Threats to Magic
M10 Rules Changes
I knew these changes were coming from my time before I left
Wizards in January, though I only got the chance to play a small handful of
games with them. I think all of us need to actually play a bunch with the
modifications to the combat step before we jump to too many conclusions, but
with that caveat in place I’m not going to let my lack of experience stop me
from speculating. 
I had the same knee-jerk reaction to the proposal that everyone else is having: I’m all for bringing new players into Magic, but not at the cost of making the game less interesting. (Aka: “Please don’t fuck up my game for the sake of some imaginary brain-dead newbies.”) Here’s the thing though … are we sure the new rules are dramatically less interesting? While R&D’s motivation for the changes is to make the game simpler, Aaron Forsythe makes a very different defense of the new combat rules on his Facebook wall:
Using the old damage-stacking cards correctly just got more difficult. Try blocking with a Siege-Gang and a Husk now and figuring out what to do. There are sacrifices to make (literally and figuratively) and it isn't just "best possible outcome all my guys live and yours die once again". The game is still quite, quite difficult. And this doesn't cater to the bottom 10%. It also doesn't cater to the top 10%.”
He’s right that damage-on-the-stack always works out to let you do everything you want to do. The new system is in fact going to force some interesting trade-offs. While some game-play goes away, some other game-play decisions are actually created where no interesting decisions existed before. At first blush it seems like fewer options is just bad, but there’s any number of Rosewater articles that argue fairly convincingly that restrictions are actually good and often breed creativity. I’m not trying to say that game-play will get more compelling for us long-time veterans, but I think a decent sized chunk of the “lost” game-play will actually be replaced with other stuff rather than lost.
(This argument is a bit reminiscent for me of arguments around the use of the designated hitter in baseball. Proponents of having the pitcher hit often argue that National League baseball has more strategy in it, but if you study the statistics it turns out that the decision to have the pitcher lay down a sacrifice bunt is so automatic that it’s the American League that actually sees more interesting and diverse managerial strategies deployed. Damage-on-the-stack-sac-my-guy is so easy and obvious that we might actually be up strategy thanks to the creation of more judgment calls.)
Meanwhile, I know that I as a good player will now have less tricks that I can deploy against mediocre players, but in my heart of hearts I actually felt guilty when I won that way. It never stopped me from using the tricks, of course. I’m way too spike-y to let a little thing like empathy get in the way of hanging a ‘W’ on the scoreboard, but I’m pretty sure most of you reading this have had the same experience of being forced to explain stack tricks to someone who is initially surprised by them. Wizards is right that they are initially counter-intuitive. Yes most people smart enough to want to play Magic can figure them out after one or two explanations, but some percentage of them will walk away from that initial negative experience, especially if it comes at the hands of some asshole at a PTQ.
And you’ve also got to admit that Wizards has a pretty good track record when it comes to shepherding our game. They never muck around with it lightly and very few of their controversial decisions look bad in hindsight. I’m struggling to even think of one.
Pro Tour Honolulu
Magic is at its most fun when it is interactive. The best moments are those when you’re trying to figure out what your opponent is up to and then trying to figure out how you can use your resources to thwart their plan. The resulting “ah-ha” moments are among the game’s most enjoyable. Unfortunately, there weren’t very many of those on display in Hawaii last weekend.
Part of the problem is that the tools available within the Shards block for fixing your mana were not up to the task of supporting all those gold cards. It’s not that the mana fixers were bad – they’re probably better than what was available in Invasion block and might be on par with Ravnica. The difference is that this time the gold block is all about 3-color shards instead of 2-color guilds. On top of that, Shards is extremely fast and aggressive. The block gives you access to very powerful spells, but in order to wield that power you pretty much have to have 3 different colors of mana available by turn 3. So it’s both faster and more color intensive than Ravnica, but the mana fixers aren’t any better. As a result there were a ton of mulligans all weekend long. The odds that both players had a playable opening 7 were depressingly small and the raw power of the cards meant that no one had any time to hiccup. If you stumbled at all you got blown out. As a result a majority of games were just blow-outs.
Things might have been better if the borderposts allowed you to return any land instead of just a basic land. As printed they do a good job in Limited, but they add a whole new level of inconsistency to constructed mana bases. Kibler went 8-1-1 with an Esper Beatdown deck that runs 8 ‘posts, but he just straight-up admits in the Deck Tech we filmed that he doesn’t actually have enough basics to support them. His plan was just to get lucky. The other break-out deck of the tournament was green-white aggro, which the Japanese ran not because it was actually good, but because it had the most consistent mana in the field and was fast enough to punish anyone who stumbled. If both players draw their mana, they are an underdog. In practice, however, they won 64% of their matches – the best winning percentage of any deck in the field with a meaningful number of people playing it.
If I want to place 60-40 bets and then just shuffle cards and see who wins, I’ll play poker. Luckily, the mana in Standard is better and this block format isn’t being used for very much.
Like I said at the top, though, I think there was a more interesting and subtle flaw buried under the mana issues. R&D has made a concerted effort to push creatures. R&D has also introduced a very powerful new card type in Planeswalkers. Both of these are valiant and successful efforts. R&D also printed cascade at a level that is very powerful in at least block constructed (jury is still out on Standard in my mind). R&D also printed a bunch of powerful sorceries, including Maelstrom Pulse, Blightning, Slave of Bolas, Martial Coup, Cruel Ultimatum, Thought Hemmorage, Identity Crisis, and Lavalanche (though the latter didn’t see much play thanks to its bad interaction with your own cascade). Throw in Behemoth Sledge plus Finest Hour and most of the action that happens in this format happens at sorcery speed. There’s no permission to speak of and while there is a decent selection of instant speed spot removal, there are really powerful trumps available like Wall of Denial (and to a lesser extent Uril).
