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@c256
Which is more likely to happen first: set identifiers switch to being 4 characters long, or set names start getting silly to match the remaining 3 character set codes?
There are many ways to represent the same name with different three letter codes.
Never under-estimate the power of a fixed-width database field to steer a large industry and/or institution.
All the questions about the difference between Battlebond and Reality Fracture got me curious: how many times more a tentpole set is printed in comparison to a supplemental set? How many more printers are required?
I canāt give exact numbers but many times more.
When I last heard, several years back, it was not a single digit number. Magic has grown a lot since then.
So emeritus of truce makes swords to plowshare in pie by giving it a condition to be prepared, while bloodline recollection puts the 3 life cost on the spell itself instead of putting it on the prepare trigger. Do you think that if the emeritus was not casting a real spell, you would have made the prepare spell fully on color to better pass the message of what is and is not allowed in the color pie?
The effect of Swords to Plowshares is in whiteās color pie. The big issue is how efficient the card is. It being a prepared spell makes you jump through additional hoops, so the play balance is achieved.
The problem with Swords to Plowshares was not that White doesnāt get that effect, but that white shouldnāt be better than black at targeted creature removal. That problem can be solved by changing the effect, or by adjusting the rate. The wider audience is historically believed (correctly) to be quite bad and judging rate, so the effective way to change both the perception and practical reality from āwhite is better at removal than blackā was to NOT make Sword to Plowshares or similar cards in mono-white. (See also: Path of Exile)
In your article today you said that your more recent attempts to get Mood Swings published positioned it as a sort of bridge product that could be used to get non-gamers and casual gamers more familiar with the concept of TCGs. But this idea seems to run counter to the idea of only selling it through Secret Lair, a format which (and correct me if I'm wrong) caters almost exclusively to highly-invested and highly-knowledgeable existing Magic players. Was there any concern that the game wouldn't find its intended audience being distributed in this way?
Mood Swings would not exist if not for Secret Lair. I tried for twenty-eight years to publish it through normal channels. The challenge is for a big company like Wizards, a product release has to be a certain size. An experimental game like Mood Swings is just too big a risk to be printed in that volume.
Secret Lairās model allows for much smaller scale products, including testing the waters for a game like Mood Swings. Also, Secret Lairās brand is about pushing boundaries and trying untested things.
If Mood Swings is successful, thereās the possibility of a wider release, but that would only be because Secret Lair gives the game a chance to illustrate its demand.
The way most āgateway gamesā are introduced to most new gamers is basically āan enfranchised gamers gets a game that helps non-enfranchised players experience the good parts with less overhead than games for established gamersā. In specific terms, the most likely way Mood Swings will help bring new people into the concepts of games like Magic is that an established Magic player will get Mood Swings and then show their (currently) non-card-gamers friends how to play it. Some people will like it, some wonāt; some will want to play more, or less, or just play with those people and not care about the game. Some of them will like the ideas behind the game, and see how it could be āmoreā ā and then they can get their own copy of Mood Swings, and see how variation, trading, and collection works; or they can try something else thanks a little bit crunchier, or they can try Magic itself. The āgatewayā makes it easier to get from āThat looks neat but itās a lot to learn at onceā to āMagic playerā (in this case).
I just saw the card back for Mood Swings, and I don't think it works at all. When designing a game with a shared deck/discard between players, you ALWAYS want the card back to be 180-degree symmetric. Because players across the table from each other are going to put the cards in the discard pile oriented their way, which will lead to marked cards if they're not all facing the same direction.
Iām missing your issue. I donāt understand how different orientations in the discard pile makes them āmarkedā.
I think you might be overly focused on the competitive aspects of a 5-10 minute casual game where youāre not expected to shuffle the deck during a session. āTournament Magic cares, therefor Mood Swings must also care.ā is, shall we say, not going to be the most common take.
Maybe my question about Colour Shifts in Reality Fracture was worded wrong. I did not mean to express that you will do colour pie breaks, but instead having an effect that one colour can do in another colour that the other colour also can do with its own take like the Ancestral Recall and Ancestral Craving Example. I never questioned that it was not in pie, if that came off as such, I would like to apologise if what I said came across as accusation. I simply wanted to ask if we can expect effects that are colour shifted that the other color can do with an own take on the other colour like life payment in black and such. Knowing how planar chaos broke the colour pie, was not my intention of asking.
Do we ever get creative while staying in pie? Maybe. : )
It seems like maybe youāre trying to ask if Reality Fracture is somehow āfilledā with color-shifted spells, the way Planar Chaos was intended to be (regardless of whether those shifts tended to be breaks or not). The answer pretty clearly seems to be āNoā. There is a (quite low) level of such shifted concepts in most Magic sets, and RF might follow that trend, but the thing that is āshiftedā in RF is the high-level concepts of the cards.
For example, the shifted Chandra is not a blue character doing red things, or a red character doing blue things, but a blue character doing blue things, who happens to be paired (by name, art, some amount of flavor) with a red character doing red things. Both characters will stay in their respective colors.
Planar Chaos, by contrast, was built around the concept that the set of abilities could have developed entirely differently, effectively giving a different functional color pie that was still balanced, reasonable, and consistent with itself. (In practice, the āwith itselfā turned out to be critical to the project, and when the larger/largest audience moved heavily towards eternal formats, that key component was effectively undermined.)
Power lunch has always fascinated me. Do you think there's a world where R&D ever designs power lunch or something like it?
Color me skeptical.
Power Lunch is a design exercise, not a product. It would be bad for the game (and maybe just ābadā), with a pretty high likelihood.
Was reality fracture a large color pie challenge?
No. The rule was all cards have to be in their color mechanically.
