arixordragc

[arixordragc]

The mistake BFZ made wasn't focusing on the conflict with the Eldrazi, it was disregarding the things people loved about Zendikar. Setting up the conflict in ROE only to cut directly to "Then the Eldrazi died lol" on the next visit would not have been received any better. The solution was to consolidate - take the things people loved about Zendikar and make that key to defeating the Eldrazi, rather than having a group of random idiots from nowhere fart into the place, declare themselves the heroes of the multiverse, and solve the conflict for everyone.

Loving what I am seeing for Tarkir, but definitely not happy about the dragonlords essentially being killed offscreen. As a whole, I feel like the Dragonstorm aspects of the Dragonstorm arc were tacked on to BLB, DSK, and DFT, with each having only one card representing it. Was it really necessary to have TDM's story be in those otherwise unrelated sets? I would much rather have TDM's story be self contained and show the dragonlord's downfall, as oppose to it starting near the end of the story

We want to have connective tissue between sets for the players that enjoy the larger story arcs. Regardless, the Tarkir: Dragonstorm story was going to focus on what is in the set versus what is not.

[arixordragc]

More on topic, let's use this as an example to illustrate what people are feeling. Now I don't read comics myself so I'm going to fudge some numbers here, but it's just too help illustrate the point.

Let's say a new Spiderman comic is released every two months or so. It's been that way for decades. Every second month, you can look forward to a continuation of the story, characters and world you love so much.

Oh, also in this hypothetical scenario, Spiderman isn't everywhere. If you want Spiderman content, these bimonthly comics are your only option.

Now, one day, the comics start including a couple pages in the middle that have nothing to do with Spiderman. Hell, they often have nothing to even do with superheroes at all. Sometimes it does. Two months ago it was Power Rangers. But this month it's My Little Pony. Next issue is Star Trek, followed by Scooby Doo, then Twilight.

It may not be a big deal. You can just skip those pages, sure. But it's still a little annoying. It breaks up your reading flow, makes it harder to flick through...and these properties are already all over the place. Some even have their own comics already! But like I said, they're ignorable enough.

Then the company that produces these comics announces that they're cutting out two Spiderman comics entirely so they can pump out more comics of these other properties instead.

Oh, and this announcement comes almost immediately after the company said "Don't worry; the extra pages were just an addition. You're still going to get all the Spiderman you used to!"

As someone who only recently got properly into Magic this year my stance on the recent UB Standard legality is that so long as the mechanics are good, fun to play, and work well with the other Standard legal sets then I don't particularly care if Final Fantasy is legal.

But.

There is something about the Marvel Universe being Standard Legal that feels off. Final Fantasy shares many aesthetic and gameplay similarities to Magic that make it slide into the general ecosystem better from a Look/Feel perspective. Meanwhile, as much of a Spider-Man fan as I am, it is going to be incredibly weird seeing Peter Parker or Miles Morales face off against the critters of Bloomburrow, even more than Thunder Junction or Duskmourn do.

I will attend the Final Fantasy and Spider-Man prereleases because I love playing Magic and I am interested in both sets, but I cannot shake the feeling that this decision makes the overall play experience strange, especially since SIX Standard sets of a year is way overdoing it (maybe 3 In-Universe sets and 1 UB set would be a better balance?)

I understand the decision from a logical standpoint but the emotional reaction to Magic losing some of its Qualia is something that I can't ignore

I have read many of the responses to my request for emotional responses yesterday (I will continue reading - there are just a lot of people sharing). A common through line is the feeling of loss, that the decisions we’ve been making are taking things away from them.

So, I wanted to take a moment to talk about something that I believe Universes Beyond is adding to the game. I’m not talking about value to other people that aren’t you, but something that is upside to the enfranchised players that are the backbone of the game.

As I’m head designer, my focus is on mechanics and the core gameplay experience of playing the game. Universes Beyond has been a bolt of energy for the design of the game.

Because so many of you are sharing personal stories, I’ll use my own experiences as a way to illustrate my point.