The result of this cocktail is a format that’s really low on interactivity. One of the basic rhythms of Magic is threats versus answers. Figuring out how to play around their answers and/or how to use your own to break up their plan is fun. However, that interaction was largely missing last weekend. Even if you both drew a reasonable balance of land and spells, all those powerful sorcery-speed effects meant that the games played out more like a race between my threats and yours. The most telling sign of this was the complete lack of matches that went to extra turns. The rounds flew by all weekend long and both days ended something like an hour ahead of schedule. That’s because no one had anything to think about. Normally, at the end of 55 minutes there’s still a decent number of matches going on and a couple of them will take 10-15 minutes to resolve those last five turns. Not in Honolulu, though. There were never more than a couple of matches and those never took more than a couple of minutes.
Cascade was a big culprit here. It’s extremely powerful but doesn’t set up any interesting decisions. You pretty much just cast your cascade spell at the obvious time and then hope for the best. Opponent spun up a Blightning and all you got was a Putrid Leech? Oh well. Shuffle up and try again. See again my poker comment above … Magic should be more interactive than that. (To be fair – I do think there’s a place in the game for cascade. It’s a fun mechanic for more casual players. It just shouldn’t be pushed to a level where it’s this relevant to high-level constructed tournaments. Hopefully it’s enough weaker in Standard that it only infects this one weekend.)
I don’t think there was a concerted plan on R&D’s part to remove interactivity from the game or anything, but I do think it’s something they should be paying more attention to and I hope they don’t look at the diversity of decks that did well in Honolulu and conclude that the format was actually good. It wasn’t fun and even the pros who normally like constructed were looking for bridges to go jump off of.
I think this lack of instants was accidental and very optional. R&D has made some nice strides toward reducing board complexity and making the game more accessible. Having creatures as 2-for-1’s can be interesting as well, but at the same time I think they’ve started making too much use of “french vanilla” keywords like shroud and lifelink. They’ve also let the creature curve get too inflated relative to the spells and they’re spending too many of their constructed points on sorceries.
In summation: Wall of Denial is dumb. Permission is not. And we’ll all be better at making judgment calls before damage is dealt than our newbie opponents.
P.S. My favorite story from PT Honolulu comes from a feature match between Brand Nelson and Kazuya Mitamura. Nelson is Fffreak, a well-known Magic Online player who was making his Pro Tour debut (arguably the most anticipated Pro Tour debut ever, as it's rare that anyone knows who you are before you play on Tour). Nelson drew a brutal schedule, including a round 1 feature match against LSV (welcome to the tour!), and was in contention for most of the weekend. With five rounds to go he drew (eventual champion) Mitamura and played a brilliant game 1, using his Magma Sprays to great effect after attacking into Thrinaxes and Broodmates. He manages to exhaust Mitamura's hand and kill both halves of a Broodmate and he's got the game won, but Mitamura top-decks a second Broodmate Dragon. Nelson's response? He laughs! He's not pissed, or angry, or depressed, or frustrated. He genuinely seemed to find the situation funny. That window into Brad's psyche told me a lot about Brad's character and convinced me even more than his results that he's going to be around for a long while. Nelson lost the match but went on to finish 9th. And if Magic Online rules had been in effect and the top four tables had been unable to take intentional draws in the last round, Brad would have made Top 8.
Re: the rules changes, I am glad to read Aaron's comment about them on Facebook, though I wish that would have been included in the initial release of the rules; I think players are justified to be a little frightened about them.
I'm not a huge fan of the end step rules changes. Yes, the names clear things up, but it still doesn't make sense to be able to do something during my end step and have it last through the actual end of my turn and remain until the beginning of the next end step; not very intuitive.
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That's not new, though. That's been there since 6E. I agree with you that the game would be better off without that loophole, but I don't see any way around it so the new terminology change seems like pure upside to me.
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Yeah, I know it's been around a long time, but I think they should have addressed the root of that loophole, rather than making the wording clearer but leaving it in. Don't get me wrong though, the change itself is a step up from what it was.
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thought i would share; we have a "round table" discussion up for our team's perspective on the rules changes:
http://power9pro.com/blog/2009/06/rules-magic-gathering-team-discussion/
thought your readers might like to participate there as well.
Cheers!
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If you wanted to play a card game where thought never rears its ugly head, threatening to shame and perplex you once again, Yu-Gi-Oh!
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nice and interesting article thanks for publishing.
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I really do not see how the combat rules change makes the game any easier to grasp. New players need to learn the stack anyway, so why not use what they know in as many situations as possible?
I am however no expert on what is easier to learn and its hard to tell without playing with the new rule if it will be more or less skill intensive (although if I was a betting man, I would bet on less).
But, I think for this change to be a success it has to be BOTH significantly easier to learn for new players and significantly better gameplay for "expert" players. If not, then why make drastic changes to something that wotc's existing customers have really never complained about? Why make changes that alter playability of many existing cards? Maybe this system really is that much better. I sincerely hope so.
At the same time (and I am probably jaded) I do not really trust that these design decisions are made because it is better design. To me it feels like WotC are trying whatever they can think of to acquire new players without considering the long term effects. I hope I am wrong.
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The new combat rules are easier in one simple, very elegant way - you no longer need to remember assigned damage. Instead, you can, as the attacker, literally line up all the blockers in the order they're going to be hit. This is a huge deal for new players (and honestly, even many of the players at the PTQs I attend), because floating, "invisible" information is a huge source of both confusion and, unfortunately, miscommunication and conflict.
Consider the halting interactions we've seen even in top eights when there's any kind of language barrier and we come around to damage assignment. Instead, you can just place the blockers in order and the information is represented on board, unambiguously.
I mean, I like damage using the stack and all the tricks it allows, but it's cleaner to have it not do so, both by dint of making information about damage visible (by ordering blockers) and by avoiding players feeling unhappy about wacky interactions caused by putting damage on and then, say, sacrificing a creature.
