Insiders

 With the new Spider-Man set coming out I could not be less excited. I'll pick through it to see if there's anything that sparks my interest but I have no intention of playing at the pre-release or buying packs. 

And the question came up from MaRo himself "is there anything that can happen with the Universes Beyond product where you accept it's had a positive effect on Magic as a whole?"

The answer to that is: I can hold two thoughts at once. 

The sales of Universes Beyond apparently demonstrate more people are getting into the game. I say "apparently" because I've never seen anyone cite numbers-either for or against. They certainly are selling. Hasbro posts profits and the signs point to Magic being an important brand. That is a net good, if you love the game. 

Which doesn't change the fact that the product is also predatory because it's priced higher than regular product, creates a second reserve list, where if people don't buy into product they don't want right now because of the theme (not the mechanics), then they run the risk of never being able to see that product again, and that the Universes Beyond sets have increased the flow of Magic cards to a deluge and that feels exhausting.

Nevertheless, I would still like a Universes Within set-something like the Time Spiral or Innistrad Remastered sets. Collected editions of UB sets but printed as Magic cards in-universe. This would go a long way towards mitigating the ire that players like me have towards these outsider sets, because it would show a willingness to bring the game back to the people who have invested so much into it, or just don't want Spider-Man in their Black Lotus. 

The idea.

It started as these things often do: someone else trying something interesting with Tifa Lockheart.

Now I am less thrilled with the three color manabase here; Steppe Lynx and Akoum Hellhound are relevant one drops but I think we all know that they don't get the job done. Maybe I'm just bad at committing to the idea but I really don't think those cards are good enough, so instead I went with this.

4 Tifa Lockhart
2 Voice of Victory
3 Grand Abolisher
3 Bristly Bill, Spine Sower
3 Knight of the Reliquary
2 Elvish Reclaimer

4 Crop Rotation
4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Royal Treatment
3 Berserk

6 Forest
1 Plains
4 Windswept Heath
4 Ghost Quarter
2 Temple Garden
1 Bojuka Bog
1 Sejiri Steppe
2 Flagstones of Trokair
1 Cabaretti Courtyard

3 Wrenn and Realmbreaker

4 Scale Up

This was my first take on the deck and I don't think it's bad! There's some powerful effects in there, but I kept finding that I wasn't getting as many landfall triggers as I would like when I goldfished it.

What, I kept thinking, is a way to get multiple lands into play? Then it hit me: Veteran Explorer. And there's already a shell for that card with Cabal Therapy! So: 

4 Tifa Lockhart
3 Bristly Bill, Spine Sower
2 Elvish Reclaimer
4 Veteran Explorer
3 Voice of Victory

4 Crop Rotation
4 Royal Treatment
3 Berserk
2 Swords to Plowshares
1 Infernal Grasp

7 Forest
4 Ghost Quarter
1 Bojuka Bog
2 Swamp
4 Verdant Catacombs
1 Godless Shrine
2 Plains
1 Underground Mortuary

4 Scale Up
4 Cabal Therapy

Now we're talking. I don't know if this is good, but it's a neat place to start. Yes, it's still a 3 color deck, but I think that Black offers me a lot more power than Red does, and as it turns out, I already had a G/B deck that I wasn't super thrilled with and could retire. 

So let's see where this goes!

Keeper of the Gate

I recently learned how to play Love Letter, which is a delightful little game. Thematically it is about trying to get a letter to the princess to woo her-and intercepting the letters of your rivals. 

Now, Love Letter has a LOT of reskins-basically different riffs on the same idea. While I was being taught the game, this subject came up and it was said, with no small amount of derision, 

"There's a dragon one, Batman themed one-"

I kinda shrugged it off. "I mean,dragons?"

"Sure, sure, but nobody needs a Batman themed Love Letter."

And this bothered me but I couldn't figure out why--and today I finally did.

If Batman gets someone playing a game, why is that a problem? If the goal is, say, to get a message to Batman to help him prevent the diabolical schemes of Bane, while diverting messages that would take Batman off the case...then how is that bad?

Especially since thematically, it is a game that involves no violence itself-it's all about cunning and wit. 

The derision was especially jarring coming from friends who actively seek inclusion. I think that was one of the reasons it threw me. We should have as many ways to get people to play as they might like! 

Nooooooooooooooooow.....I can hear people already starting to wonder about this in regards to my feelings about Universes Beyond sets. 

So I want to be clear about this: I am glad that sets that show off Warhammer 40k, Dr. Who, Spider-Man, Final Fantasy, etc. bring new people into Magic. I love this game-and sharing things you love is one of the best things you can do. 

