Not trying to yuck your yum, just pointing out a trend in the enshitification of magic, which you asked me to justify. I feel the current design trends of WotC trying “have their cake and eat it too” with increasing frequency of UB blended premier sets leads to a convergence which makes premier sets less exciting, less unique, and less fun. But each to their own, if you like the modern design, have fun!
Era 1 - Magic makes its own worlds and story with unique characters, cosmology, and design (eg Urza, lorwyn, mirrodin, etc).
Era 2 - Magic starts riffing off of extended fantasy and legends with more direct references, but still a flavour of distinct and unique personality (eg theros, amonkhet, innistrad, etc).
Era 3 - Magic literally just shills other IP now. Jim Hopper can get in a tardis to fight gandalf. An original, unique, creative universe takes a backseat to direct rip-offs.
Everyone is different I guess. The modern era of MTG is clearly popular among some types of players, they are making record profit. However success measured by ‘packs sold’, and success measured by ‘unique and interesting game” are two different things, despite what WotC execs say.
My lament I guess is that magic used to be a game which wasn’t afraid of creating new and interesting creative ideas, and making them uniquely their own. While there is still an element of that in some sets, they are taking a back seat to the current stale design model of “A trope + B gimmick”. It just feels lazy and inspired, and who wants to play a game that is now just a platform for pop culture references?
This is just embarrassing. Nothing but ham-fisted tropes and shilling to other IPs for a quick buck. Disgusting. Bloomburrow seems like the only authentic magic set in this bunch.
What a disappointing year… it’s so sad to see magic just become an advertising platform for other franchises. Maybe bloomburrow will be interesting, as it’s the only original thought in the line-up?
Browse to https://vger.app . It’s a webapp, it’s great, much more privacy friendly than having to install a whole native app to just browse.
Voyager is the apollo replacement, it rocks!
My group plays with the planechase. It’s fun, adds another element of randomness that can lead to interesting situations and strategies
Just switching to overlay while in game for me causes the game to fully crash. Figured it was a known bug, haven't tried to troubleshoot yet.
Still no fix for game crashes when accessing overlay in-game (linux)
Hmmm, tough to say whether to keep it on or off. I guess will need to see how it plays.
For all intents and purposes, LotR is essentially a premier set. It had a pre-release, its draftable, it has multiple booster styles, it replaced the launch slot which would otherwise have been a premier set… we’re just splitting hairs now. The fact it’s not standard legal really doesn’t mean anything anymore.