andrew

Surprising level of transparency here when it's very easy to just ignore these kinds of questions, even if it's a bit roundabout.

"[W]e have to take into account numerous factors to make sure that boosters packs are equally desirable. One of the biggest factors is the overall average powerful level of the cards."

Translation: no one would (theoretically) buy "under-powered" Standard boosters if they were the same price as "high-powered" masters boosters. This doesn't really appreciate players who want to draft or want Standard cards (and would therefore buy Standard packs regardless) but I'm sure they have people there doing this all day every day.

Congratulations to @kaiyo@lemmy.world for winning our subscriber giveaway! Sending tons of positivity for great pulls, let us know what you get!

We got 59 submissions to the post from 2 weeks ago. For the curious, I plugged them all into wheelofnames.com and the linked video shows the results.

Can’t wait to do this bigger and better at 5,000! Thanks to kaiyo and everyone for being a part of the community.

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/mtg@mtgzone.com/t/314841

Preordain is unbanned in modern. Mind's Desire is unbanned in legacy.

Bit of fluff in this but some of the insights from Mark in this Lessons Learned. I particularly like the nuked ability, Debt, from Guilds of Ravnica as well as his lesson in WAR about making sure players get what they're expecting.

• Unstable: not everything happens quickly. Sometimes the key to success is to have a vision and slowly work toward it, even if it takes great time. This is not only true of Un- sets but also mechanics, themes, and set ideas.... So many of my successes started with great doubt from the rest of R&D. The key is realizing that good ideas can win out, but they require a lot of nurturing and refining.

• Dominaria: the importance of iteration. "We began vision design not knowing how we were mechanically executing on our theme [of history]. We got to solutions, not because we had a sudden epiphany of how to do it, but because we took ideas and worked on them." Mark uses Saga and historic as examples.

• Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance: overall system and structure is more important than any one design or mechanic. "Something that works well in a vacuum but doesn't integrate with the rest of the set is a problem." Mark goes over an unused Orzhov mechanic called Debt (certain spells give debt counters to your opponent and at the end of the turn, your opponent could pay 1 for each debt counter they wanted to get rid of and would lose 1 life if they had any remaining debt counters).

• War of the Spark: you can't fight your theme "I was designing a Planeswalker war set, but the audience wanted a Planeswalker war set. I was focusing on the wrong thing.... You must understand what your set is asking for and then figure out how to bring that theme to life. The best Magic designs deliver on the thing that players want most."

This is Mark's 20th (!) anniversary as head designer! He lists out a bunch of highlights and lessons from each of the sets in the previous year, a few that stood out:

• There needs to be more synergy between sets. This has been true since blocks went away and one I really hope they improve upon (or just bring blocks back!).

• Many players liked having a set (Brother's War) that looked back at one of Magic's greatest stories. "Players liked seeing old characters they recognized in card form.... They also liked how the design made the artifacts feel like a throwback while still applying modern design technology."

• The Transformer cards (in Brothers War) felt out of place. Happy he identified this one. "[T]he core of the set for many players was nostalgia. These players felt seeing cards of a different IP flew in the face of that."

• All of the lessons from Aftermath! Set was too small, most (all?) players didn't like paying the same amount for fewer cards, the set was sold as story-focused but not much happened story-wise, and many players were unhappy about Planeswalkers losing their sparks.

Coverage is at https://twitch.tv/magic and starts at 5am Eastern Time today and tomorrow and at 4am on Sunday.

The Prof explores the accelerating power creep in Commander sets and increasing cost of pre-constructed decks, particularly CMM's new $80 price. He asks why the price is so high on these though, considering they're not premium products.

His roundup of the historical prices on commander decks is pretty eye-opening. The original Commander Legends precons were $15-20 each, as was the case for many of the Commander decks after that. Even recently the top end was $34-45 per deck. CMM, however, is one of the most expensive masters sets ever, let alone among all sets.

Similarly, $240 for a Collector Booster box gets us only 4 boosters now, when originally a box had 12.

What happens when the product made for the format made for everyone is priced so high, it's only available for those with the most cash and most means?

The Prof's answer is that the community pays this price in many ways:

• WOTC is incentivized to keep prices high in general, and thereby also increase reprint equity. This is obvious given how terrible the mana bases are in the CMM precons ([[Sliver Hive]] being a notable absence), and how many of the CMM reprints could have been in many precons last year.

• Regular Commander decks get worse. [[Fierce Guardianship]] and [[Dockside Extortionist]] a great example of a reprint that could have appeared in any previous deck, but the highest priced reprints only go into high priced sets. Regular decks are underpowered and worse.

• "Everyone's format" is no longer for everyone. When Commander precons now "aren't for you," then the format becomes not for us too. New price floors harm the ability for many to access Commander, which for the Prof is the format of "just jam cards in a deck."

Congrats everyone! We welcomed our 1,000th subscriber last week to MTGZone! A huge thank-you to everyone here for browsing and contributing—this is a wonderful place already and will only get better.

To celebrate this awesome milestone, we're giving away 1 LTR collector booster and 2 LTR set boosters to one lucky community member!

To enter:

1. Make sure you're subscribed to /c/mtg.
2. Add a comment to this post with 1 thing you'd like to share about the game. Anything! Favorite deck, an MTG story, a streamer you like, your pet card, suggestion for the site.

We'll leave this up for 2 weeks and at noon eastern on August 7th we'll pick a random member from the comments here. I'll reach out via DM for an address and once confirmed will post here!

Some fun facts for reading this far:

• Our first post was on June 9th, a bit over 6 weeks ago. Since then we've had a total of 304 (mostly spoiler!) posts.
• You've upvoted these posts 2,439 times and downvoted them only 42 times.
• You've also made 1,098 comments, upvoting them 2,240 times and downvoting them only 9 times!
• We have 409 registered users at this instance now!

Thanks again to everyone, can't wait to celebrate 5,000! As always please DM me or mike with any questions or suggestions or if you're interested in getting involved, or find us at Mastodon.

Updates:

[12:00pm] It's noon Eastern! I locked the thread and will get all of the unique usernames here to run the drawing!

[1:46pm] Apologies for the delay! We have a winner: @kaiyo@lemmy.world! I sent them a message now to verify and once I get a reply I'll make the official announcement post with drawing video. Stay tuned!

Mark Rosewater had a Panel at the San Diego Comic Convention titled "Maro's Visual Teaser." This was all he included with it:

Eight images of eight upcoming products

All eight will be previewed in the next two weeks

I will show them in silence

I will answer no questions about them

Commence wild speculation!

Land Tax is banned

Land Tax enables an overpowered draw engine which can be set up consistently at a minimal mana cost. Disrupting the engine in time can be difficult, and requires cards not available to all colours. The Land Tax engine can be exploited in different deck shells, and doesn’t appear to have a natural counter or weakness.

Spoiled in the article, Collecting Commander Masters