Ctrl+F searching for "Time Spiral". No results found. That's new.

It's nice to get reminded of the basic math behind the game's simplest and most neglected creatures, especially when it can be so complicated.

Actually, I would wonder why red has always lacked a true "bear" until the printing of Falkenrath Reaver. Was it really so out of color before that they couldn't at least have a creature that starts out being normally proportioned and some ability shuffles it around.

jandrobard: I know. It's weird. Which is why I finished off with the deck I did - Muraganda Petroglyphs, which also runs Blade of the Sixth Pride.

TheRedGoat: Red and Green were, for the longest time, in contention for 'better' creatures - the position where White is now. Green got efficient, smaller creatures with a few larger 'bomb' cards, like Scaled Wurm, while Red monopolized the mid-range vanilla creatures. Both got good 1 drops, but the difference between, say, Llanowar Elves and Raging Goblin shows how the two colours treat their creatures.

I had my beer in my hand the whole time, just waiting to take that "Time Spiral sip...."

Not sure if I'm relieved or disappointed (since it's the middle of the day). At the least the article was great as always. Thank-you again, berryjon, Master of Articles.

Well, I'm in the process of double-checking next week's article. I'll make certain to include something there!

"I think they're wrong" hallelujah man. This has been my biggest complaint about MtG since the day I started.

I remember when they introduced Mythic Rare and tried to assure us that they would be "something that feels very special and unique" and "not just be a list of each set's most powerful tournament-level cards".

Sure, some Mythics have found their way to the junk-rare box, but on the whole, when they design a card, the rarity definitely plays in to how strong they make it. There's just no way cards like Phyrexian Obliterator or Vengevine would have ever been printed at Rare. Had they designed Vengevine at Rare, even had Mythic never existed, it would be lacking Haste, or be a 3/2 or some such.

Anywho, that little rant aside, great article again man. It was a good read. :)

Tyrant-Thanatos: Rarity as a balance factor works if and only if you assume that there will be a limited supply of cards in any given area. To the point where no one would have a complete copy of any given set. Except by the time Revised came around, they knew the opposite was true. People would find out, and they would get the cards they wanted.

So, seeing Bears affected by rarity just makes me annoyed and disappointed.

Yeah, I agree. Given limited supply, it does work to an extent. And in a sense, it affects how Limited formats work, except that it means that a lucky pull could potentially steal entire games.

What surprises and annoys me is that WotC refuses to change this design philosophy whatsoever, even knowing that their game has grown far, far beyond the point at which anyone can get any cards they want/need for their builds, regardless of rarity.

@Tyrant-Thanatos So could you maybe explain how the heck Nephalia Moondrakes is considered a rare worthy card? Cause that's been eating away at my brain since it got leaked and I still can't figure that cards use even in limited.

Junk rares do exist. I even mentioned it in regards to Mythics. Exceptions will always exist.

TheRedGoat: Just be glad that you live in an era where Wizards no longer deliberately prints bad cards to put into packs. Pyramids, Shahrazad, Obelisk of Undoing...

Funny you mention Shahrazad among the bad cards...I've actually had a devastating casual deck built around that card some 10 years ago. It worked on the ruling back then, that cards that were removed from the game in the sub-game remain exiled when returning to the main game. It was just Shahrazad and stuff like Leyline of the Void and Tormod's Crypt combined with discard and land destruction. At some point we had sub-games within sub-games, leaving everyone without a library when returning to the main game after a really really long time, haha.

As for the bear concept: I remember when I started playing, this idea was explicitly explained in a 5th edition rulebook. The balance of P/T and casting cost based on 2 mana for 2/2 indeed took at least a double page in the book. Newer players won't read these sort of design explanations in the folders added in the starter decks anymore...but when I started playing it helped a lot with understanding how the game actually works and why.

I think in your discussion of vanilla p/t you forget to mention a fairly important aspect - that being power creep.

Creatures are slowly becoming better and better as years go by. Alpha had Scathe Zombies and Gray Ogre, now we get Walking Corpse and Falkenrath Reaver. Does being an uncommon factor into the extra point of stats that Kalonian Tusker gets? Probably. But Tusker is also a much more recent card than either Elvish Warrior or Gnarled Mass, which explains why it's more pushed. A more apt comparison for Gnarled Mass would be Watchwolf - uncommon, from the same period, but also in two colors. Mass saw constructed play in its time if I recall correctly. These days even 3/3 for 2 is not good enough for standard without significant upside or good synergy.

Re: Rarity as a balancing factor. I think it's actually perfectly fine for rarity to to be used that way because it allows to point different cards at different formats. I agree with you that in a world in which people routinely use websites to acquire their cards rarity is a non-factor when it comes to constructed formats. That is fine. Maybe 5% or 10% of all cards in a format are intended for constructed play, and those that would completely warp a limited deck or be useless because o how much synergy they require should be put at rare or mythic which largely keeps them out of most drafts and sealed pools and keeps the limited environment balanced.

