Mark, people seem very worried about the power level of recent sets in comparison with previous times. Is Wizards acknowledging this and making an effort to tone down future sets on this regard?
About a year ago, we made a conscious effort to raise up the power level of current sets as it had drifted downwards for a number of years (and players had complained about it). It’s not currently higher than it’s been at past times of Magic’s life.
So, I guess I’ll ask, what is all your opinion of Magic’s current power level for Standard-legal sets? Is it:
a) too low - you’d like to see us make Standard-legal sets more powerful
b) just right - you’d like to see us keep Standard-legal sets at the power level they currently are
c) too high - you’d like to see us make Standard-legal sets less powerful
Choose a), b), or c) and explain why.
Raising the power level is fine, but it’s been problematic whenever you subvert some sort of restriction in MTG. It always leads to a massive unseen power spike. Sure in a vacuum of a small set of cards it works well, but in the ecosystem of MTG, subverting a cost of any type is dangerous.
We saw this in various forms over the years. The subversion of physical limitations to using a card for it’s investment weighed against it’s impact. It sucks to get something countered or killed when your opponent is tapped out and everything says “They can’t do anything at instant speed because they have no resources” only to run into a Force effect or a Pact effect. They subverted the physical need to tap mana sources in order to prevent your actions. Now your ability to play also leans on your ability to not only meta game but also know what possibilities exist in the entire ecosystem of magic, and being able to recall them instantly in a high pressure situation from memory. This is both a game state misrepresentation, and possible literal human advantage. But let’s not dwell on that too much besides the feeling of the first time this happens it’s something to be remembered, whether it’s good or bad.
Now we see this again in the subversion of the physical cost of “must be in hand to play”. Normally you must have a card in your hand to put it onto the stack. With companion you no longer need to do this. While it should be “balanced” in that it puts on other costs for the card that should be restrictive and reveals your plan to your opponent, any effect here that changes costs, subverts costs, or ignores costs completely immediately become a massive advantage in a single game format or game 1 as a whole since they now are a free extra card “in hand” at all times that can’t e discarded, can’t be played around, and can only be countered or the ability negated. In a small pool of cards this is easy to balance. In the wide range of magic as a whole though we run into the same problem as above in avoiding costs.
While this doesn’t change high level magic in the slightest, it does definitely fit the “blue is the most powerful color of magic” creep that’s been happening because it can counter spells.
At this point though what can we do to balance it? A lot of people might argue to ban it. I’m going a completely different way though and want to abolish a long standing held method of balancing the game. We should rethink Blue being the only “counter play” color and introduce more force effects into other colors. We kind of saw this already in Modern horizons but it wasn’t balanced in all ways. Blue? AWESOME. Black? Good. Green? Okay it has a use. Red? “Oh no another red/white bulk rare”. White? “Oh no another red/white bulk rare”. These all should have been on the same power level in some way that could be BACKBREAKING to a win con in a card type. Blue? Force of Negation NAILED it. Black? Force of despair NAILED it. Green? Missed the mark. It only stops a very specific form of play, and should have just been “... Counter target enchantment and destroy up to 1 target enchantment”. Now you can break a back. Sneak and Show versus elves is now something I’d watch. Red? Could you imagine if it Chaos Warp but hit a spell? But then we get to White. How do we break a bat here? Angel’s Grace with the added effect of wiping out sacrifice effects would be an amazing thing. Now every color gets access to some back breaking way to do meta play. Everyone runs these as four ofs. High level magic has never been more meta gaming and rock/paper/shotgun excitement is at an all time high! Who has an interesting strategy AND gets lucky?
So... yeah. a. It’s got to go higher. We need to balance the scales by doing massive print runs of back breaking cards, and lets do it at uncommon. Lets just go for it and watch Magic warp into an extremely interactive, meta knowledge, complex, and huge beast that it’s already becoming, but without “Blue is the most powerful color” because now everyone has a good “force” effect.
