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Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2026-02-22 12:28:57)
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2026-02-22 12:28:57)
I played Reef Pirates at my first standard tournament. (I lost terribly, so I don't know how good a card it was back then...)
If you miss the old cards, play with the old cards lol. I used to hold casual "Card Soup" tournies at my local LGS. Everyone took aprx 36 random cards of any colors of their choosing from the store's dozen 10 cent bins, then threw some lands in.
As for the card, the thing that makes it crazy to me is that it also doubles counters on other creatures you control; even if it attacks and is blocked, or killed, that attack has a lasting effect on your other creatures too.
Power creep. I'm also utterly confused by reviews that look at that card and say "It looks good, but I'm not sure if it will be good enough." It's bonkers. Not "Break the game" bonkers, mind you, but any reviewer who doesn't recognize that this is the very definition of 'must counter/kill' is off his rocker. It's like an Overrun that doesn't need a damn army, thank you very much.
I just remember when Baneslayer Angel came out, and a pile of people thought that card was way too much for 5 mana. This card makes that card seem quaint by comparison. Sure, the Angel can make you win races, but this hydra wins with two swings, assuming you don't have 8 power worth of defenders to block.
I'm cool with the direction Magic's gone. I just can't help but feel like a dinosaur when I see cards like this, which are so far beyond the power level that I'd accept, it's silly. I was just thinking to myself yesterday "Gee, it's been a while since I turned some Reef Pirates sideways. I miss those guys."
Why so? Just because of power creep?
A creature that attacks naturally on turn 6 as an 8/8 trample is... slightly better than Terra Stomper, and obviously a heck of a lot better than Force of Nature or Crash of Rhinos. The fact that it's a 16/16 trample on turn 7, and that you can easily shrink those turn numbers by 2 with the help of elves, ramp, or Lightning Mauler, does make it pretty terrifying.
It's clearly mythic, where "mythic" is code for "absurdly pushed". But is it particularly worse than other mythics of recent years?
Bwahaha.
...makes me feel old. Very, very old.
Ha!
Apparently the real reason was that Matt Tabak was bored.
I think the removal of the loophole is definitely one of the chief motivators for this change.
I'm certain a huge part of this is the loophole. It may, perhaps, be the point. The fact that it shortens the text of the ability is likely just a nice side effect, since it seems like they tend to print something with a similar effect at least once per block.
the point isnt the loophole. this most likely forecasts a new trend, their willingness to continue to print more of such cards with this ability. thus this new template facilitates that in a few ways: 1. shorter text. 2. more intuitive text. 3. more intuitive interaction. 4. single ability (more in-line with flicker effects, similar effects that don't take up 2 separate paragraphs.)
Agree with the loophole switch. I like the Faceless Butcher + Sacrifice outlet in my EDH reanimator deck... but that loophole will still always exist on that card. Nothing is lost, the game is made less complicated going forward, and that allows Wizards to print more complicated top-down cards. Win-win.
It also means that if I have a Banisher Priest exiling something of yours, and also have a sac outlet like Cartel Aristocrat, I can make your creature can return at faster-than-instant speed. That's probably why they made Banisher Priest say "an opponent controls" along with the new wording: it'd be a bit powerful to have some creatures with continuous effects able to enter the battlefield quicker than you can respond, especially if I have Launch Party or Fling in hand. It's rather less exploitable if it says "an opponent controls". (And also rather less likely to lead to infinite loops.)
I agree with UncleIstvan, it's great to eliminate the loophole.
Doh! Was pleased to see loophole disappear, forgot that meant o-ring would probably need a new name again.
Yeah, this is a new ability, not an update like indestructible. It's definitely a cleaner ability, but it means anything with the old ability (like Oblivion Ring) probably won't be reprinted again. Also, yay whales!
It's definitely an aesthetic improvement. However, it's only one trigger, so its functionally different from Oblivion Ring: if you were to bounce the O-Ring in response to the first trigger (the ETB), you can put the second trigger (the LTB) on the stack first, meaning the exiled thing will stay exiled and never return. This card only has one trigger, so it cuts that whole loophole out. So, this guy is functionally different from Fiend Hunter.
As to whether it's a good change, I think its great. The loophole was unintuitive and not on purpose. A lot of people are whining that it's dumbing down the game by taking out weird corner cases, but it's so much cleaner and better designed imho.
I was looking at the preview http://mythicspoiler.com/m14/cards/colossalwhale.html
The rules text says "Whenever ~ attacks, you may exile target creature defending player controls until ~ leaves the battlefield".
Does that mean they've officially approved "exile x until y." to mean "Exile x. When y, return all cards exiled with ~ to the battlefield under their owner's control"? Can Oblivion Ring finally say "When ~ enters the battlefield, exile target creature until ~ leaves the battlefield"?
If so, wow! That's so much more elegant. I've been waiting for that change for ages, and didn't think it would happen. It makes so many templates so much easier to read (and I think still unambiguous).