New players do need to learn the stack, but combat damage is probably the least intuitive way to do so -- and, again, the least visible. When I play a Cylian Elf and my opponent Cancels it and I Bant Charm their Cancel, we can literally stack the cards on each other. Super-intuitive. From there, activated abilities aren't much of a reach. Combat damage, in contrast, is something that I've seen screw lots of people up all over the place (and really, I only ever play at PTQs and $1-5Ks, so it's not like I'm talking about my kitchen table crew here).
I would have been happy keeping combat damage as is, but I think the change is both reasonable and elegant, and will improve Magic as a whole.
Because losing to your opponent is game play, but losing to the game is just poor.
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I'm sorry - this is just ridiculous. 'Wacky interactions'? Stacked damage is 'a huge source of confusion'? No.
If you can read a card, understand what the words on that card mean, and aren't starring in the feature film 'Memento' (a roundabout way of saying you are able to remember what cards do), you shouldn't have any problems with any 'super-ridiculous invisible information' hidden in those crazy-looking scribbles on my Mogg Fanatic.
If you're playing at a PTQ & you can't handle calculating combat damage, I feel for you. I really do. (And don't let the fact that derision is the emotion that I'm feeling for you lessen that in any way.)
This change is needless, confusing, and will actively harm the game of Magic; the existing player-base as well as the new players that this change is clearly being made to accommodate.
If you wanted to play a card game where thought never rears its ugly head, threatening to shame and perplex you once again, Yu-Gi-Oh! is still played in some locations, I think. Why did Magic need to get lobotomized (well, or sodomized...but I was trying to keep this post high-class)?
I'm going to have to play with the new rules to be sure, but I suspect that I'm going to be playing much more EDH in future - you know, a format where the rules work. I can handle Chains of Mephistopheles getting flashed into play in response to my Opportunity, but damn it, I'm drawing a line in the sand at combat damage not using the stack. Complexity is fine - it's interesting & opens, rather than closes, possibilities. Over-simplicity is ridiculous & takes away part of the draw of Magic.
Hopefully, by Magic 2020 (assuming the game lasts that long), the rules might change (since apparently they have to be changed every 10 years) to a semblance of sense & order, & I can play DCI-sanctioned events. I'm fairly certain I'm never going to play with these rules unless I'm forced to.
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I'm sure lots of other people have "empathy" for you as well. Don't let the door hit you on your way out. I'm sure you'll have fun hanging out with the D&D 2nd edition players and the old miniatures people still playing Rogue Trader.
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This is the first and only convincing justification I've ever heard. If they'd put it this way on WotC's original article the change would have been much easier for me to swallow.
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Oh yeah, regarding the mana issues in Alara Block. The problem is when you fill a format with cards that cost XY or XYZ and make them way too good compared to anything else assuming you can drop them on turn 2 or 3 respectively. Because then the only way to balance these cards out is to introduce the risk of not being able to cast these spells, leading to what I would like to call a high variance format. Now I havent played any block constructed, but the problem is just the same in draft. Really annoying when bad drafting actually leads to having more powerful cards.
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Well spoken Randy. I think once people get over the surprise and fear, it'll blow over like everything else that made people surprised and fearful before it. The damage thing stinks, but oh well. We'll learn. My biggest gripe is the mana burn loss. It was a great tool to teach new players the importance of using your resources wisely. It had great flavor as well! With great power comes great responsibility!
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great post randy! i agree that the rules changes are going to take some getting use to and that the most contraversial is the elimination of the stack from combat. it's going to be sorely missed by us spikes. however, it does ultimately return a semblance of a parallell to the "real world" (in the sense that a creature can attack and then suddenly vanish and still do damage).
what do you think of some of the cards they spoiled in the article? i thought many of them look super powerful. ball lightening is awesome! worth losing mogg fanatic (won't be played since it's no longer a potential 2 damage) for a 3cc 6/1 trample.
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Why do people think Mogg Fanatic is suddenly unplayable? It was a very efficient and very highly played creature back before 6E rules (when combat worked pretty much the way it's going to now ... just with a "damage prevention window" playing the role of ordered blocking). 6E rules gave the Fanatic a long run as the best 1-drop of all time, but the reversion back to almost the original combat rules does not render it unplayable. A 1-drop that can attack, block, and kill a 1-toughness creature is still a very good deal, especially on a goblin. You're still going to play Sakura-Tribe Elder too. He's just going to chump-block a little bit more.
Meanwhile, new duals are the most exciting thing spoiled and they look pretty good. Comes-into-play tapped is a pretty big drawback, but I'd have to play a bunch to have an intuition about how often that matters.
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The new duals are looking pretty brilliant for post-Onslaught Extended, as they interact charmingly with Ravnica's duals (I wrote about this a bit already). As you've said, we'll need to see how they work out in Standard, but I'm excited by them from an aesthetic POV, as they're much more rewarding on that axis than, say, Vivids.
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Great points.
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Don't the new duals hate on aggro decks pretty hard? Isn't hitting a certain-color 1-drop pretty important, whereas these things only come online on turn two? Alara Reborn has certainly eliminated 1-drops, but I still am not quite sure about these new duals. I'd like to play my Birds on T1, or my Isamaru on T1, or any number of 1-drops.
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This really won't be a problem in extended since the shocklands count as basic land types. In standard, I think the point is to force players to play more basics. However, that's going to be hard once the rotation happens in October as the cards in Shards block really steer you into building decks of at least three colors.
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well, it's not that fantasic anymore. i mean, i could just run ANY one drop at this point. i suppose being able to sac it to hit an x/1 flyer is to its advantage but the mogg lost about 200% of it's previous power. that's why we're all saying it's unplayable.
CIPT (will that now be cibt?) is a def' drawback but the elimination of pain is nice. many, many decks lose 6-8 pnts of life on bad draws if they only have sulfuric springs or llanowar wastes. they did have to balance the power somehow, and i believe the potential for it to CIP untapped is a good balance since most often we want to play it on turn 1. however, in ext'd they're going to kick some booty in conjunction w/ the rav-duals. that's where they'll shine i think (in ext'd).