Basically I think the rarity symbol on a card is irrelevant unless you are viewing the card in the context of Limited play. And in draft, it makes perfect sense for uncommons to be a bit more pushed - it's a way to set the average power level of decks. Cards that are aimed at constructed play often have a power level that is problematic for limited, so putting them at rares or mythics make sense. You don't want every other draft deck to have a titan in it.

TheRedMage: Actually, I did comment about Power Creep, but not in that frame. Let me quote myself:

Around 2008 and 2009, MaRo and company finally decided that a Concentrated Effort needed to be made to make creatures more relevant.

So, to do that, they increased the number of creatures in each set, gave them more and interesting abilities, and tried to price their casting cost just a little bit better. You see, the cost of creatures had to be better when compared to non-creatures, and not as an investment over time. And the biggest thing they had to compete against was creature removal.

Creatures themselves are getting more powerful and cheaper, and this has been going on for seven years now. It's also important to note that vanilla creatures are drying out, save for the obligatory instance at common in each set. Even French Vanilla isn't seeing much use outside of , and even then you move past common, and you can full expect creatures with special abilities everywhere.

I don't disagree with your comments, but I think we're approaching them from different angles. And I appreciate your input, thank you.

TheRedMage

"Basically I think the rarity symbol on a card is irrelevant unless you are viewing the card in the context of Limited play."

The problem is it's not. The rarity symbol impacts the supply of the card, which influences the economics of constructed heavily. While constructed staples printed at Common have, in the past, occasionally held value (I'm looking at you Serum Visions) this tends to be the exception, and not the rule. Even constructed-playable Commons and Uncommons often hold significantly lower values than that of Rares and Mythics, unless they're beyond "playable" and more like "mandatory".

It's all about Supply and Demand. Rarity tanks the supply, and Power boosts the Demand. So when Rarity = Power, Rarity = Money. This creates a huge entry barrier into competitive constructed play for anybody who doesn't already own a significant collection, and new players are vital to the growth a prosperity of the game.

This is especially important given how widespread alternative means of entertainment have become since Magic started. Not to sound stingy, but these days you could buy 2-3 whole videogames that could last you hundreds of hours each, for the same price that you would spend on a single standard deck. That's going to push a LOT of potential players away, and it surely does.

Maybe. But I don't think secondary market considerations should influence card design - not heavily at least. I'd rather magic stay expensive if it means it stays awesome.

I don't feel like making competitive staples more accessible would detract from the game's "awesomeness" though, tbh. In fact, I think it would boost it quite a bit.

As someone who literally can't go to an LGS and meet people and play socially because the singular LGS in town is closed every single second that I'm not at work, I feel that increased accessibility would increase interest, and bring in an influx of new players, which would help LGSs as well, and promote the possibility of additional ones as the market grows.

It genuinely hurts to think that my entire collection sits and stagnates in my closet while I play Magic online through programs like Cockatrice, simply because there isn't enough interest to facilitate any use of my cards.

I see what you mean Tyrant-Thanatos, although what you describe only happened with the eternal formats in my area. Around 10 years ago we were some people playing Legacy and/or Vintage, not many people but at least some. I paused for a while and started playing again earlier this year. Went to the nearest Magic Shop and asked around if someone wanted to buy cards, especially high priced ones - because no one played Vintage anymore. They were all like uh oh Moxes, Workshops, even amazed to see dual lands...and I was equally amazed to see no one was playing Legacy anymore either, only standard and modern.

I found out that I can use most cards for commander, which is frequently played here, but it was a hard decision for me to sell all the stuff that I wouldn't be playing anymore.

@Tyrant-Thanatos, I am sorry but it would. Printing this sort of cards at, say, uncommon, would destroy the draft environment. Cards that have the power level of an Inferno Titan are good for standard, but are extremely toxic for limited, as the tools to deal with that sort of card are not easy to come by. Printing that at mythic means there aren't as many of those cards floating around in limited events.

There is also another issue - and please bear with me, because I am going to digress a bit, and since this has little to do with the article I would suggest that we continue at least the economy part of this conversation elsewhere if you want to continue it at all.

The total value of the cards in an average standard-legal pack after it gets opened doesn't fluctuate that much, it's usually on the order of 2.00-2.50 $ (and yes, there are outliers, but it never gets that far from there. This is the nature of how economy works. If demand rises, at a certain point the price reaches a point where it's advantageous for stores to crack packs for singles and sell those singles, which increases supply to match the increased demand, which lowers the price back below the "crack pack for value" threshold. The price of singles is largely set with this mechanism.

Let's say we start printing tournament level cards at uncommon (and similar considerations go for rare, although not as extreme). This would result in one of the swingiest and least fun draft environment since the times of Mirage, so this set would be undraftable, and the decision to sell an undraftable product in booster packs seems foolhardy at best, but let's go with it. That means the needs for standard are met by opening less packs: In Kaladesh, for example, on average, you roughly open a copy of a given uncommon every 27 packs that you open, and a copy of a given mythic every 120 packs. This means the demand for packs would be about four times lower, which in turn means less product sold, less money circulating into the game as a whole and less resources that can be devoted to R&D to make this game as great as it is.

