalypse Chime. But I'm not sure how. It turns out the Chime appeared in the 1996 comic book. Details to follow:
So, we have a chime that when you ring it destroys everything, rips all mana from the land, removes the planeswalker's spark, but the walker and the chime sticks around. Just talking this through, I'm starting to get an idea of how to shape this card. But it would be very silly of me to ask for help, only to design the card and say "You know what. Forget it." Besides, I wouldn't mind seeing how other people would approach this Mythic Legendary Artifact.
Evidently, Jennifer is the 6th most common female name in the U.S.. Jean comes in at 58:
http://names.mongabay.com/female_names.htm
Number one is Mary. Makes sense. Bit surprised to see that Patricia is number two, however.
The bottom of that list makes for strange oddities, too. Evidently, there are over 12,000 women in the U.S. named 'Robert'.
I think I only know one person named Jenny.
Well, I suppose it was inevitable. Though, he could have used 'Jeannie' instead. It may be the feminized version of 'Jon', but it isn't as ubiquitous as Jen. I swear, half the women I know are named Jen...
http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/113098836228/the-player-psychographics
Several years ago I started using Timmy/Tammy and Jenny/Johnny, not just the male versions. I didn't remember seeing them before that, but I may have subconsciously taken the names from somewhere else.
But I've been seeing them more widely and I only just noticed a few months ago, Mark Rosewater endorsed exactly the same conclusion, with exactly the same names.
@Alex/JM and in furry circles were herm characters are common, you'll see "shi" and "hir" a lot. Still in the broader populace, I agree these aren't picking up.
I'm firmly in the "they" camp. Although I generally defer to Wizard's awkward templating, I cannot abide their insistence on wasting invaluable card space using "he or she".
You say "never stuck". There are several people in my Livejournal extended circles who use things like "ze" regularly. But it always looks unnatural to me. I think "they" is perfectly sufficient. (The one nonbinary person I know f2f prefers "they", fortunately.)
For what it's worth: the only time 'they' is an inappropriate pronoun is when the gender of the pronoun is known. So...
"I don't know who drank my Crystal Pepsi I've been saving since 1991, but I hope they enjoyed it."
...is grammatically correct, but...
"Sarah ran her penny-farthing off a cliff and broke her cervix. I hope they have medical insurance."
...is not. But we wouldn't use 'he or she has' in this scenario either, so the choice to use 'he or she' over 'they' is moot.