One day, when I was seven or eight, I woke up and went downstairs to see that my Dad had bought me a comic book and left it out on the counter for me as a surprise. It was Spider-Man.

I must have read that comic ten times. It was the start of a life long love of comic books. I’m not quite sure why the superhero genre, in particular, spoke to me so strongly, but it did.

As a teenager I was a bit of an outcast, and when I stumbled upon the X-Men, it felt like a story that was core to my lived experience. I too was an outsider, but out there were people like me and if I could find those people, we could bond over our similarities.

I enjoy designing Magic. I mean really, really enjoy designing Magic. I don’t throw around the term “dream job” lightly. It is truly a lifelong passion. I spend so much time writing about it because it is something that brings me so much joy, and there is a desire to share that joy with others, my found family that shares my similarities.

Designing Marvel cards has been electrifying. I have spent years mastering the art of Magic design. Getting to combine that with my love of Marvel characters has been inspirational. It has inspired to make designs I would have never thought of.

It has pushed me in directions I couldn’t have predicted and resulted in designs that tickle both my inner Mel and Vorthoses.

And it hasn’t just affected my own designs. I have given more notes on card designs than I have in my twenty nine years at Wizards.

For example, the amount of back and forth with Aaron who designed the five Secret Lair cards we recently revealed at New York ComicCon was exhaustive. He and I have long bonded over our shared love of Marvel, so getting to translate that into Magic with him has been amazing.

And each Universes Beyond product we’re making has people as equally passionate about that property.

My point is from purely a design perspective, Universes Beyond has had huge dividends. It has inspired us to make fresh new designs. It has sparked creativity. We are making awesome card designs, mechanics, themes, and sets, things that most likely wouldn’t have come into existence otherwise.

The passion that beloved characters and worlds has inspired in us is translated into amazing Magic design, something that will make the act of playing Magic better for anyone who enjoys the nuts and bolts of the raw gameplay of Magic.

[arixordragc]

Speaking as someone who is, and always has been, in favour of UB, I definitely have Some Thoughts about this.

1. I'm in favour of UB largely because I have long since lost any attachment to Magic's own "original universe". I don't care about Spiderman, or Dr Who, or...Mr Assassinscreed. But I also don't care about Chandra, or Jace, or Kellan, so what does it matter? But I'm aware enough to know that if I did care about Magic's lore, I would be incredibly pissed at being told it's getting cut back so that we can get even more Marvel slop - as if that's not already everywhere.

2. Although I don't care for Magic's lore, you know what I do like? Fantasy. Especially good, traditional high fantasy, the sort that first drew me into the game way back in 2000. The sort that, despite your recent insistence otherwise, really was foundational to the game back then. Even if I haven't enjoyed the story and characters for many years now, I could still enjoy the rich fantasy aesthetic that I love so much. But with Magic's own aesthetic leaning more and more sci-fi and few of the announced or released UB releases fitting that aesthetic, the look and feel of the game is still drifting away from what I once enjoyed so much about it.

3. You lied. I know when people say that it's usually hyperbole for "Circumstances changed to make the thing you once said years ago no longer true", but no, in this case you straight up lied. There is absolutely no way that this decision was made in the, what, five days since you last told someone that UB was "additive", that it wasn't taking away anything, only giving other fans something they like as well? Well now it literally is taking stuff away, and you had to have known about this for months if not years. Feels like statements about it being purely additive were nothing more than a hollow attempt to temporarily pacify complainers in the hopes that they'd have grown to accept it by the time this announcement arrived.

4. It's just too much. Not only 50% UB, but six set releases a year for standard alone, along with whatever supplemental premium releases you're adding to the mix. It looked like you were really taking steps to address the issue of product fatigue, but then you go and completely reverse it with this.

5. You already know how people feel, because you once felt the same way. You're allowed to change your mind, of course, but that doesn't mean everyone else has. If you genuinely don't understand why people don't like this, just remember how you felt 15 years ago and realise that some people still feel that way.