The current standard format is the cheapest we have seen in years. This has been achieved by adding the Masterpieces - extremely valuable non-standard-legal cards that appear in standard-legal packs. These cards essentially say "the value of the cards in a pack is more or less set, but we can adjust how much of that value is standard-legal. If only 90% of that value is standard-legal, standard will only be 90% as expensive." That sounds like a much better way to go about it.

And yes, this is obviously an oversimplification, but it's a useful one. If you want to read more about this there was an interesting article by SaffronOlive that goes into more detail.

@Winterblast: I think that what is harming Legacy and Vintage specifically is only tangentially related. Wizards has a list of carts (the reserved list)that they promised they wouldn't reprint. This happened around 20 years ago, but they keep their promise to this day. As this list includes many Legacy and Vintage staples, as long as they keep their promise Wizards has no way of controlling the price of these formats. They can keep modern in check with strategic reprints in supplemental product, but they can't do the same for eternal formats. They are kind of between a rock and a hard place - they either go back on their word or let Legacy and Vintage go unsupported. So far they have gone with the latter, and I agree that it sucks.

If you are interested in playing Vintage, the place to go is Magic Online. Wizards is not bound by the reserved list for digital printing, so you can buy $20 Volcanic Islands and $100 Black Lotuses. The online vintage community is not huge, but at least it exists.

TheRedMage I know the problem with the reserved list but it's not only that. What I meant is that the useful new cards for the older formats are also often very expensive because they come at mythic rarity and have sometimes only appeared in one set.

I don't really understand why printing some better cards at lower rarity would ruin the experience in limted. In fact, I don't play limited because the overall power level is too boring imo...a bit more really good stuff in boosters would absolutely take that feeling away because in a draft you mostly get a choice of cards of which you usually wouldn't consider 90% when building a deck. It works well with legacy cubes, so why do people think it wouldn't be fun if the average booster delivered the same playing value?

Just to keep this short, I'm fully aware if what printing cards of that calibur at lower rarities would do to draft. That's why I said "making them more accessible". There are other ways to go about that, without affecting limited.

It just seems to me like every solution to this that WotC tries, they limit so severely that it does nothing to the accessibility of staple cards. I'll admit to knowing little of Standard (really not my bag), but the Modern Masters and Eternal Masters sets MSRP high, and run in limited prints. I do like the Masterpiece concept, but we only have one set so far with them, I don't see it having much impact on the entry barrier for quite a while.

@Winterblast: Personally I find that one of the appeal of drafts is exactly that you get to play with cards that would never make it into a constructed deck. You explore a more vast portion of a set, so to speak.

That said, the problem with that approach is that the format becomes even swingier and variance driven. Did I get to have a couple of the standard-tier uncommons? Ok, we got there. Did I not, or maybe I did but I didn't draw them? Perfect, my deck can never beat an opponent that draws one of those now. It works in cubes because every card is powerful, but normal standards set can't work that way - and as for why that doesn't work, Mark Rosewater wrote an article and then another article.

@Tyrant-Thanatos: It's hard to make this consideration out of formats thats that are as rapidly evolving as standard is though. The existence of valuable cards is ultimately a good thing - it makes shops more willing to invest in the game as they can accrue a larger profit that way. Thus the game reaches more players and prospers.

The Masters set are having a positive influence. It's just that it's hard to shake things up too suddenly - you want stores and collectors to feel like they can buy copies of valuable card and know that their value might decrease, but it's not going to crash and burn. Making standard cheaper will eventually make modern cheaper too, it's just going to take a few years.

@TheRedMage, I agree, to some extent. It will take a while, it's true. I'm just somewhat disappointed it took this long to even initiate a strategy to make to game more affordable.

I love Magic, and I love playing it socially with friends, but I've hit a wall where I either have to intentionally dumb down my decks, or somehow convince my friends to spend ridiculous amounts of money in order to maintain a fun variety of decks that can actually compete with mine.

This is why we've turned to sources like Cockatrice, but it's just not the same as physically sitting down together and enjoying a game, laughing and joking and throwing cheetos and such. I remember having loads of fun doing things like Emperor, but I'd have to find a way to defang the decks I have, or they would dominate and suck all the fun out.

I don't even know where I'm going with this now, but I guess my point is that anything aside from non-format kitchen table $20 decks seems excludingly expensive.

Have you considered trying to introduce your group to Pauper? It's a format with an established metagame, it can be played competitively, it's skill-intensive, allows you to do some pretty powerful stuff (Gush, Preordain, Mulldrifter, Fireblast and Timberwatch Elf are all legal in this format) and decks usually run between 20 and 40$.

I will admit that I come from a vantage point where both me and my usual competition will have spent however much money is necessary to have an established deck in the format, so these dynamics of casual play are somewhat alien to me. But if you want that sort of competitive-like experience - i.e. everybody has one of the best decks in the format and tries to learn all their in and outs - maybe you can look into the cheapest format of them all.

I updated the associated deck a bit to make it more aggro-y.