I think this is just all a bad take from Mark. I understand his position and that this blog is mostly a defense for WoTC’s decisions, but this just misses every one of the complaints for me. He’s basically saying “this is hard, I’ve been doing this for 30 years, trust us” while not addressing the actual complaints.

To me these are arguments why Maro, Michael Majors, and the entire FIRE team should be let go and new people brought in. Doing this for 30 years and still making these mistakes means that someone else is making the decisions and those decisions are not and won’t be in the best interest of the game.

All good bans here, I think they’re still 3-6 months behind on Legacy tho.

The Vintage bans really surprised me, both of those are much needed imo and I’m glad they did something about them. Vexing Bauble kind of nerfs the entirety of why anyone plays Vintage, and Urza’s Saga is just ridiculous with that many cheap powerful artifacts.

Yes, absolutely. I think they’re being a little tongue-in-cheek with that but it was Ice Age Block Constructed and Rade came with a brew that was targeted against the current meta.

Yea I think you’re right, I remember reading somewhere that Wizards may change the card abilities up to the last minute too. Perhaps it was more balanced at one point.

The artwork in this is as good as the card design is bad! Jokes aside this is really cool looking.

This was so unbelievably needed, but I think these cards are also proving to be too strong in the other eternal formats too.

I think what we’re seeing here is how little playtesting is actually being done anymore. Now, and especially with Arena and the # of games being played, they just do whatever they want and wait and see how it breaks the game. Then let everyone hate their lives for a month or two before fixing the cards back to what they should have been from the outset.

I don’t think anyone in the world can convince me Ocelot Pride should ever have been printed at 1 mana. That’s a 1/1 or 1/2 for 2W all day every day for me. I just saw Ocelot Pride win in a LEGACY mtgo challenge last night. The deck at least got to the finals, the player streaming lost to it in the top 4.

If they don’t ban Grief in the August announcement then I think the organizers may just take matters into their own hands.

Yea you’re right about Sunfall, I don’t know how I forgot about that lol I hate that one too.

This is awesome! @andrew@mtgzone.com is in Pittsburgh, and may be going. You could win this, Andrew!

Top 32 players get one 😛

I remember looking at the 4th or 5th edition card and just thinking so many things. You’re totally right, and this was one of those cards that really sold me hard as a kid.

This is really cool actually, I love products like this and Bloomburrow is the perfect set for it

This seems really good, either early or late game. Kind of like Shark Typhoon in a weird way.

I think it homogenizes everything it touches, to be honest. The cards are purposefully designed to be more powerful every release, and every time they do one it squeezes out more and more older cards. Even Vintage seems to not be immune from these sets.

Oh good correction there, that I can’t speak for 😅

IMO I think we ultimately see 3 UB sets per year, 3 “in universe” i.e. Magic sets per year, and 2 Horizons/Remastered type sets per year. You can’t really pump a set shorter than 6 weeks, and it seems like 8 or 9 sets is the upper bound on what they can release each year.

It was unwatchable, almost every game was Boros Energy vs Boros Energy, or you could get lucky and see Boros Energy vs. Jeskai Energy, oops I mean Jeskai Control. 32 copies of Galvanic Discharge in the top 8 decks!

I understand that Amazon is a way a lot of players buy cards, but… I don’t think it comes with the buy-a-box promo? It also feels kinda bad that they’re essentially drawing customers away from shopping at their LGS.

I completely agree. Honestly, this seems like the direction they’re going and it just totally screws over the LGS market. It’s clear as day they want to scrape every available penny from every product they sell, but this is all at the expense of the game stores that have been a huge part of Magic’s history and success.

Magic: The Gathering® – Assassin’s Creed® Bundles

Just want to say, I strongly recommend NOT buying the Assassin’s Creed bundle. It doesn’t even come with an oversized d20, they included a normal size solid black dice w/ red numbers. It looks like a pre-release dice.

The 7-card packs each contain a land in one of the cards, so you’re getting 6 cards really. And they’re charging $65 for these instead of the normal $40!

If there are AC cards you want I would strongly suggest buying them as singles, you cannot even build 2 sealed decks with the cards you get from this bundle which is what I normally try to do with the cards whenever I get one.

I forgot how much I love Susan Van Camp’s artwork. This really brings you back to the older game.

Sometimes I look at these cards and I just cannot believe how many words are printed lol. This is such a wall of text, no wonder they had to shorten “enters the battlefield” to just “enters”. This seems really strong to me.

I honestly think they’re going to try selling these for $3, which is absolutely bonkers nuts but I think their plan was to raise the “normal” booster price and then sell this garbage for around the original booster price.