6. In a way, it speaks to a general lack of faith in Magic's own IP. Good franchises don't need to shoehorn POPULAR THING to grow and maintain a fanbase, the fans will come and stay based on the franchise's own merits. Occasional crossovers and nods can be fun, but again - 50% is a lot.

7. There are people out there who love Magic's creative. I'm not one of them, but I know they're there, and there are a lot of them. You must know this too, or you wouldn't have a whole creative team employed. And you've just told these people you're cutting back on the thing you've spent thirty years carefully creating and getting them attached to, in exchange for yet more of stuff that already permeates so much of pop culture. If people like Marvel, they can get Marvel in SO many other places. If they like Bloomburrow, or the Phyrexians, or Jace, there is only one place to go for them. And you're shrinking that space, significantly, in order to push more of the stuff that's already everywhere.

If you don't immediately understand why people would be hostile to that, then nothing that anyone says can help.

I’ve always felt the core role of this blog has been one of information. We make a lot of choices in design, and I try to use my various communications, including Blogatog, to walk the players through what we were thinking when we made key decisions.

The challenge with this approach is that it’s very logic-focused. It uses intellectual justifications to explain actions. But the problems I’m often responding to are emotional in origin. I have a good friend who’s a psychologist. He refers to this (using the words of author Robyn Gobbel) as an owl brain solution to a watchdog brain problem.

When someone is hurting, hearing about why the thing that is causing them pain is the result of intellectual decisions falls flat. That’s what has been causing some tension lately here on Blogatog.

It’s clear that for some Question Marks changes over the last few years represent the loss of something key to what makes Magic special to them. To them, the game is losing its heart.

While I can’t necessarily do anything about that, I want to better understand what you’re going through. So I’m using this post to ask players who are concerned with the recent changes to help me understand their feelings. Let me hear your stories about how your lives have been affected by these changes.

[arixordragc]

Great points, very well articulated...that will be completely ignored by people insisting "But Magic has always had robots" or "Something something buffet".

Why do you think modern Kamigawa was so beloved but other planes got so many complaints for "too modern for Magic". Personally, I'm a fan of all the different things you've been trying, but I'm curious on why those things were perceived differently.

It’s not as if Kamigawa was liked by all and others were liked by no one. Each had its fans and its foes. Kamigawa just skewed heavier towards fans than the average set, I think because it was a home run of a set.

[arixordragc]

Just to clarify, I'm referring to the world and set presented to us as the cake, not the story as written by Seanan McGuire. I guess I misspoke when I used the chef as the metaphor there, but I hope the point came across nonetheless - I find fault with the world and set, not with the actual written story.

“I agree. I more expected, “you already did this trope”.” You shouldn’t be thinking in terms of tropes at all. Just think about how to make the story and cards interesting instead.

A trope is a "common theme or device". It just means things that are most associated with something. If we're doing a horror set, we're going to make cards based on things associated with horror. "Don't do tropes" is like saying when doing a topic, don't make cards associated with that topic. It's synonymous to saying, paint me a picture, but don't use colors.

The issue for discussion is *how* should we use tropes, not should tropes be used.

[arixordragc]

You're absolutely right. But at the same time, you also can't just throw eggs and sugar into a bowl, stick it in the oven, and expect to come out with a good cake. You gotta use those ingredients right; you gotta measure them, balance them, mix them properly, bake them properly.

(And just to make this absolutely abundantly clear, my criticisms are never leveled at the authors and writers who pen the actual story. To continue the metaphor, I'm blaming the ingredients, not the chef.)

“I agree. I more expected, “you already did this trope”.” You shouldn’t be thinking in terms of tropes at all. Just think about how to make the story and cards interesting instead.

A trope is a "common theme or device". It just means things that are most associated with something. If we're doing a horror set, we're going to make cards based on things associated with horror. "Don't do tropes" is like saying when doing a topic, don't make cards associated with that topic. It's synonymous to saying, paint me a picture, but don't use colors.

The issue for discussion is *how* should we use tropes, not should tropes be used.

