Pattern Recognition #336 - State of Play

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

22 August 2024

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

Every year, Mark Rosewater publishes his retrospective on the year. This year's article was published on Monday, here for your reading pleasure and today I'm going to take some time to provide some feedback and critique of what he says.

This is not an attack on you, Mister Rosewater. This is me taking a second look at your opinions and providing some additional context from the view of a player. I love you! We love you!

So, the State of Design covers just the published sets of the year - in this case, Lord of the Rings, Wilds of Eldraine, The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, Murders at Karlov Manor, Outlaws of Thunder Junction, and Modern Horizons 3. This does not include Commander Sets, save where they cross paths with the pack-cracking sets, and does not look at Secret Lairs.

Also, Rosewaters's article doesn't delve into the nitty-gritty details. Yes, it summarizes, but for various legal reasons, he's not going to go under the hood for us. And I can live with that! Now, for formatting, I'm going to be taking each section in stride and responding to it, either to offer my own response or to offer up clarification. I won't be talking about everything he says, so don't expect me to quote whole passages. So let's begin, shall we?

GENERAL COMMENTS

The last Magic year had some of the best-selling sets of all time and some big misses, including our worst-performing set in many years.

What you would be seeing here would be proof of this. I called my FLGS yesterday while I was editing this article and asked the guy I know behind the counter, KALE434, to take a picture for me of the boxes of Murders at Karlov Manor that had been marked down to at-cost. As in, the store was trying to sell the case for the cost it took to buy them. No profit at all. Sadly, it turns out that they were all purchased by someone who wanted the cheap cards! Murders was, without a doubt, the worst selling Set in a very long time, and Wizards is going to dissect what went wrong with it for a long time as they try to keep propping up Hasbro.

On the other side of the equation, Lord of the Rings sold out. And Sold Out. And SOLD OUT. For a variety of reasons, this set was extraordinarily popular and more than made up for the shortfall of MKM. We'll get to that shortly.

We pushed more boundaries.

Boundaries is a very deceptive term. Deliberately so. Boundaries are not about constant expansion, it's also about learning from the mistakes of the past and carefully going over old ground to reuse things that may or may not have worked in the past. The return of Poison Counters over the past couple years has been an example of this sort of boundary pushing. Trying to find a point where things work but they don't break.Pushing boundaries is a sign of a healthy development process, the framework itself that allows for the cards to be made and be printed. This is not, as we shall see, always a good thing as some boundaries are there for a reason. Even if the reason only becomes apparent after the fact and you're scrambling to figure out how to respond to the blowup.

Resonance

Another buzzword, Resonance can best be described as vibes. Do the players like what you're doing from a non-financial standpoint. Is the flavor and mechanics on point? Are the players happy?

Happy Players Buy Magic.

Unhappy Players Don't.

Mr Rosewater? If by some act of Urza you read this, I just want you to know that this word choice just smacks of being a Corporate Buzzword, and I'm cynical enough to wonder why.

Resonance is good, but there's such a thing as too much of it.

The back half of this year, from Murders onward, is a series of sets that are very tightly tied to the theme of the set. This is something that's going to come up again and again over the course of this response, but I do agree with Rosewater's followup. They they did to much of it. Wizards let the creative tap flow on each theme for the set and let the "wouldn't it be cool IF" rule the design and development process too much. Murders, Outlaws, Bloomburrow and probably Duskmourne could probably stand to have had a bit tighter control over their development to keep in mind that these are Magic sets first and not Magic tacked onto a cool idea, no matter how cool the idea is or was.

... we ended up with some designs that were simply more complicated than needed.

I didn't get that this year, but reading on, I do see the point that MaRo is making. Yes, nothing this year held the same complexity as Mutate, but you have to remember that every set is someone's first set. Every pack is someone's first pack. And if this new player is thrust face first into some obscure paragraph that induces catatonia when read, you've failed as a designer. We'll get to the complications later.

... the impact of the Phyrexian invasion was integral to sets from a story standpoint, it wasn't as visible as some players wanted from how the story presented itself on cards.

March of the Machines: Aftermath was a horrible idea, and the implementation of the Phyrexian Invasion was a [swear word] from start to finish. In chasing the Golden Snitch for that perfect win, Wizards has repeatedly shot itself in the foot. Magic is, at its heart, a story-driven franchise. We care about the characters (mostly), we care about what they do and what happens to them. When you throw all that out because the people in charge don't care, well, why should we, the players, care about them?

We players don't mind if a story gets decompressed. If you had told us that 'March of the Machines' was the Phyrexian Invasion of the Multiverse, and 'All Will Be One' was the grand finale, two sets that were back to back, then no one would have complained as long as each set represented itself well enough. and stood on its own merits. And for bonus points, you could have scored some forgiveness for the utter mistake that was New Phyrexia and its development.

But taking some huge event you've been building up to for years and tossing out with the trash because you want to chase the next high like an addict isn't the way to do things.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: TALES OF MIDDLE-EARTH

The set did an excellent job of capturing the flavor of the books mechanically.