āThis thing I havenāt seen yet is probably what it says it is instead of what I thought it might have been before I knew anything about it ā and thatās disappointingā ā thatās distilled essence of internet right there, folks.
what color is primary in searching top of library for planeswalkers? iād assume green because of oath of nissa but that was also quite a while ago
Itās either green or white?
Things like this are a not-small part of what makes it hard to update the Color Pie articles/lists....
question about what counts as a deciduous mechanic: to my understanding, deciduous means that a mechanic doesn't have to show up in every set, but may be used if the designers think it would be useful. My question is, under that definition, wouldnt every single mechanic be deciduous? Wouldn't every keyword ever made be allowed to be used in a set in the right context? What keyword/mechanic *doesn't* count as deciduous under this definition?
We purposefully space apart most mechanics. If we use it in a set, we normally donāt bring it back for a while. For deciduous mechanics, thatās not a concern.
By the time you're getting "well, technically" about the definitions of these terms, it's worth remembering that there *is* no technical meaning of these terms -- they're just language that R&D uses to help communicate, and they can be (and are) changed without *technical* meaning at any time. Mark shares them to help facilitate that communication. R&D could decide to never repeat a mechanic in adjacent sets tomorrow, and "evergreen" would still have the same function. Next year could have "horsemanship" in every set, and it still wouldn't change the function of either "evergreen" _or_ "deciduous".
Since we're talking about Companion, is there still the possibility to print more companions?
There is a possibility.
Companions have *very* little useful design space; that wa apart of the problem with the ones we got.
In our right-handed predominant world, I assume it feels ānaturalā to tap by turning cards 90 degrees clockwise. It helps that the symbol is nudges us to do so in that direction. Are there people that tap going counter-clockwise anyway?
There are.
This is actually the more ānaturalā movement for right-handed people. If you want to investigate, the terms youāre looking for are āpronationā and āsupinationā.
Regarding my instill energy question, thanks for answering! For the record, hereās the 5th edition printing and the masters edition IV digital printing, neither of which specify āfor attacksā. Also, that wording of āattack the turn it comes into playā has always been translated as just āhasteā on other cards. If I can give my ball lightning or nether shade a tap ability, they arenāt restricted from using it due to summoning sickness despite having the exact same wording as instill energy in every set they were printed together in. Isnāt that inconsistent?
You make a strong argument. Nether Shadow appears with Instill Energy in Alpha and both have the same line of text. It is odd that one is has haste while the other doesn't.
I donāt remember the actual rulings for these cards back then, but early Magic had a bunch of these sorts of āit works like X with this specific pair of cards, but like Y with these other cardsā rulings. Inconsistency was annoying but considered less important than each card ruling reflecting the specific intent, concept, and (yes) flavor of the specific card(s). in large part, this grew out of the idea that play groups would figure out the interactions of weird card effects on their own, and different groups would have different answers, and that was ok ā it meant that the game would have slightly different feel in different places, adding to the ābigger than the boxā feel of Magic. This continued even after the game got big enough to want centralized FAQs and regional-and-bigger tournament scenes, for a while, but eventually was replaced with a consistent set of rules that made similar cards behave in similar ways, and didnāt require players to bring a printout of their deckās specific rulings to every non-tiny gathering, and reduced the number of popular decks that were ābrokenā (stronger or weaker) by a random phone call to Wizardsā Customer Service line the day before big events.
Mark,
Isn't there a case to be made that a way to get more players to understand the intricacy of the stack is if there ARE cards that interact with it, as well as mentioning it in rules text more often?
Nivmagus Elemental is 14 years old -- it's not a great card by any means, but there was FUN to be had in playing with a zone of the game that's rarely interacted with.
I get that the design space is not in any way very deep, but surely there's space to have more than one card per decade, right?
And sure, a card that manipulates the stack may often just be a āmore complicated Voidslimeā, to which I say "ā¦so?" It's actually okay if a card has uses other than it's primary purpose, and if it's a "more complicated Voidslime" more often than not, surely there's space to have A card, right?
It's a shame that Design is leaving that space so unexplored instead of letting it shine in new ways.
Thereās simply not much design space there, and the little thatās there would be hard to explain to the majority of players.
Some people might *like* the feeling of hitting their own thumbs with a hammer!
"Cards come from throughout Duskmourn's history" explains away crisp, clean survivors - but this is not how sets normally work. Normally we see a plane at a single point in time. If a set is across an unusually long period of time, that should show up in the mechanics, not just art.
How would that show up in the mechanics?
The Brothersā War was also across time, for example, and it didnāt have a mechanical representation of it.
I canāt think of a single set that showed a single point in time. The first super-obvious counter example that comes to mind is the race set, but itās also clearly true in Antiquities, Final Fantasy, Fallen Empires, War of the Spark, etc. Offhand, Iād guess that the Innistrad Wedding set is closest, but even that clearly depicts multiple points in time. What am I missing?
Out of curiosity re:discard/counterspells: is there a research differential between "players dislike playing against this mechanic but like playing with this mechanic" versus "players don't like what this mechanic does at all" when talking about player likes/dislikes?
Itās more a dislike of playing against it.
Donāt forget Land Destruction. Itās really not hard to see the through-line there, is it?
Do you find it surreal to get messages from people not knowing who you are because the algorithm is throwing Blogatog around, due likely to either your operational presence on tuimblr and/or the growing popularity of MTG? Compared to some years ago, you only got questions from us QuestionMarks. Do you remember the first time it happened?
I don't, but it's happening more and more.
I first noticed it a few years ago when Tumblr was trying to sell itself (and had started trying to ājuiceā its numbers). That was before Universes Beyond, fwiw.