[arixordragc]

Yes, tropes are everything. But there's a difference between something that features tropes and something that's specifically built around them.

I also want to clarify that despite the complaints, I'm not using "tropes" in a derogatory way, purely a descriptive one. Though even then, I guess I'm more talking about specific references than general tropes.

Regarding Unsettling Twins vs Twins of Maurer Estate - Although there are definitely other reasons, a big one could simply be a matter of volume. It's no secret we've been getting a whole lot of trope-based sets lately, and that they've been getting much more heavy-handed than they were in the past (including SOI). While I get that that might be a good thing for some, others could simply be getting burnt out by it, hence more complaints.

I don't think the sets individually are more heavy handed or of higher volume than the past, but having numerous sets of that volume next to one another is unique to this year.

[arixordragc]

@zorroaburrito The problem with Dack's death was the fact that they killed off a fan favourite character without giving him a proper send-off in card form. Yes, that sucks, but the death itself was actually fine. Not great (I mean, can anything from that story be called great?), but perfectly fine. Gideon's death though, had so many problems I legit don't know where to begin. I guess I'll start with his arc - which, as I perceived it (I acknowledge that this is the sort of thing that everyone can have a different interpretation of), was about how his martyr complex was a bad thing. It wasn't this great virtue to be admired, it was a flaw which was causing him problems, that he needed to overcome - or at the very least, learn to manage better. So the fact that it's exactly what ends up saving the day, and then being praised by everyone as actually really great and heroic, is incredibly jarring, at odds with what was previously established, and pretty unsatisfying. Then there's Liliana. Her arc (again, as I saw it) was about how she can't keep running from her (metaphorical) demons; at some point, the consequences of her actions will catch up to her and she'll have to face them head on. That starts to happen when she defies Bolas, but the fact that Gids then takes the bullet for her robs that arc of any satisfaction. She doesn't have to deal with the consequences of jack. Once again, she does the Bad Thing and gets away scot free while someone else suffers for it. Then there's Bolas himself. He's supposed to be this diabolical, millennia-old mastermind, with plots upon plots and schemes within schemes (whether or not he actually comes off that way is irrelevant, point is that's what the story wants us to think he is). He spent decades planning this thing, had a contingency in place for any potential hitch...but he somehow didn't foresee the guy known almost exclusively for his martyr complex sacrificing himself to stop him. Even if we charitably assume that Bolas wouldn't understand WHY someone would sacrifice themselves, he should 100% be aware that there are people out there who would, and that Gideon was one of those people. The fact that THAT was what blindsided him just serves to make him look even more idiotic than he already did. But you know, maybe it's unfair to blame Bolas for not seeing that coming, considering it made no sense at all. Gids saves Lili by...transferring his indestructibility to her? Is that a thing that can happen now? Since when could planeswalkers just give their powers to each other like, fittingly enough I guess, trading cards? If Jace ever gets sick of being a telepath, can he just slap Ajani in the face and say "You read minds now", and then in the next set we'll get Ajani the Mind Sculptor? Is that a thing that can happen? Because I don't recall that ever being a thing that can happen, which means the fact that that's exactly what this whole turning point hinges upon feels incredibly contrived. And for that matter, why does doing that kill him? Does Lili's contract just somehow sense that it isn't killing her, so it just decides that Gids is the next best thing? Or did Bolas, in all his infinite diabolical genius, write a clause into the contract that says it's totally cool if someone else takes the bullet for her? How does any of this add up? The whole thing feels like the thought process started and ended with "These types of stories typically have a heroic sacrifice involved, we're out of potential designs for Gideon so chuck him in there".

Bring back Gideon. It has been too long.

You might want to sit down.

[arixordragc]

My understanding was that it was "We had an exception to the rule and shit went wrong, thereby proving why the rule is in place".