Absolutely no one, and I mean no one, argued against that. My dad, when he first saw LotR cards in my hand last February, was able to grok them because he knew who Bill the Pony was and recognized Sting, the Glinting Dagger. He could equate the card to actions in the game and see how one led to the other. He's still more a Whovian though.

LotR knocked it out of the park as a gateway set. People recognized the franchise from the movies or books and art direction aside, it was an excellent way to introduce new players to the game through a familiar framework. Too bad that it's next to impossible to find now for a reasonable price, meaning that this aspect of it has been reduced in scope. With one exception, this set was pretty much the Gold Standard of what sets should be.

Two. Two exceptions. Not one.

The Ring tempts you received a lot of criticism.

Yeah. Very true. Rosewater goes over some of the points in his article, and I just wanted to agree with most of them. External data tracking like this is very awkward in Magic. Unless you're on Arena that can take care of that for you. It has similar player-memory problems that Day/Night has, and while they tried to tone it down by ony allowing one creature to have it at a time, it still had memory issues.

My biggest issue is that the Ring is Bad. If it's helping you, it's because you're doing what it wants you to do. Return it to Sauron.

In a way, I almost wish that Wizards had found someway to make the Ring have actual drawbacks instead of the massively powerful card we got.

Something like...

If you know it, you know it. If you don't, well, this version of The One Ring let you use another resource in the stead of your chosen Ring-Bearer's health to preserve themselves. There was a price to putting on the Ring, and the lack of a price hurt the mechanic.

Two of the cards were too good.

Orcish Bowmasters and The One Ring. If you haven't seen how these cards have been played in the past year, I don't know what to tell you. The former is a powerful hoser that punishes a lot of decks with both direct damage and Amass. The later is... well... it's almost as popular in legal formats as Nadu.

Lots have been said on these two cards, and I won't waste words here.

The special one-of version of The One Ring was upsetting to some, although enjoyed by others.

The One of One Ring was purchased by Post Malone for 2.6 Million Dollars US from the person who found it.

I don't even want to think about how the taxes on that were handled.

But the search for this card drove sales, and that made the bottom line good for Hasbro. Expect them to chase this lightning strike again.

THE WILDS OF ELDRAINE

Enchanting Tales, the enchantment bonus sheet, was a huge hit.

Damn straight it was! The bonus sheet that is the latest in a long line of such things, hit it out of the park with the art that popped as well as (mostly) excellent choices as to what to put onto the sheet. I think the worst card there was Hatching Plans, and that's as a card, not for what really sold the bonus - the art.

Seriously. The art! GORGEOUS!

Roles were fiddly and had logistical issues.

I can see what Wizards was trying to do with Roles, both with the token sub-themes going on across the various sets, as well as trying to make Auras more accessible. However, the implementation of them proved to be a little awkward, especially with the 'Creatures can only have one Role at a time' thing, where some were confused if you could put a role onto a creature that already had one, and if you did, which one went away?

Also apparently one of the Roles was missing from the tokens? That was a thing apparently. I could be wrong though.

Wilds of Eldraine had a much higher percentage of its set focused on fairy-tale tropes.

A running theme as I mentioned, for this year. While LotR benefited from the focus on the source material, Wilds felt to a lot of people like Fairy Tales with a coat of Magic paint slapped all over it. Ruby, Daring Tracker was utterly and blatantly Red Riding Hood, while you actually had to understand Arthurian mythos to get that Syr Gwyn, Hero of Ashvale is a representation of Lancelot du Lac, and not having that understanding didn't detract from the card itself.

(Bonus points - look at the Alias' listed on the wiki page for Lancelot.)

There is a difference between being inspired by your source material and copying it. A line that hasn't been crossed this badly since Arabian Nights.

THE LOST CAVERNS OF IXALAN

Ovidio Cartagena, the set's art director, is from Guatemala. He worked alongside Miguel Lopez, the set's narrative lead...

One of the bigger blowbacks against Kaladesh was that it too a surface level look at the art and culture that inspired it - the collective of the Indian Subcontinent and then turned around and just did very poorly with it. With the return to Ixalan, creative control was put into the hands of people who have a history and cultural background that comes from the places and peoples they were trying to emulate. This resulted in a brightly colored set that looked and felt like it wasn't your standard stereotypical European Fantasy. Something that Wizards has long had troubles with.

I look forward to seeing more like this in the future!

Descend got the most negative feedback...

The mechanics of Ixalan were a bit obtuse. Descend was used in multiple different ways, leading to confusion about what the context was for each case. Had Wizards chosen a definition and stuck with it, I think it would have been better received. But for me the standout was Craft.

Craft was, to put it simply, a test case to see if they could make Meld better by putting all the information onto one card and making the other card required defined by the first as having a certain quality. There were a lot of different Craft cards in the set, and finding something you could focus on became a problem. If all of were "Craft with Token" and had "Craft with non-Creature Artifact", which would have helped keep the focus of the mechanic in play, rather than having the mess we got.

Both mechanics were too varied to really tie things together. I'm hoping Craft gets a comeback. Not so much Descend.

Some players disliked the Jurassic World™ tie-in.

And they would be wrong.

