every card that sees play these days does so many things that it’s not even comparable to old standard anymore

This is my biggest gripe with design overall. It has shown its effects most predominantly in Standard since Standard was one of the slowest formats, but I think this problem has caused every format to get a lot faster.

I’m 100% with you, and I desperately want a non-limited, much slower format but I don’t know how on earth we get there with Hasbro/WoTC making it pretty clear that they care way more about sales revenue than the game being fun.

I personally think these are all positive bans. It’s unfortunate that bans are needed every cycle lately, but these are all good ones to me.

Breach is a card that should never have been printed. Yawgmoth’s Will was already insane, and printing the same thing for 1 mana cheaper was a huge mistake imo. This is just now finally catching up to reality. There was talk of banning Mox Opal but I think that is too premature when the obvious issue right now is Breach.

Sowing Mycospawn should never have been printed. And Troll was enabling too much efficiency for Blue/Black decks. I think both of those were the right hits right now. I know there’s tons of talk about banning Reanimate, Daze, Entomb, etc but these are absolutely the right hits for now in my opinion. I think waiting to see what a format without Troll looks like is better than hastily banning any of the core cards. I’d like to see Bowmasters gone next.

I personally think these are all positive bans. It’s unfortunate that bans are needed every cycle lately, but these are all good ones to me.

Breach is a card that should never have been printed. Yawgmoth’s Will was already insane, and printing the same thing for 1 mana cheaper was a huge mistake imo. This is just now finally catching up to reality. There was talk of banning Mox Opal but I think that is too premature when the obvious issue right now is Breach.

Sowing Mycospawn should never have been printed. And Troll was enabling too much efficiency for Blue/Black decks. I think both of those were the right hits right now. I know there’s tons of talk about banning Reanimate, Daze, Entomb, etc but these are absolutely the right hits for now in my opinion. I think waiting to see what a format without Troll looks like is better than hastily banning any of the core cards. I’d like to see Bowmasters gone next.

Enigma Jewel is one I personally specced on. I knew that card was busted beyond belief and made a dimir Jewel/Rats deck for Pioneer last year before the UB announcements. I have not played 1 game with the deck but at least there are marginal gains on the Enigma Jewel playset lol.

This was fantastic and so is Matt Nass. My main takeaway from this was with the lands in the deck, how much we could use Blood Moon in standard right now 😆 My mouth is salivating at the idea of punishing that mana base.

Reposting my comment with this account for visibility as it appears my mtgzone account still is not visible outside the instance.

Non-magic, but I may have to open up a discussion on the Lemmy hosting discord for this. I actually thought it was working after an update we applied but I’ll see what they and Andrew can help with.

I’m curious to know how many price increases and card or pack decreases have happened over the last 2-3 years. Hasbro’s insane requirement of WoTC to increase revenue 50% year over year, and WoTC’s constant pushing of all costs onto the consumer has gotten us to this point.

I’m also curious what this looks like even just 1 or 2 years down the line. 50% YoY is impossible to maintain, so what happens when they don’t hit the target? What happens when they decrease revenue for a quarter or fiscal year? What happens if it bears true that some UB sets are hits, and others are flops? What happens if we hit a recession?

They’ve traded the health of the underlying game for short term profits under the tenuous assertion that people will always continue to pay.

I have a lot of thoughts on this but I’ll keep it crazy short (lol).

First, that was incredible and I totally felt his excitement the whole time. However, what am I watching! Timeless has effectively now become Yugioh, and it’s not even a joke, that’s what Yugioh game play is like.

I started out really interested in Timeless as a format, but this is what you get when you take free interaction out of Legacy. It’s a joke format to me right now, and adding Chrome Mox makes it unplayable. I think it was unplayable before with the prevalence of combo decks, but this is truly something else. This guy won the game on the opponent’s upkeep without any lands in hand or in play…

I don’t think Wizards gives a shit really, they don’t care about 60 card constructed at all imo, but I can’t seem them adding Force of Negation in 2025 when it was actually needed in 2024. I’m very curious to know how big that Timeless playerbase is.

I think that’s okay tho, but you could also have the Vehicle stay a creature until the following turn. Like you crew it on your turn, and it stays a creature until your next turn.

I really think the issue I have with Vehicles is that they can be crewed at instant speed. That holds up every single turn and step of the game for that action. I would have preferred crew being a sorcery speed action. Something you can only do on your turn makes more sense to me and it solves that problem.

I think this is a pretty good idea, and I like the overall take on it. It’s a little confusing at first but I imagine it will get iterated on. The Game Changers are very confusing, I feel like people will just optimize against these or any list like this.