I don't normally squee over template changes, but that one I'm pleased to see!
Heh. Yeah, sorry. Board game design and playtesting is indeed occupying the largest part of my spare time at the moment. I am still working on updating Multiverse a bit, but I've been in the middle of a big port from Rails3.0 to Rails3.2 for a while, and that's been stopping me working on new Multiverse features.
"(I got a contract offer from a publisher to publish a board game design of mine" So that's what happened to the announced Multiverse releases XD
I hope that works out well for you.
URLs don't display well on card text
http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/29771251/Zachari_Lavar,_the_Good_Pontiff
This was a lovely story that portrayed an Orzhov pontiff sympathetically.
One of the things I loved about Ravnica is the depth of the guilds: each guild was a simple stereotype, but you could easily imagine ten dozen different stories about them.
This story was apparently written in response to the apparent dearth of non-hypocritical orzhov characters.
I enjoyed it as a good characterisation of a well-meaning, harsh but fair, character in the Orzhov hierarchy. And possibly as a "good man in a bad situation". But I was slightly shocked so many people linked to it as an example of a "good" Orzhov without qualification.
Yes, someone who nurtures their slaves and trains them to be healthy, well adjusted and successful is a lot better than someone who treats them cruelly and capriciously. (And some of the time may be more successful too.) But yech, enslaving three generations of a family for a mistake someone else made says "interestingly gray" not "good" to me.
Multiverse's booster generator doesn't exactly have print runs, but it does ensure the commons are evenly distributed by colours. I tried to do this in a way that'd work in heavy-gold sets, heavy-hybrid sets, artifact sets and so on: basically we put the commons in cardlist order, split that list into ten / eleven, fudge those boundaries a little bit, then randomly select one common from each section. It probably gives rather better colour consistency per booster than might be ideal if I were strictly trying to match Wizards' boosters, but I don't think people really care.
I've yet to hold a formal 'multiverse' draft (got a few coming down the line, though), but when I drafted Magic 20XX, I set the card designer I was working with to make random packs, like Vitenka said, and printed them up. Afterwards, I saved the paper 'cards' and sorted them, so that when the second draft came, and I hit the random pack button, I wouldn't have to print so many cards.
It took a very long time. Like a 'no one will appreciate the work you're putting into this, so don't expect them to' long time. I'm still torn as to whether my method was better or Alex's method (print out a common sheet x5, and uncommon sheet x3 and a rare and mythic sheet x2 or x1, then randomly shuffle) is the better method. Alex's method is faster, but the packs aren't representation of what a real Magic draft is like. Sometimes, in a 16 person draft, one common will pop up 10 times, and another common will only pop up once. Alternatively, though, random booster generators (and I assume this applies to multiverse as well) don't take print runs into consideration. Boosters near other boosters will generally have a reasonable mixture of Magic cards in real life. And the print run is designed so that the colors are reasonably balanced in packs... something that a random generator won't duplicate.
So when 20XD6, 20XXs expansion comes to town, I think I'm just going to use Alex's method, but print a lot of commons. Like maybe 14x common sheets. Color sort 5x common sheets, and make sure at least one common of each color ends up in a pack, then randomize the rest. Again... a lot of work. But I do want as close to a sense of realism as possible.
On a separate side note, if you need to print a specific selection of cards, we talked about that issue here.
For draft there is the "Random booster" option. That's what I did; though I also printed out the mythic rares and slotted them into the packs, because I deliberately wanted to see what would happen.
Getting printing at the right size is a pain.
Are there any Apprentice clones that hasbro hasn't foxed yet? If so, could we maybe get an exporter to that format?
Drafts? With a lot of difficulty.
I print out the visual spoiler, hide the rares and mythics, print it out again, hide the uncommons, print it out again. Cut up all those bits of paper, slip them into sleeved MtG cards, sort them by rarity, sort the commons by colour, make up boosters... and then try to get enough friends over to do a draft, which is even harder than all that first step.
I'd really like to enhance Multiverse to allow on-site drafting of custom cards. I've done quite some thinking about how it might work, how to architect the server-side code for it and so on, but it's a lot of work; even if I were working on it as my major hobby it'd be at least 6 months away, and I'm mainly occupied with playtesting my board game designs at the moment. (I got a contract offer from a publisher to publish a board game design of mine, which is rather awesome.)
It's worth noting that testing "precons" is a lot easier. Make your decklist, put it on a details page with ((cardname)) terminology, hit that details page's "printable" link, print it, cut it up, stick it into the sleeves of an already-sleeved deck you've got. Make a few more such decks, and then when friends come over anyway, you can just get them to play one or two games with your home-made cards, and get a lot of useful feedback that way.
The flavor of the new legend/planeswalker rules is a bit off, but while the old rules made sense, it was a little forced. Mechanically the change is probably good, though I always thought that the ability for an opponent to play one to blow yours up was an intentional drawback. I like Jack's point about clones.