mike

Yea this is absolutely the direction they're going. I feel like they desperately want to use AI art. They must be salivating at the cost savings from removing artists and set designers from the creative team. I can't imagine the playerbase accepting that but who knows, they've/we've accepted everything so far.

Completely agree. I also think THB wasn't tested outside of limited, and I think nothing was starting with WAR.

I can't help but feel a lot of this could be fixed by creating a separate game. At first I thought UB should be the separate game, and I still do, but it's clear Hasbro will never do that. Perhaps the best outcome could have been a game that returns to the old frame, the old release schedule, the old artwork, and the old play/card design philosophy and just sell it as Classic Magic or something. I would play the crap out of that game, and it would still even be Standard legal since all of the cards are compatible with the original game.

I know it's just a dream at this point, but I think there is still a huge demand for something that's basically premodern with new cards.

This is very well written, and one of the best pieces of content we have on this site. You are really amazing, Evu. I have much more to say in another comment after I finish reading everything in full, but I just wanted to echo that I've felt this way for about a year myself, probably longer. It's just getting too hard to enjoy the game, and it's even harder with MTGZone because I really WANT to enjoy the game and be active here and in other communities but I just can't find the love anymore.

every card that sees play these days does so many things that it’s not even comparable to old standard anymore

This is my biggest gripe with design overall. It has shown its effects most predominantly in Standard since Standard was one of the slowest formats, but I think this problem has caused every format to get a lot faster.

I'm 100% with you, and I desperately want a non-limited, much slower format but I don't know how on earth we get there with Hasbro/WoTC making it pretty clear that they care way more about sales revenue than the game being fun.

I personally think these are all positive bans. It’s unfortunate that bans are needed every cycle lately, but these are all good ones to me.

Breach is a card that should never have been printed. Yawgmoth’s Will was already insane, and printing the same thing for 1 mana cheaper was a huge mistake imo. This is just now finally catching up to reality. There was talk of banning Mox Opal but I think that is too premature when the obvious issue right now is Breach.

Sowing Mycospawn should never have been printed. And Troll was enabling too much efficiency for Blue/Black decks. I think both of those were the right hits right now. I know there’s tons of talk about banning Reanimate, Daze, Entomb, etc but these are absolutely the right hits for now in my opinion. I think waiting to see what a format without Troll looks like is better than hastily banning any of the core cards. I’d like to see Bowmasters gone next.

I personally think these are all positive bans. It's unfortunate that bans are needed every cycle lately, but these are all good ones to me.

Breach is a card that should never have been printed. Yawgmoth's Will was already insane, and printing the same thing for 1 mana cheaper was a huge mistake imo. This is just now finally catching up to reality. There was talk of banning Mox Opal but I think that is too premature when the obvious issue right now is Breach.

Sowing Mycospawn should never have been printed. And Troll was enabling too much efficiency for Blue/Black decks. I think both of those were the right hits right now. I know there's tons of talk about banning Reanimate, Daze, Entomb, etc but these are absolutely the right hits for now in my opinion. I think waiting to see what a format without Troll looks like is better than hastily banning any of the core cards. I'd like to see Bowmasters gone next.

I just want to mention, I'm glad they printed this as a sorcery. I originally thought this was a better Collected Company at first but then re-read it and I think it's a cool card. Certainly interesting in white instead of blue. Searching 7 cards instead of 6 I guess comes at the cost of the sorcery speed but that feels pretty strong too.

I mean I guess it's par for the course but this card just seems crazy to me. Definitely commander focused, as is much of the design lately, but this is usually getting played on turn 4 in commander and the life loss trigger seems pretty easy to activate every turn. Often I think you will get getting two triggers off this every turn. And then it has lifelink and flying to boot!

Enigma Jewel is one I personally specced on. I knew that card was busted beyond belief and made a dimir Jewel/Rats deck for Pioneer last year before the UB announcements. I have not played 1 game with the deck but at least there are marginal gains on the Enigma Jewel playset lol.

This was fantastic and so is Matt Nass. My main takeaway from this was with the lands in the deck, how much we could use Blood Moon in standard right now 😆 My mouth is salivating at the idea of punishing that mana base.

Reposting my comment with this account for visibility as it appears my mtgzone account still is not visible outside the instance.

Non-magic, but I may have to open up a discussion on the Lemmy hosting discord for this. I actually thought it was working after an update we applied but I'll see what they and Andrew can help with.