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Well, sure, it doesn't change much for defensive block-stacking, since you can still chump and get the effect out, but it makes creature combat as an attacker such a nightmare. But, regarding how Fanatic is still good, it is, but considering the high number of efficient creatures, how a red 1-mana 2/1 isn't even considered for play anymore... its stock going down is just such a downer. All of that, not to mention the rules about assigning damage.
But you do bring up some enlightening points. I played Alara block during the Reborn-less days on MODO, and while I started off with a lot of counterspells and "interactive" cards, even without Cascade gumming up the works, I kept feeling that the sorcery-speed spells were just that much more powerful, and it's true; the game was much less interactive and considerably less interesting.
I don't actually think Magic is "ruined forever," but every time Magic has a push toward more sort of a casual inclusivity, I think of how dumb Portal(the set, not the game) was and how there were no instants in that game at all. Think about it, we HAVE been down this road before, and we already know it isn't pretty.
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While the changes in rules are far from being trivial, I agree about the dangers of an environment where instants no longer matter. I do hope R&D is reading this, and it's a shame they didn't have Randy on board at times like these.
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I hadn't thought about this before, but I wonder if the recent emphasis on main phasing things is why I've been able to walk so many people into what are to me obvious "on their turn" things, the most egregious being flashing out Cloudthreshers to eat an attacker (and often to kill an offending planeswalker at the same time). To me, the opponent passes turn with six mana up while you have threats on board should by nature engender suspicion, but I've had more than my fair share of people giving me free kills off of flashed Threshers in the last two major local events.
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I really agree with your statements here, especially those concerning Shards of Alara block constructed. The game has become much more luck-based as of late, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop anytime soon.
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I could've sworn that in either your column or Maro's column one time at the mothership, you guys discussed how the emphasis on creatures and instants in Odyssey block made the whole thing non-interactive.
Also, worse format: Alara block constructed or Onslaught block booster draft?
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I'd say onslaught still slightly worse, but only because of isolated cards (sparksmith, timberwatch, lavamancer's skill basically). Oh wait, thought we were comparing draft formats. All constructed formats are worse than all draft formats
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Er oops, emphasis on creatures and SORCERIES.
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What this actually....???
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It's funny. When I first thought about this combat change, I was like "wow, how did that fly past Buehler?" Then I remembered that you, um, didn't work in R&D anymore.
...I do not understand this change. I see why, and I see what they did, but the two do not seem to be linked in such a way as to produce the desired effect, to me.
I also think it removes some skill and rewards instead more algorithmic rules. All the pump in the format is +x/+2, so assign to this guy first instead of that guy so they both die regardless, etc.
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Hey Randy, interesting post. I would be interested to hear your opinion about another thing that bums be out about Alara Block Constructed.
The simplest way I can put it is that decks seem to have lost their unique identities. That will probably sound vague at first, so here's an example. If you watch a matchup between your '98 Worlds Draw-Go deck and one of that era's Sligh decks, you really get a sense of a clash of philosophies. One deck is filled with counterspells to stop what the opponent is doing, the other burns all its bridges in a dash to deal 20. They are completely different in their approach to winning the game.
Fast-forward to Honolulu and you have a format dominated by what we would have called in the past mid-range, good stuff decks. That is, most people just played what they thought were the best cards, without having to worry much about cost or synergy. This means that the consensus best cards, like Bloodbraid Elf and Maelstrom Pulse, showed up in huge numbers. It also means that most decks look and play pretty much the same. Instead of a variety of unique archetypes, you have a blob of decks that share many of the same strategies, philosophies, and cards.
I think this is largely a by-product of changes that made Magic better in other respects. Creatures are better now; mana-fixing is better; we have cards that cost more than four that are worth playing. All of those are good things, but they also contribute to the problem I outlined.
Competitive Magic has been remade in the image of casual Magic: we both play our big guys and smash them into each other. While I'm sure a lot of players like that, I also liked it when the most powerful Constructed strategies were unique, creative, and didn't necessarily resemble Limited or casual Magic.
Shards of Alara, to my knowledge, has nothing close to a viable combo deck. It has few if any respectable build-around-me cards. Thopter Foundry? Sigil of the Empty Throne? Mostly it has powerful cards that are powerful all on their own. I think we can keep the powerful vanilla creatures while adding more interesting cards that rely on synergy to really shine.
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Clearly as Magic has evolved away from mono-color decks and dual lands have gotten better and better, the lines between the archetypes have gotten a bit blurry. I think the pendulum definitely needed to swing away from the mono-color decks of the late 90's, but I agree with you (and I'm pretty sure R&D agrees as well) that things have gone too far. Cryptic Command and Cloudthresher are not supposed ot be int he same deck.
I'm not sure Alara Block constructed is super guilty of this, though. the MOCS event on MTGO was all mid-range good stuff decks, but things evolved from there and the Pro Tour itself was more diverse. From my seat there was Jund (which you could build aggressively or controllishly), there was G-W aggro, there was slow Esper, there was fast Esper, and there was 5 color control. Each of those is a pretty different archetype that's trying to do pretty different things. There's no combo to speak of, and they overlap a bit (especially around Bloodbraid), but those 5-6 strategies are reasonably distinct in my mind.
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Yeah, now that I look over the Honolulu lists some more, I agree that some distinct new archetypes emerged. My criticism would have been better applied just to the Magic Online field.
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While I agree with Randy on his point that needing to make crucial decisions prior to damage happening adds a new kind of strategy to the game, I still believe that the stack has an important place in combat.
In Alara block, we have at least 2 ways to deal blanket damage to all creatures at instant speed - Jund Charm and Volcanic Fallout, off the top of my head. Suppose you attack me with a 4/4 trampled and I block with a 2/2 first striker. With either of the blanket burn spells in hand, I stack damage, burn creatures, and take no damage. Under M10 rules, no such tricks can be deployed; my blanket burn is significantly worse in combo with my creatures. Damage prevention games are similarly nerfed, as the role of particularly timed instant-speed combat tricks vanishes.