Their complaints boiled down to how rare the cards came out, and how they didn't really work all that well with the rest of the set outside of some of the Dinosaurs. It was a Universes Beyond product that was put into a slightly relevant set with mechanically unique cards. An experiment to see if they could drive more sales this way than through selling them as a Secret Layer. It was a mixed bag in the end, really. People liked them, and honestly, who doesn't like Dinosaurs? (People who are wrong, that's who.)

For what it's worth, my box of Ixalan had Command Tower, Swooping Pteradon and Don't Move.

MURDERS AT KARLOV MANOR

Oh boy....

New Capenna

Look, about 90% of the problems with the presentation, delivery and implementation of the set could have been solved with placing the set on New Capenna. In the wake of that Plane's premiere set, players such as myself recognized that an obvious evolutionary point would be to explore one of the other lasting genres that came out of the Roaring 20's. Aside from the Mafia. And that would be the Detective Noir. A single detective investigating a murder in a post-Phyrexian Invasion New Capenna would have allowed the setting to explore what happened there after Atraxa's Fall, as well as how the Angels are making a come-back through a more grounded viewpoint.

Instead, because Ravnica polls well, someone got antsy from Ravnica Withdrawal after War of the Spark and wanted a set on Ravnica to get their fix. And no, I'm not going to stop with the metaphor. But Ravnica has a very unique identity to it, and Murders has no relevance to it what-so-ever. Ravnica is the Guilds. Murders is not, and the set suffered horribly for it.

You can see this in the land cycle of the set. There is no reason for Undercity Sewers to have basic land types except that someone misread Ravnica and what was good about it, saw Watery Grave and went "That's what makes them popular!" If they didn't have those, they would have been perfectly valid alternates to the Temple of Deceit and that would have been fine.

But Ravnica got stuffed in, or the other way around, and things went downhill from there.

Investigate returning was a huge hit.

Absolutely. I'm penciling in a future article that's going to look at how Treasure, Clue and Food are an excellent addition to the game and how they interact with the existing framework to support everything. Look for it eventually!

MORE INVESTIGATE! MORE! Just don't overdo it like you did with Treasures, please.

... the set played too quickly in Limited.

With Disguise and Cloaking, the game had a larger creature focus than was intended, and a lot of the games in this set revolved around your creatures and trading Disguised creatures because of Ward and the lack of viable removal.

Creatures were also pretty good in general.

... ward even more frustrating...

Simply put, Murders was the straw that broke the camel's back when it came to Ward. Too much of a good thing. Voja, Jaws of the Conclave was a standout in terms of just how out of control this mechanic was as it was being liberally added to everything. Including Disguise in order to make it distinguishable from Morph.

It got so bad that Gavin Verhity issued a near-apology over it, and explained how it should work and how it will be working going forward.

All of this turned Murders into the worst selling set of the year, of the decade and probably longer as well.

There are going to be a lot of people at Wizards trying to figure out what went wrong with this, and I fear they will draw the wrong conclusions. Or rather, the conclusions that suggest that they were right and everyone else was wrong.

OUTLAWS OF THUNDER JUNCTION

fun

There. That's the best feedback you can ever get about a game. Ever. If you've read my scathing review of the misbegotten stain of a set that was New Phyrexia, I saved special ire for the horrific and should-have-been-career-ending goal of the set. Which was to be unfun.

Outlaws was fun. IS fun. I see myself using Outlaws cards for years to come because of the combination of flavor, mechanics and art. I will gladly jump into an Arena draft for Outlaws when it comes up without worry.

the Western flavor

We, the playerbase, have wanted a "Western Set" for ages now, and Wizards has recognized this. It was the preliminary inspiration for my Solle set, which I really need to get back to. What we got was all sizzle and no steak.

While the flavor was on point, and some of the jokes and fun cards were masterpieces (my Dad got the Road Runner and Coyote joke when I put Cunning Coyote and Resilient Roadrunner in front of him side-by-side), a lot of the set fell flat. The biggest problem that a lot of feedback I saw came from the sheer and undeserved number of Legends in the set. Someone decided to make the set about the Outlaws and forgot that you can't build a set on the edges of design. There was no reason for there to be 43 Legendary Creatures in the set, and if they had just focused on the core Oko Gang vs Akul the Unrepentant and whomever worked for him, they could have done a better job. Add in a few Lawmen who had the creature type of Detective to offer support from Murders and things could have been much better.

The tone felt too jokey

No, the set was "wouldn't this be COOL!" and you let the top-down flavor override every other consideration. There's room for humor in a set, that's for sure. Our beloved Westerns understand the necessity of levity to make the other emotional hits hit harder.

There were problems with how this set was put together. The mechanics weren't one. The Humor wasn't. The Legends and the lack of focus was.

MODERN HORIZONS 3

I'll skip this one. I don't do MH sets, and this was no exception. Nadu is still being talked about and that, combined with the explosion of Ward is causing me to see a lot of people in my circles just give up on single-target removal and go all in on board wipes in larger formats.

I keep my piece on that, and keep Horobi, Death's Wail close to hand, just in case.

Thank you all for reading! Please leave your comments below, and I look forward to talking with you about my subject matter. Join me next week when I talk about something! What? I don't know yet!

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