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Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2024-05-11 10:29:21)
Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2024-05-11 10:29:21)
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.
The changes to indestructible and unblockable are very sensible for a variety of tiny little niggly reasons that most people won't see. I fully support them.
The legend rule changes... I'm glad Clone is no longer Hero's Demise; although hexproof generals will be even more annoying now, amuseum is right that the problem there is with hexproof or the creature, not the rule in general. I've seen lots of people complaining about the flavour of the new legend rule but I'm not that bothered.
It makes Flagstones of Trokair less good which is a pity, but it makes Kokusho the Evening Star less good which is absolutely fine.
The planeswalker uniqueness rule definitely had to go the same way as legend rule for consistency. I quite like the way it makes extra copies of the card in hand more useful than they used to be.
Eldritch Rites was the most interesting, but it missed out due to rules violations. Consuming Contract was the next most interesting, but it went out in the semifinals. I am astonished and somewhat distressed at the vast amount of votes Revenge of Necromancy is getting... I love Deathrite Shaman style versatility, but Revenge of Necromancy won't do anything unless you can make the opponent discard, so it has the same problems with topdecks and so on as Megrim and Geth's Grimoire but more so.
Most of them sound good to me. As in, I'm not sure the new way is easier/better, but I believe them that they tried it and it does.
The status keywords is always a bit strange. It would be nice if "destroy target unblockable creature" could sensibly target something that "can't be blocked by creatures with >2 toughness and can't be blocked by creatures with <=2 toughness". But there seems to be no good way to do that, so the only way is to make things either like keywords or unlike keywords, and ignore occasional edge cases. So indestructible is a keyword. Unblockable is less like a keyword. Rules say "has defender as long as..." rather than "can't attack as long as..." etc.
I've almost never played any games where the legend rule mattered after deck building, so I don't have any strong opinion about it. I think it makes sense that it's easier to formulate a coherent strategy when you don't have to plan around your opponent having the legend. And the flavour is a little bit worse, but the previous flavour wasn't very good either.
Maybe one way to go would be that new legends oblivion ring previous legends? That way, the "summon Jace" spell works how you expect -- if you summon a grizzly bear, you get a DIFFERENT grizzly bear, but if you summon Jace, Jace stops helping your opponent and starts helping you. But he goes back to helping your opponent when he gets fed up of you. Actually, just "destroy all previous copies" would work even better from a flavour perspective, but leads to bad gameplay of everyone waiting to play their legend second.
Ironically, from a flavour perspective, clone effects are the one thing that SHOULDN'T remove a previous legend. If I summon a vesuvan doppleganger to take on Krenko's powers then I DO get a second copy of Krenko. But I suppose (1.) it would hard to be define copy effects as exceptions from the legend rule and (2.) it would remove one of the balancing mechanism for legendary creatures which are not supposed to co-exist with themselves.
I would have vastly preferred "new legend replaces old," no matter who controlled either. It just makes a great deal more sense to me.
the new one always replaces the old means people would hold on to them as long as possible.
clones as a way to kill legends is a stupid side effect. if geist is a problem, then hexproof is the issue, not the fact that it's legend. also, there's a whole class of normal creature and artifact removal. maybe try playing some of them once in a while, instead of relying on clunky rules loopholes.
I am of two minds re: the legend rules. I think the original rule was better from a strictly flavor point of view, but although it did have downside issues, it also did help keep with controling the less interactive legends. I would have used the World enchantment rule: the new one always replaces the old, which does much of what they are trying to do anyway, while preserving the "legend as a defense" aspect.
Mostly seems sane cleanup. Getting rid of "I play a legend as a kill spell"... well, that's a bit of a shame, but I can see why players of the legends hated it. And in environments with huge numbers of stupidly silly legends, it either didn't matter (because there's such a small chance of a collision) or there's a couple of dominant ones (and it's just metgame pain and they ought to address the problem directly.) And yes, indestructible always was a keyword. The comp rules may disagree, but they were wrong.
So I can see it. "Build a 75 card deck and then choose up to 15 to not play each game" is nice. Going to cause some gnashing of teeth when people choose what to sideboard in their first match, though...
The new Legendary rule is kind of weak. I know there's been a big push to make Legendary 'more fun for players', but I don't see why it's neccessary. Players already like Legendary creatures... one of the reasons why they like them is because they feel unique and special. If everyone has a copy of the latest Jace on their side of the board, it doesn't feel as special any more. We talked about Slivers, and how they could always go back, so it didn't really bother me. But you can't revert rules changes as easily. I guess we're committed to the game having less flavor on this one subject.
Though, that said, I do like how they're implementing the rules. "When you cast a Legend, and you control the same Legend, you get to keep the Legend of your choice" is a strong way to implement it. I can dig that.
'Up to 15 sideboard cards' is just logical. I don't know why they didn't change the 15 or nothing rule years ago. In theory, it's to help prevent cheating... but people shouldn't be disqualified for not wanting to build their sideboard the way they want to build their sideboard. I know they listed another reason for the change, but, to me, it didn't make sense before you bring in the game loss problem.
I'm not sure why Indestructible really needs a keyword, but sure. If it bothers people that much, that seems fine. Meanwhile, removing unblockable makes sense. Multiverse, alone, has had enough discussions over the problems with 'unblockable' when designing cards to warrant a change in the rules. It must be quintuplely problematic for Der Wizards.
The playing of lands is just them cleaning the rules, and feeling the need to explain to the public what they're doing and why. Fine by me... it's an invisible change.
Yeah, I didn't really like any of them.
The article: M14 Rules Update
The gist is that the legendary rule now only applies to creatures when they are controlled by the same player, and that when a legendary creature enters the battlefield, and there is more than one copy of that creature, you get to keep one. This has also been applied to planeswalkers, for the sake of symmetry, if not common sense.
Sideboarding rules have also changed.
Indestructible is now a keyword, and the word "unblockable" has fallen out of use.
Thoughts?
I'm not sure i liked black enchantment at all :D But there are some cool U/B Control contenders and i would like to see that online again. So voted for them.
I kind of like Mass Mummification, but it moves to slow. Really should have removed two counters per turn. Otherwise, I feel most of these cards were the safe cards after a lot of hands got a chance to veto a lot of cards. That's probably fair, but not much fun. :S