As for damage assignment in gang-blocking scenarios, I think the new rule is unnecessary and that it limits strategic usage of combat damage. Say I play Lure on a 3/3 creature. I attack into your three 2/2s. Under old rules, I could assign one damage to each 2/2, then use any array of sorcery-speed effects post-combat to deal 1 blanket damage or give all creatures -1/-1 until end of turn, thereby sweeping your weakened board. No more. Now if, say, Nausea is the intended board-clearer, I get two of your 2/2s and the third lives on.
Will we get used to it? Sure. But I think it all circles back to Randy's observation that the once-crucial Instant has lost a lot of cred in Magic.
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Your first example is just not true. First strikers still deal damage in a separate step, so you can have your first striker deal damage and then before regular damage is dealt, Fallout or Charm.
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You can still sweep the board in the Lure scenario. Just cast Nausea before combat rather than after. In fact, why wouldn't you do it that way even under the current rules? That way if, say, Nausea gets countered at least you wouldn't throw away your 3/3.
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Yes, it can be done with Lure in this scenario. But it's like that without it - my 2/3 is attacking and my opponent have two 2/2. If they double blocked me, i can't assign 1 dmg to each for Nausea.
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Aaron's "block with SGC and Husk" example at first makes you go "whoa, complex." But after thinking about it, it's mostly identical to just blocking with the husk and nothing else. Which would be superior to the example as less is then at risk. All the new "look at this decision" examples I've seen involve dramatic overblocking. Not just unusual situations, but unusual situations with highly questionable decisions.
So all the sacrifice effects are being powered down. Now maybe that's OK - powering down isn't inherently bad. However, look at the tiers of different tricks:
Removal
Pump
Bounce/Blink
Damage Prevention
If I said right now those are roughly in order of power/appeal, you'd probably agree with me, right? Post change, which ones get worse at the expense of others? The ones at the bottom are now more vulnerable to your opponent's counter-trick, while the ones at the top conversely benefit. Witness something like Putrid Leech's pump effect. Better vs damage prevention (having the opportunity to add power), worse against removal (my Leech vs your bear + Magma Spray).
So the best get better at the expense of the worst. Since removal is already first pick and damage prevention or self-bounce is 23rd card, this means fewer tricks will make the playability cut. The result will be fewer tricky instants seeing pl... being "cast" on the "battlefield", which is exactly the situation you're rightly complaining about.
Now add to that more directly limited decisions, like my Fanatic vs your 3 attacking Saprolings. Far from "mine all live and yours all die", this was a real decision: take 2 + kill 2, or take 1 + kill 1. Creature advantage vs tempo.
I think it hurts more interesting decks. I think it hurts the ability to play more esoteric tricks. I think it reduces interactivity, decisions, and surprise. And unlike past changes (i.e. 6th edition) it isn't giving us new choices new choices that make up for the loss.
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I'm not sure about the changes yet, but I'm willing to see what happens. As Randy said, there are few things Wizards have done that have ended up being really, really terrible (and almost all have been heralded as the End of Magic, too...).
As for the new dual, I've heard from other sources as well as this comment section that they seem weak for aggressive decks... I don't necessarily think this is the case. Say your deck's interested in playing an Elf/Bird/Hierarch on T1. This land sort of comes into play untapped in the sense that you're not penalized any for playing a Forest on turn 1 to play that mana creature. I guess painlands don't either, but they cost you a life. In fact, it will activate your dual land. So you'll have to build your manabase with, probably, 10-11 Forests, 4 of the appropriate dual, likely some other playset of duals and filling out with basics of your secondary color. You won't be able to open on Elf and then play, say, Stigma Lasher or something, but I think that's okay. I mean, if you want to choose to build your deck without high % chances of running your duals out untapped and use them as sometimes Invasion lands sometimes not, that's something people are clearly willing to do (people are playing BPs and used to play Invasion lands, etc.).
I think Randy's points about Shards block are really interesting, and I think they hold true in draft occasionally too. I've read more than once on various sites that people have lost over and over to stupid 4 and 5 color decks that are poorly built but that hit 4 separate basic lands on the first 4 turns and were somehow able to play their mishmash of powerful multicolored spells. Naturally this is a bit weak as a commonly occurring theme in block and/or draft, but luckily the instances are pretty contained and will only be relevant for another few months at the most. As was mentioned, Alara Block is not really an important format.
The consideration of instants is the most interesting thing of note, to me. I've felt like a lot of things lately have been weak comparative to Magic's past. Tribal synergies and nearly perfect mana have made a bunch of decks seem pretty boring. Decks like Elves and Faeries that have been changing by about 10 cards since their introduction in Lorwyn, and decks that have simply integrated the very best cards relative to the environment due to their access to any card they choose are not very innovative or interesting to play/watch, in my opinion.
Luckily, Magic is constantly changing and it looks like the future, for now, is going to move away from both Tribal and 5color (3 color seems like a fine place to be if you ask me). Hopefully with this change decks will become based on getting the mana right and powerful (but not obvious) synergies and strategies again. Personally, I'm excited.
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As far as the new duals go... what land in standard can you currently run that provides mana of more than one color on turn 1. Pain Lands are the only one i can think of that would be reliable. everything else comes into play tapped or required another mana source to activate a color out of it.
I think these will be heavily played in extended and see heavy play in standard once Lorwyn rotates out as well as seeing play in any current deck that can survive with less than 3 colors
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Well, that's exactly people's complaint. These duals are replacing pains, which DID allow you access to mana of either color on turn 1, which these don't.
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You provide some very insightful thoughts from a person very well acquainted with the entire gamut of Magic: the Gathering.
As a test last night, I played a few XXX drafts on MTGO (it's nix tix after all).
Through my six matches the number of times that a spell or ability was played with damage on the stack that would only have worked with damage on the stack could be counted on one hand, and even those weren't that drastic of difference between Declare Blockers usage and Combat Damage usage. I think there were three total.
