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[markrosewater]

Were rooms counted as two enchantments when determining the as-fan of enchantments in Duskmourn?

No.

[snarksideoftheloon]

Why would they ever? It's still only one card in the pack.

[markrosewater]

is there a drive to work episode on dual lands and their evolution? Curious why most of the duals were really bad until like ravnica and onwards.

Someone never played Alpha. : )

Early R&D wasn’t the strongest at power level, so we didn’t understand what level we could set them at.

[snarksideoftheloon]

Also remember Legends and multicoloured creatures, when costing multiple colours of mana was thought of aa upside and not downside (=extremely weak legends with cool creative).

[markrosewater]

Do you ever browse r/custommagic? If so, have you ever stumbled upon a card so well designed, you printed it? If so did you contact the designer?

I’m not allowed to look at unsolicited Magic design, so no.

[snarksideoftheloon]

Welcome to Blogatog!

[markrosewater]

My friends and I just created a fun extra “rule” for Mood Swings, and it made our games so much more fun. We all decided to exemplify and act out the moods we each controls- for example, playing honesty causes you to answer all questions truthfully, and you have to be excited and restless when exhilaration is out. I encourage you and others to try it out!

R&D often plays you have to act in the mood as you play it. A fun opt-in if you enjoy such a thing.

[snarksideoftheloon]

Sounds like a great improv adjacent exercise, good for things like D&D as well!

[markrosewater]

What types of free spells could see print into standard?

Reactive ones.

[snarksideoftheloon]

Force of Will standard incoming!

[markrosewater]

What led to full art lands being something you said you wanted to keep a rare special thing (and often repeated that) to them being available on every set?

As time goes by, we sometimes change our mind.

[snarksideoftheloon]

Money, of course!

[markrosewater]

Rescue from the Underworld combines effects available to black to achieve blinking, an effect normally associated with white and blue, yet it is not considered a color pie break.

Why, then, is Ambush Viper considered a color pie break despite combining effects available to green to reproduce a black effect?

Black’s weakness is not the inability to blink.That’s the difference. A break undermines a color’s weakness.

[snarksideoftheloon]

And another one bites the dust.

[markrosewater]

I hate that you always describe commander as a political game. I play at an LGS and the vast majority of games don't have any politics in them. The strategy is modified because it's multiplayer, but that's very different. Commander Youtube channels and the like play into table talk, but that's because they are shows, not real games. It's so far removed from how the average person plays the game

I’m using game designer terms. A “strategic game” is defined as each decision is made to optimize your play. Usually strategic games dictate who you are actively working against.

A “political game” is one where the player has options of who to affect and other players are allowed to persuade the outcome.

From a game design sense, once other players can influence your game action decisions, it becomes “political”.

[snarksideoftheloon]

I thought Mark's answered this same claim before. It's about game design, not playing styles and opinions. A third person immediately, by its nature, makes the game irrefutably political.

The game would need some extremely straight-jacket rules for it not to be so, like obfuscating until the end who's actually winning.

[markrosewater]

Are color hoser cards good for the game? It feels like they are being phased out.

I think some are good. The issue is their power level.

[snarksideoftheloon]

They're good for competitive constructed. Generally anything else is garbage and terrible game design, since they completely arbitrarily work or not depending only on what colour(s) your opponent just happens to be playing.

[markrosewater]

"There’s no set I’ve done that doesn’t have things I would have done differently if I made them today"

What would you have done differently about Reality Fracture?

I can’t tell you that yet. : )

[snarksideoftheloon]

Follow it up with Reality Splint?

[markrosewater]

People have a tendency to view the past more positively than it was actually experienced. We look back to a “golden age” that never really existed the way it’s remembered. Theres actually a term for this called rosy retrospection. Over time the mind tends scrub out the most negative aspects of experience and so we remember it more fondly. It further leads us to believe that things in the past were better than the present. Whatever differences exist between early magic sets and current magic sets, I believe this is the strongest undercurrent to why someone would feel nostalgically like the creative was more fleshed out and deep back in the day.

I agree.

I have the vantage point of being the person people complained about Magic back then. : )

[snarksideoftheloon]

Yet when half the sets are UniBey with actually no stories they're telling in those sets, the creative has evidently shrunk? It's not like the above argument is the catch-all negate people think.

[markrosewater]

Will Mood Swings have a Reserved List?

It will not.

[snarksideoftheloon]

Reserved could be a card though?

[markrosewater]

If/when we see slivers again, will they be the old (correct) templating of the effects being symmetrical, or the new (incorrect) templating of them only affecting your slivers?

It will be what R&D believes is the correct choice, them only affecting your own Slivers.

[snarksideoftheloon]

Welcome to Blogatog!

[markrosewater]

Hi Mark, since red gets land destruction, or at least nonbasic land destruction, in theory could red get "put a stun counter on target (nonbasic) land"? Magmatic Hellkite does it but that's as a bonus on existing land destruction/replacement. I mean just the stun, no destruction.

We tried red stunning lands and found it pretty unfun.

[snarksideoftheloon]

Iirc Chandra's Revolution was the only such card printed.

[markrosewater]

Can black pay life to get fast mana?

It can pay life to get mana. I’m not sure what fast mana is.

[snarksideoftheloon]

Play design concerns won't let black get any early ramp close à la Dark/Cabal Ritual but with life loss tacked on.

[markrosewater]

"We don’t want to encourage players to do something that we feel would make gameplay less fun."

Why not? Like most things that get let out of the cage, people will binge it for a few weeks, find out what works and what doesn't, and then we'll just settle into a new equilibrium.

My, and my fellow designers, job is to create a fun game, not to experiment with unfun things to see what would happen.

[snarksideoftheloon]

And this is how game design differs from economic politics.

[markrosewater]

Do you have a favorite type of foiling treatment? Etched, Rainbow, Galaxy, Ampersand, From The Vault, Dragonscale, etc.

Galaxy is my favorite.

How about all of you?

[snarksideoftheloon]

I have experienced maybe one of these. There are too many foil treatments.