Re: stages of design: the change towards a single big set and no blocks as you claim is a dominant factor why sets perfom well. On this blog you give rough estimates on how well a set performed, which I appreciate, but I don't see any data online, so I my assumptions are based on what I vaguely remember. With that said coming to the question: Not soon after you proclaim the single block era you did a 3 set block Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance and War of the Spark, with the last one of the series being the best sold product (afaik). This leads me to the theory, that blocks are NOT the inherent flaw of performance, but that the execution is what matters. Sets after the first on the same block "simply" have to feel fresh like WAR did and not like the same reheated formula of the first, like some of the small sets did. What is your view on the propsed theory?

There are not a lot of hooks like “giant conclusion to a three year story arc with twelve times the amount of a popular card type that we normally do in small number.” War of the Spark is not easily replicable, as evidenced by the challenges March of the Machine, our second capstone event set, faced.

The evidence strongly suggests blocks *are* the problem. War of the Spark is the exception the proves the rule, not one that negates it.

[arixordragc]

Since when was Magic ever "just one thing"?

Hi Mark,

I brought this up before but I have been seeing Magic getting much more comfortable with modern technology and how much of a disconnect that is (to me) seeing it on the table. I am not talking about advanced technology, but rather mimicking directly our real-life technology. New Cappenna, Kamigawa, even Karlov and thunder junction touched this, but the high tops are tv sets from the duskmourn previews make everything feel mundane and not "magic" to me.

Is this type of world building direction something we are going to see more often? Do you think that UB living in more modern settings has allowed sets like this to be made, where previously they wouldn't have? I think people are excited I think the set is going to be loved, I think design and art has been amazing this year, but again for me every has been feeling less magical.

Magic does what it always does, push boundaries. Magic is not inherently tied to any time period. You can have modern settings where Magic plays a big role in the world.

We’ve been testing how modern Magic can be. Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty was very modern and it was beloved.

But if the overall feedback is modern things are too much, we can pull back. Duskmourn is definitely pushing into new area.

What do you all think?

[arixordragc]

You joke, but it would legit likely be better than the actual story!

Sentient animal-based stories have been one of the pillars of fantasy since Aesop. Why did it take this long to do a set like Bloomburrow?

There are a lot of different types of stories. There are even more we still haven't gotten to yet.

[arixordragc]

These are my feelings exactly. Older worlds like Innistrad and Theros worked because they felt like their own worlds, which happened to be inspired by a real world source. They looked at the atmosphere and feeling those sources created and created their own setting to match, with the occasional Civilised Scholar or Rescue From the Underworld for spice. Newer top down offerings just feel like a shallow collection of references, like it didn't go beyond writing down a list of tropes and checking them off as you went.

I hear a fantastic closer on a vid about top-down design that mostly critiques it. "Magic brought me in because of its originality of ideas and strong gameplay. But when what it becomes is just a mirror rather than a new concept, then perhaps a focus on Top-Down can pull us away from what made us fall in love with this game in the first place."

Art (of which I include game design) is about interpretation. The fact that we’re using a subject you’re familiar with doesn’t lessen the art. Five different artists can draw an apple. Yeah, you know what an apple is, but what does each artist bring to their interpretation of it?

For example, Innistrad is one of my best designs. I and my design team used gothic horror as an inspiration, but we did things with it that Magic had never done before, and expressed gothic horror in a way it had never been expressed before.

[arixordragc]

Magic does have an unfortunate tendency to be like "(Popular Thing) used (trope) and it was good, therefore if we use (trope) it will also be good".

Do you think Tamyio's death was a little too Obi Wan with the downloaded copy now guiding Nashi? And does having a downloaded copy really blunt the poignant impact of her death?

I confused by the term "too Obi Wan". That implies it's a bad thing, and Obi Wan's death is one of the most famous, and I believe well executed, deaths in popular culture.

[arixordragc]

Your thinking is a bit too binary. Speaking as someone who prefers softer magic systems in general, I absolutely agree that things don't need to be "precisely clarified to everyone", but that doesn't mean the only other option, or even the best option, is to have no rules or consistency whatsoever.