Oddly enough, mana burn made up the deciding factor in one game as well. My opponent tapped two lands and sac'd an Expanse only to get a tapped land and two mana in his pool he couldn't use.
The more I think about these changes the less concerned I am.
That still doesn't mean I'll 'like' them anytime soon though.
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I played few drafts on MTGO now and I experienced entirely different result. Instants when damage was on stack shows in every game - in both Alara and 10th Edition drafts - and they was game breaking in 3 on them. But maybe this is not ordinarily and i just prefer to draft them, because i realy enjoy all those tricks and reaction spells and abilities. Even in constructed they are always the main part of my decks... I will be realy missing this "damage on stack" part of the game...
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Don't you think that the rules changes will lead to an even further weakening of instants? The change weakens all tricks, not just the onboard sac tricks, which by their very nature are all going to be instants. If tricks are getting weaker then it seems that people will simply play more creatures, especially of the big dumb variety. Even if a slight bit of strategy is added in the way of deciding what to do with sac creatures, a large decrease in the playing of tricks will only exacerbate the no instants problem.
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I was wondering when somebody was going to call me on this. The two halves of my article do in fact seem to contradict each other a bit. I believe both halves, though ... I think the weakening of combat instants just puts that much more pressure on R&D to make sure they aren't giving us 'Portal Magic.' I do think they're up to the challenge, fwiw.
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The new combat damage rule makes instant damage sweepers like Volcanic Fallout better than sorceries like Pyroclasm or Infest.
Let's say I attack with Woolly Thoctar and he blocks with five Hill Giants. With the new rules, I can only kill 1 Hill Giant.
In the old rules, I could assign 1 damage to each HG, and then cast Pyroclasm or Infest or Volcanic Fallout in my post-combat main phase.
In the new rules, sorcery speed damage sweepers are worse - I can still cast VF after blocker declare and before damage, and kill all 5 HGs.
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I've been teaching Magic to 4th and 5th graders for many years now and they never had problems understanding "damage on the stack" and then sac/etc. I've always said to think about what happens in a real war. Two soldiers shoot each other and are badly wounded. It looks like they are going to die. One soldier is lucky enough to have a doctor nearby who treats his injuries and he lives (just like the creature who is Unsummoned, regenerated, Bandaged, etc.). The other soldier isn't lucky and realizes he is going to die so his last efforts are to reload his weapon and empty it at the enemy before taking his dieing breath (just like the Fanatic who sacs himself to help his Planeswalker or any other creature who has a similar effect.). If 9 and 10 year olds playing the game for fun can understand it then why are older people wanting to go to FNMs unable to figure it out?
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We're all sorry to have seen you leave R&D; the best work in Magic history happened under your watch, and they should name the building after you.
Wall of Denial is the single dumbest card printed in a long time. It slows games to an absolute crawl, and allows for almost no interaction at all. Good to hear I'm not alone on that one.
But along those lines, the new combat rules seem to favor blocking a lot more than the old system did, as attackers can no longer assign damage manually and then sweep the board, kill a lord and his vassals in one attack, and makes many offensive combat tricks worse. This, quite logically, means that attacking will not be nearly as profitably, and may happen much less. Isn't that a giant strike against the new combat rules? Games slowing down, aggro getting worse, when combat is one of the most purely interactive areas of the game.
Wizards has done a great job giving people incentive to block over the past few years, but it seems with the huge power-push of recent walls (Denial, Plumeveil, Reverence) and now rule changes that punish attackers, the game could slow down and make aggro decks much worse. Thoughts?
Finally, keeping track of assigned damage was NOT hard, and claiming it was hard to keep track of is just insulting to Magic players, who are generally very smart people. So keeping track of a few small numbers a turn was never difficult, and didn't need to be changed by assigning ALL combat damage like trample damage.
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I'm not sure I agree that Wizards has done a great job giving people incentive to block.
The natural state of the game tends to favor blocking. If i have a bunch of creatures and you have a bunch of creatures then it's really hard for me to attack profitably, because you get to line up all the best blocks. It usually takes an evasion creature to break out of that stalemate. (Maybe that's really "threatening to block" rather than actually blocking that's favored, but whatever ... you see my point.) In addition, casual players are often scared to attack for fear of getting their creatures blocked and killed, which is why you see more big stalemates in casual play than when Spike is involved.
For these two reasons, Wizards goes out of its way to encourage attacking. They print tons of evasion creatures. They print aggressive weenies. They print gigantic fatties. They print way more creatures with higher power than toughness than they print creatures with "big butts."
Of course, this dynamic (like most things) is a pendulum that can swing back and forth, with the only constant being change. Recently, I certainly agree that they've printed a lot of good walls, including the 3 you call out, all of which are 3+ mana and relevant to constructed (off the top of my head I can't think of three other entries into that category from the previous 15 years of Magic). So yeah, they've given us some good walls to block with.
However, I don't think that's the same thing as "giving people an incentive to block." Have you tried blocking in Shards block limited? You can't ever rely on it. Exalted is the biggest problem -- I tap out for a blocker, planning to trade, but you drop an Exalted guy before combat and I no longer have any good blocks. But it's not just exalted. There's also a bunch of haste, and there's a bunch of Giant Growths (Colossal Might being particularly punishing to people who like to block).
I'm actually kind of torn on this point. On the one hand i think the aggro creatures (and the attacking strategies in general) have been pushed too much in recent years, and so if this rules change really does make blocking a more viable strategy then I actually think that might help bring things into balance. But on the other hand I know the natural state of the game favors blocking (and stalemates) so it would probably be better to just dial back the aggro strategies rather than tweak the rules of the game.
At the end of the day this rules change was made for different reasons (and pretty reasonable ones, as I argued). R&D can now dial the knobs between attacking and blocking wherever they want them via the basic blocking an tackling of card development.
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Randy, I think your comments on Alara Block constructed are quite insightful. I'm pretty sure the reason this happened can be explained by a number of things. Although this is just conjecture I'd like to see what you think.