The issue between Love Letter's reskins and Magic's sets is that Magic sets become integrated into the game. Love Letter allows you to pick the flavors of the game you want. If the Batman version of Love Letter bothers you, you can ignore it and your experience doesn't change.

Magic is a stew, and it doesn't matter if the flavors don't go together anymore, you're stuck with everything that's thrown in there. The stew can't be unsalted, can't be reflavored. You've concocted a permanent change, and now instead of being able to pick the jalepenos off my pizza, I just have to swallow it. 

Maybe that's part of the price to pay, to bring more people in. If that's the case then...well, in the spirit of being welcoming, I suppose it's worth paying. But I do wish that the issues that players like me have with this introduction of flavors we do not like, didn't seem so easy to dismiss. 

Because UB isn't about making a better game of Magic, it is about making a more profitable one. 

Sometimes that reality is a little hard to take. 

State of Design 2025

You can check that out here. Come on back and I'll tell you my thoughts.

First, under the main Lessons "We need to be better at supporting our themes downstream of our designs"

I mean...what's new is old? This comment could've come right after the debacle of Mirrodin/Kamigawa. It even did, as I recall-because they started implementing ways to bridge the sets to they would interact better. It even could have come after Urza's Saga/Mercadian Masques! That's nearly thirty years ago.

However, I don't want to be condescending here; Magic design is one that is constantly changing and it can be extremely difficult to integrate everything into every set every time. They have done some great things with the Limited environments, and they're aware of the complexity going into sets. These are good things!

That said; how often do you need to learn that lesson, my dudes? 

The lessons from Bloomburrow feel...forced. As if they were searching for problems. That is a good thing, I think. When player complaints are "Not the right mix of animals" and not "this play pattern sucked" you're doing something right.

The "on rails" critique is one that I feel could be given to any typal Magic set; focusing on creature types inherently puts a set on rails. So while it isn't an inaccurate criticism, it's not very reasonable. 

The assessment of Duskmorn seems pretty good. I was VERY opposed to the mundane items in that set. And I'm really happy to say that Duskmorn is a cool set that is absolutely worth playing! I'm glad that this is  the big takeaway because I had a lot to say that was negative about the artistic choices. 

Similarly, the Foundations review highlights its strengths as a core set, and I feel like the lessons once again are solutions looking for problems. However, the strain on Foundations may start to show in two more years, when the set is still legal and players are potentially exhausted by it.

Now...Aetherdrift we're going to talk about. I realize that I may be in the minority because vehicles didn't really do it for me, but...if vehicles were exiting to players then why didn't the set hit bigger? So I already disagree with the first highlight, and while we found Start Your Engines to be better than expected, Aetherdrift just did not capture that same sense of fun that I and friends of mine had in the other Limited environments we played. 

Maybe that's just me--because the lessons all hit their marks--and suggests they did something wrong here. If the set is about racing and players end up caring about the locations visited and not the race, that's a mistake. AND this directly contradicts the notion that players enjoyed a set revolving around Vehicles-they may have been hyped for the idea, but the execution not so much.

However, the takeaways for the final lesson I have to support. Magic should try new things, and that means they don't always work. But I support the attempt--I just find some of the explanations to be suspect. 

Dragonstorm's lessons are particularly interesting to me because in all three cases, it's suggested that there may not be a good solution to them. My takeaway is that sometimes you just have to live with the inelegance of certain things. That's hard--but it's also necessary. 

I'm not going to talk about the Final Fantasy set, because I just don't care about Universes Beyond, with one exception:

Money clearly talks, and it says there's going to be more UB sets, and fuck y'all who have critiques about it. 

Is Cube The Best?

I honestly have no idea if Cube is the best format.

But what I really like about this story from Rhystic Studies is that the Cube-to me at least-isn't the thing at all.

The people are the thing-the way they take a creation and mix it up to make it their own, to give an experience that just cannot be replicated anywhere else.

Conquest Database

Whoohoo! There's a new database for all the Conquest cards to help with deckbuilding. It's a little shaggy but it DOES get the job done!

Thanks to everyone who built this incredibly helpful tool.

Free Pizza: Fantastic Four season

 I got there with this:

I have to admit, I had a lot of fun working the last few ranks with this deck. It offered me the consistency of reliable powerhouses like Collector and Dinosaur, with some random bonuses from the Shield package. 

But...I am starting to wonder what the future of Snap is. The playerbase has had a lot more to complain about lately, than celebrate. The squeeze for money seems to be in, instead of building an exceptional experience for people that makes some of the money instead of a miserable grind that tries to make all of the money.

I haven't quit--the new season has started and I really like what Galactus: First Steps adds to the game-anytime they make "lanes matter" cards like Iron Patriot, I feel like there's a good strategic element being brought to the game. 

But...the enthusiasm for play has started to wane and it's a bummer.