Also worth noting is that although other stories might have used poorly defined (or even completely undefined) systems to good effect (also also, important not to confuse "used X to good effect" and "worked despite using X to bad effect"), that doesn't mean that THIS story is using it well for THIS aspect. Context is everything in storytelling, and good uses in some contexts do not vindicate every usage in every other context. Of course, I'm aware that that doesn't automatically make it bad either - there's definitely a discussion to be had, but the way other stories use it is not part of that discussion.

What's the point of a multiverse now its so easy to move between planes? Aren't Ravnica/Kaladesh/New Capenna and the rest of the the planes mixed around Thunder Junction just like a new version of Dominaria now?

Omenpaths are unstable (they can come and go) and not super frequent, so it's not an easy task for a character to go from plane A to plane B if they aren't a planeswalker.

[arixordragc]

It's a fine start, yes, but considering even fans consistently complain of stories feeling rushed and bloated, I'd say they could still be doing a lot better. I can't speak to MKM cause I didn't read it, but I do know that one of the reasons I bounced hard off the WOE and LCI stories was the constant switching between three or four different groups of characters doing different things.

Still, a marked improvement over the Phyrexia arc, which was a massive improvement over the Bolas arc.

re: blocks. Character limit is really restraining my ability to convey this thought in its entirety. I think the recent asks haven't put to words the difference between 9 months worth of sets and the stories they represent. I believe it's less about having 3 sets worth of cards, but having an adequate amounts of stories to build the world and putting the named characters to paper. Theros Block didn't sell me on Theros, seeing the journey of Elspeth through the plane of Theros did.

Each set having the equivalent stories as a three-set block requires us tripling are amount of stories which is a huge ask for the creative team.

[arixordragc]

From what I recall, Circu was only originally printed that way because it was the only way to actually get the abilities to all fit in the text box, a problem that was solved with the more condensed templating later on.

If zones of the game such as hands, graveyards, libraries, ect were considered by the rules to be a little bit more like objects and thus be able to be targeted directly do you think that would that open up design space for y’all or limit it?

It doesn't open up much usable design space.

[arixordragc]

Oh I understand that. Like I said, OP's assertion is absolutely unreasonable, and I hate that makes people associate those of us with legitimate complaints who actually want to see the story be better with people like them making wild and completely unsubstantiated claims about what "everyone" thinks.

With that said though, I wouldn't worry about WotC making any decisions based on people like that. They have their own methods of collecting actual data; it's not like they're going to look at some rando on Tumblr and think "Well, hyperrfuzzzysnipper said that everyone hates him, so I guess everyone hates him". They didn't axe the Gatewatch after WAR because of dumb hyperbole. They axed them because either a. That's what they were planning to do from the beginning, or b. They really weren't as popular as WotC had hoped. In the first case, they're just following their plan; in the second, they're listening to genuine feedback.

Regarding Kellan, that can easily be explained through ye olde "familiarity breeds contempt". Even if you just have a vague disinterest in something, overexposure can turn that vague disinterest into active dislike. And you can say his "lack of identity" is an important part of his character, but that doesn't mean people like a "lack of identity", or that it was handled well. Remember, someone interpreting an aspect of media differently to you doesn't mean they haven't consumed, only that they consume it differently. Just like overall opinions, specific interpretations vary from person to person.

Case in point, I absolutely despise Liliana and think that Gideon's sacrifice was one of the dumbest examples of a "heroic sacrifice" I've ever seen (though I agree about Ajani. As one of the only characters I remotely care about right now, having the most attention he's been given in some 15 odd years be not even him, but a mind controlled puppet with his face is endlessly frustrating). Doesn't mean I think you're wrong for thinking otherwise, and I'm not going to assume you didn't actually read it or that you're being disingenuous; we just have different interpretations and opinions, and that's cool.

And since this is already way too long, so I just want to say, I'm also not trying to pick a fight or anything! I just really like discussing storytelling, and you've been cool about it, so if I come off as antagonistic, I'm not being a dick, I'm just oblivious.

Is wizards aware that everyone hates kellan?

For those that don’t like Kellen (and I assume it’s not all of you), what don’t you like?