Firstly, it's 3 color paired block. That makes things incredibly difficult in terms of diverse deckbuilding and splahes. In Ravnica, the overlap between two guilds would be a single color meaning that you could select two colors and then splash a third and effectively be in 3 guilds. This isn't the same in Alara, instead of choosing 2 colors and splashing a third, you are forced to choose 3 colors (a shard), and splash a fourth.
Secondly, I think that it's telling that there were five different design teams at the outset of the block. Both Naya and Jund have nearly the same type of idea behind them, make a big dude and smash. While Naya gets away with a little more effeciency, I think the fact that both shards have extremely similar identities in terms of mechanics played a crucial role in developing the block and draft formats to where they were. It was practically capable to play some sort of R/G/x deck because the efficiency just isn't there.
And finally, I think they screwed up with cascade. While I love the mechanic and its power, putting it in an all multicolored set was just wrong. Bloodbraid Elf was by far the best card in the format and was in two colors meaning there is absolutely no way to splash it into relevant decks, especially giving it the power that it was. From a deckbuilding perspective, putting cascade into two colors is just unfun. As a casual player it restricts what decks can be built around it so that you can't play a blue/green cascade deck and as a tournament player it makes mana just that much more difficult. For example, you noted that choices and interactions were definitely at a minimum in this tournament, and I think had Bloodbraid Elf (obviously at a different cost being one color) been one color (let's say green for the sake of arguing), instead of seeing the same deck over and over, we would have seen green/blue bloodbraid or green/black Bloodbraid. While obviously this is still possible by adding red, it just further constricts what players can do. I know that rules breed creativity, but that paradigm only works to a point. Mark Rosewater once said if a person were asked to write a story they would simple write what they knew best, but if they were asked to write a story about zombies they would think outside the box to create something original. I think if the analogy holds, in the case of Alara Block, the person instead was asked to write a story about a zombie with a laser gun and a unicycle during the evening. While the rules might force people down interesting paths, if they are too constrictive the same thing is produced over and over.
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With respect to your first point: 3-color shards explains why everyone's mana sucks, but not why the decks don't interact with each other once they do draw their mana.
With respect to your third: I think cascade is a bad mechanic to push into significant constructed play because it's inherent random - you don't get to think about how to use your cards to out-play your opponent when you don't know what cards you actually have. Making it less colors and more splash-able wouldn't change that.
Your second point is intriguing, and one I haven't heard before. I would rephrase it as "Whose job is it to make sure Magic is interactive: Design or Development?" I think it's both, but since what we're dissecting here is a Pro Tour then it's probably more on development than design. You definitely need fun mechanics that set up interesting interactions, but development can choose not to push cascade or Wall of Denial (or Behemoth Sledge for that matter) to tournament-staple power-levels. On teh other hand development's job is a lot easier when the block has an interesting, interactive design ...
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Actually, something I thought of but forgot to mention, all of the mechanics and themes that were put forth in shards were permanent based themes, themes that had to do with your own permanents, not the permanents of your opponents. Which is actually probably the main reason that there is less interactiveness. The fact of the matter is, is they just didn't print any cards that really forced interesting interactions because the 5 main themes weren't about interactions between players, in fact, two of theme (dredge and devour) were specifically bent on interaction with yourself.
Some of the cards that I feel could have been "juiced up" a bit are the cyclers. Cycling is a mechanic that forces players to make good choices, and yet the cards that cycling was printed on were just not powerful enough to force a choice. While I realize promoting cycling wasn't the main purpose of the block, I feel that the landcyclers could have been powered up (with exception to the blue one) to really force players to look at this interaction. And, with the landcyclers printed in Reborn, because they have the potential to get nonbasic lands (i.e. ravnica duals) I felt like wizards could have printed some cool cards that would have functioned better in the extended environment, but they just aren't good enough to do so.
In all, I think that Alara Block is a fun set but just fails from its initial shortcomings. While I think the idea of having five separate themes by themselves is an ok idea, it just didn't work well enough in execution in terms of gameplay.
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Re: A bunch of stuff:
I think the 'randomness' of Cascade, from a deckbuilding standpoint, is vastly overstated. You can make your Cascade not-random-at-all, if you want to, which was exactly what our deck, and which was why everyone who played it finished X-3 or better in Constructed. You can get around that randomness if you want to. Of course, the point still stands: SHOULD a format have to pay the price of getting around that randomness, because doing so tends to lead to homogenized archetypes. That's fair. But it's a different point than 'Cascade is inherently random'. It's *naturally*, random, sure, if you don't build around it. But it isn't necessarily so.
The XYZ mana cost is the problem in Shards, both in Constructed and in Limited, and this problem is exacerbated by the fact that all the good fixing (except the Tri-lands) came in later sets. This would also have been the perfect set for Chromatic Star. But when I got my shorts from Reg, the first question my soon-to-be R&D cohorts asked me was 'what would you change about Ravnica Limited,' and without hesitation I pointed to the TOTALLY INSANE XY-cost common cycle of two-drops in Shards. I wrote an article on this for SCG late last year, so I don't want to re-iterate the point, but in a nutshell: You naturally increase the variance inherent in a multicolor format when you introduce the variance of blowout rapidfire aggressive potential starts. Cards like Goblin Deathraiders, Rip-Clan Crasher, Steward of Valeron, Squire, Nacatl--and Thoctar/Gargoyle/War Monk in the uncommon slots.
You can extrapolate this to Const. along similar lines. It's awkward, too, that there's no Rampant Growth, but Cascade is so good that you probably couldn't play it anyway.
Re: all of the Haste, I think that's just an integral part of making creatures better, if that's what you want to do. See my article "Everything Has Haste" for why dudes are always just going to get trumped if that is not the case. We played DI creatures with "defensive haste" in Honolulu for that very reason.
/agree with the summation of Fanatic's power. That was my facebook status yesterday.