What I love most is that my old school 5c Knight Tribal Kenrith actually qualifies in the bracket 1 it’s designed for. Whenever I said Kenrith before people never wanted to play against it but the deck stinks! It’s just equipment and knights from the first 15 years of the game. Kenrith is only in there to get 5c and because he’s an awesome and loreful king and commander.

I actually think this will revitalize the jank decks by giving them kinda of a dedicated format in Bracket 1.

This new wiki will be 100% ad-free, forever.

Can’t overstate how great Scryfall is to the community.

I’ve been thinking about this more. Would Aang then have to be {W}{U}{R}{G} or would there be 4 different versions of Aang?

Yea that’s pretty cool actually

Avatar at least fits in thematically with Magic, like LoTR and possibly Assassin’s Creed. What’s frustrating is that there aren’t many other IPs that fit in very well, so once they get exhausted we’re left with things like Marvel, Spongebob, etc.

As an aside, Tintin is probably my favorite IP in my life, and I will always love everything Tintin. But I don’t think I would buy a Tintin magic set at all, and in fact it would kind of make me feel weird. Tintin, a journalist set in the 20s/30s, grounded fully in reality and current events, is the exact opposite of magic and spellcasting. They make as much sense as peanut butter and tomato sauce together.

And I think that right there might be my biggest underlying problem and disgust with it all – because there is zero thematic overlap it comes off entirely as a naked cash grab. Effectively, “see! you love magic and you love tintin, you should love magic-tintin! will you give us money now?” That’s how I see this in my head and that’s how it all plays out to me. The “game” of Magic is now very clearly a much lower priority than the “business” of Magic and right there you lost me. They have figured they won’t lose enough to impact “growth” and maybe they figure they can recapture lost fans with a “return to magic” phase in the future. But right now I have 0 interest in anything coming out this year, and I’ve grown too frustrated with the current state of the game regardless of UB.

I think Air would have to become White. Black doesn’t really fit at all in Avatar, that one would be curious to see how they fit in.

I honestly cannot believe standard players are going to be dealing with Sheoldred until Fall 2025. Effectively another year, it feels like it’s been in standard forever.

It’s also really interesting to me that the next rotation sees that entire Brother’s War arc rotate out. That arc was kind of the last consistent in-universe story line we got in the sets. That will rotate out after having experienced the universes beyond sets for 4-6 months, and from there on out, we are more or less in a whole new era of the game.

I’d stay this 2025 rotation is actually pretty significant. Moving into 3 year standard, so the following rotation isn’t until 2027 (!) and then by then we will have 9 universes beyond sets in standard, Foundations still around for another 2 more years, and a standard format that is incorporating 19 sets in total. Gonna be a very interesting site to behold!

I also wasn’t experimenting. I wanted to get to Mythic, so I stuck to decks that I knew were good and that I was experienced with.

To me this is a problem w/ ranked ladder games for sure, but it’s also the main reason I don’t play as much anymore. Card acquisition is so expensive for non-drafters that you pretty much cannot brew on Arena unless you pay a lot of money every set.

I still vividly remember crafting 4 mythic WCs for a playset of Body of Research for a bad combo deck. I played the deck 3 times, don’t think I ever won with it, and then never played it again. Those wildcards are $20-30 of in-game currency never gonna get that back. Being able to dust/de-craft those cards would get me back. Still makes me mad when I think about it.

I’m still not sure I would want to play without one.

Yea I also have never played a constructed event on Arena, and have never had any desire to at all. I don’t think those tournaments are better than a ladder, and I don’t think asynchronous leagues work. I think the ladder is better than the alternatives, it would just be nice maybe if there was a literal play queue that wasn’t using deck strength and/or mmr. I’d love to see what random brews people are playing with. It would be even better to share decklists mid-game or after the game.

Matching players with evenly matched players is one of the main reasons for ladder play. This is not without its merits, but it also isn’t a strictly good thing. If you match people precisely then there is no sense of progress because players will win about half their games regardless of how good they get.

I think this is definitely frustrating, basically everyone always just wins about half of their games. I understand why the ladder exists in games and especially Arena, but I think it just got to a point for me where its not fun anymore. You’re only ever playing people at your exact ability level. The variety of opponents makes it more fun I think.

I must say, this is a really cool synergistic deck. I’d say it looks more like a tempo deck than full on aggro but really this looks really fun to play while still also looking competitive too. I love the combo between Spiteful Hexmage and Nurturing Pixie. There are so many little combos and synergies in this and not too many rares either.