At any rate, I feel like Shards Block was actually a vastly under-explored, under-respected format. Of course, given my results, I *would* think that, so I acknowledge the bias there. But we were able to create a deck that a) beat the field and b) exhibited very few of the shortcomings that people act like apply necessarily to the entire format--mana, random-cascade, power-level, consistency, etc. Your point about instant-speed interactivity, though, is a very good one, and I think we may have let the pendulum swing too far on this one. But *too much* instant-speed interactivity is a huge problem, too, because you can't make anything happen. And cards that should be 'good', like Rafiq or Battlegrace Angel or Wooly Thoctar, just don't do anything.
Which isn't necessarily a problem, but is a design constraint.
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Great comments. In particular, your distinction between Bloodbraid as "naturally" random as opposed to inherently random is a very nice, subtle point. And I 100% agree that the root of the problem is that the cheap creatures are too aggressive and too gold.
Everything is a pendulum and everything about developing Magic cards is a judgment call so yeah, too many instants would also be bad. I'm just calling it the way i see it right now.
Good luck to you ... I think you will do well in R&D.
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That means a lot to me
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I do in fact mean 'Shards Limited,' sorry
Arturo: That's not a terrible fix, actually.
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Good comments, Zac. One question though - was "what would you change about Ravnica Limited" supposed to be "what would you change about Shards Limited?" (or Shards block limited)? If it /was/ supposed to be Ravnica, then I'm not quite getting the point you're trying to make.
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Now that deathtouch is static ability I think that they make any amount of combat damage with deathtouch be considered "lethal damage" for the purpose of assigning damage, so with the new rulings on combat you can assign one damage to the first blocker, one to the second and so on, instead of making it an exception to the general rule.
This makes it easier to understand for new players, it makes sense flavorwise, and removes a few sentences from the Comprehensive Rulebook.
What do you think?
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Heh. I don’t actually like the new deathtouch rule anyway – it noticeably limits both the design space of deathtouch creatures and the number which can be deployed in an environment at a given time. It's already relatively redundant for large creatures to have deathtouch, but a 4/4 deathtouch for example could trade with a Cloudthresher or Hellkite Overlord while surviving combat with a Rhox War Monk or Sigiled Paladin, which to my mind would be a piece of design worth at least investigating (I know the same effect could be achieved by increasing the stats from 4/4 – but by that logic Moonglove Winnower could do the job it already does if it lost deathtouch and got a stat increase, too). However in the M10 rules, a 4/4 deathtoucher would effectively be a one-sided Wrath much of the time, especially in limited, which among other things would make for a prohibitive cost and preclude it from green, the historical home of deathtouch-like abilities.
Anyway. I like your suggestion as something which would be worth trying out, but I could guess at the main counter-argument being that in 99% of combat situations, setting deathtouch aside, there’s no reason to want to split damage between your opponent’s creatures nonlethally. Which makes it a question of whether or not the removal of a few lines from the rulebook justifies the potential confusion new players may feel from seeing an alternative combat option with no apparent benefit. There could also be potential power level concerns over a minority of cards such as Bellowing Fiend, Charisma, Mephidross Vampire, Spiritmonger, Pit Spawn and Sword of Kaldra, all of which would become far, far stronger under your proposed rule.
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[quote]...whether or not the removal of a few lines from the rulebook justifies the potential confusion new players may feel from seeing an alternative combat option with no apparent benefit [/quote]
That's exactly what I want to avoid, players getting confused about "splitting damage", in the option I'm suggesting you're not splitting damage per se, your assigning enough damage to destroy the first creature in line (1 in a creature with deathtouch) and so on to the next creature blocking.
I think it's easier to understand when learning it for the first time. Instead of saying "deathtouch creatures can avoid the rule by dividing it's damage anyway you choose", it would be something like "if a creature has deathtouch one damage is enough to destroy the first creature, so you can assign the rest to the next"
[quote]...power level concerns over a minority of cards such as...[/quote]
In the example of the cards you mention wouldn't even matter, because the creature has to have deathtouch for the damge to be assign the way I suggested.
Definitely wouldn't make the cards stronger, and they're going to work exactly the same way with what wizards came up with anyway. Heck they work that way right now (in 6E rules) without deathtouch, and last time I checked neither of those where "overpowered".
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From what you say here I believe I misinterpreted your possible rule, my apologies
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Arturo: great fix.
Zac: very much agreed. Most of the people I saw complaining sounded like they hadn't done much (rigorous) work on the format.
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The way I see it, on cascade in Constructed, is obviously it opens up a lot of room (or at least offers niche room) to deckbuilders, but the reason it's a bad/unfun mechanic is specifically because of how it affects gameplay. Namely, it eliminates decision-making in-game and pays you for doing so. That's not something I'm a fan of...I played 5 rds of block at Honolulu, and would estimate I had maybe six remotely interesting/questionable plays or sequences. Those aren't games I'm interested in playing, or telling my friends, or celebrating. I don't want to become an automaton!
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When I heard that they were making a 3 color block, my first thought was 'they better print some amazing mana fixing or it will be random as hell'. Aren't I clever? Well, no. EVERYONE'S first thought was exactly the same. It's pretty unbelievable that R&D have designed a block and did not correctly address the most fundamental and obvious problem thrown up by the idea behind it.
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I have to agree with everyone that says that combat damage should use the stack. the first year my friends and i played, we had no idea about the stack, then one of them got an old MtG PC game called Shandalar and we got how to use the stack in about two days, we were in 5th grade by the way, so its not a hard concept for new players to grasp.
about the mana problems though, i have to disagree. I went to the pre-release and went 6-0 with a non-artifact based esper deck (don't ask how i managed that). I'm also running a very consistant five colour control deck using only shards block cards and usually have domain by the 6th or 7th turn running only basic land other than 2 rupture spires.
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The only problem with this is that the PC game and therefore Shandalar used the old combat rules because it was pre sixth edition. So there was not much of damage on the stack there...
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