Remnant 2: Prism Edition

The final DLC for Remnant 2  (The Dark Horizon) came out and boy, is it good.

Not flawless, but damn good.

The good: An excellent, huge final level to explore. Boss Rush mode is a great bite-sized way to play. 

The bad: Prisms. 

For those who haven't played; Remnant 2 used to give you three slots for "shards" that you could use to give a small boost to your stats. The shards had an in-game currency you could use to level them up, so the bonus would get bigger. There were a ton of different shards to use so you could adapt them to whatever build or playstyle you enjoyed. 

The prisms are a drag. 

Prisms are a new item you can slot that give characters preset bonuses, which you can change by adding in the previous use of shards. Every time you level up the prism, you get a set of mixed new shards from what you already own to choose from. Then you can pick one and keep going, until you have 5 slots full.

I think that's how it works.

Which is the first problem: I don't understand how it works and they don't tell you. Are there videos online to explain them? Yes. But why do I need those now? Why should I need them?

The second problem: It's randomized. So I could be doing all this work to tilt the prism towards a build I enjoy and not get the shards I want. Which means I have to restart the whole thing over. But apparently when you make choices, you lose the shards forever, merged into the new one?

I think that's how it works. Please see the first problem.

I've seen enough videos to know that you can tilt the odds in your favor but this is just more bookkeeping.

The third problem: The benefits aren't measurable for the work you put in. I am playing this game to have fun: is stat keeping fun? Is getting a +5% bonus to critical hit fun? What if I spend time to grind things out and make it 10? 15%? Do I get to have fun then? What about all the time I spent before I finally got 15% bonus? Is that fun? 

What if I don't get the Critical Hit stat, and instead have to start over because I got Skill Bonus? Is disappointment fun? 

So it's a lot of time into an opaque system to give me outcomes I cannot control for benefits that are unnecessary to my enjoyment.

Because what I want to note is that all of this stuff? This isn't playing the game or even part of the primary gameplay loop! It's just busywork.  

Which is a bummer of an ending to what has been one of the best games of 2024. 

Reconsidering

 This video from Rhystic Studies goes into the house of Duskmourn and the inspirations involved in the creation of the plane.

Now, I said a LOT about my perspective on the existence of Baseball Bat in Duskmourn and I stand by it all. It still feels lazy. 

I really like the video: I like the added context that is provided for this plane! I wish that it had been communicated better to the players. I also appreciated the reminder that for a great many Magic players, the 1980's is shrouded in myth-a time they have no memory of, as I do. For them, the appearance of a rotary phone is as odd as a cigarette holders are to me; symbols of eras gone before I was born. 

Context matters: items can become strange quickly and the next thing you know the world is unfamiliar. Maybe even a baseball bat takes on strange significance. 

Dancing Around

 My friend Fuz ended up talking to me about this post, saying (effectively) 'I think we are past the point of (Universes Beyond) making Magic just a skin to put other IP in. It's done.'

Not long after that I came across The Professor's take on the Universes Beyond announcement. He specifically references a Rhystic Studies post to help explain how he's feeling.

I'll even include links to other essays the Prof talks about: The Twitter thread by Gavin Bull, and the essay by Gareth Edwards, for your reference. 

Because with the support of the essays I can se what Rhystic Studies and The Professor want to but can't say because they don't want to get demonitized and/or want to maintain good relationships with the people who work at WotC.  

I don't judge them for that, but I don't have that problem.

They are trying to speak out against the enshittification of Magic. 

How do I know for certain that Magic is being enshittified? It isn't because I think WotC doesn't have talented people who care about the game. The opposite is true-but it is very difficult to get someone to believe something when their paycheck relies on the opposite. 

No. I am confident the game is being enshittified because the parent company of Hasbro has been losing money except for Magic. 

Hasbro doesn't know how to make or run games. They (seemingly) have ONE arm of the company that does, and they are milking it for all it's worth. They don't care about players. They don't care about what games mean to people. 

They care about money. And when what you care about is money, everything else gets burned to the ground for money. 

I still love Magic and I will probably always love playing Magic. But Magic has meaning and I am not OK with that becoming watered down into nothing. Like all art, it isn't just the object any more. 

It's something bigger, and it's a goddamn shame to see that being pissed away for mammon. 

Now Peasant Kenobi has a different perspective on this and while I appreciate his optimism and agree that Magic from a story perspective has always been an amalgam and pastiche of other work. But I feel like he's got some rose colored glasses on. Yes, Magic will change and yes, some people won't like that while others will and no, Magic isn't going to die.

Until it does, because that's how enshittification works (if you did the reading). Nevertheless, I feel the perspective is worth considering. 

What's Old Is New

Foundations is...a Core set. 

When Magic was starting, Core sets were the sets they'd release in the Summer and they held reprints, allowing new players to catch up on cards from sets they'd missed, giving WotC a chance to keep a steady supply of Giant Spiders in the format. 

They always sold like crap. 

As the game evolved, WotC used core sets to add in new art-so they wouldn't have to pay the extremely high royalties to older artists-and as a way to add older cards to the format that could help control the environment. Think: a place to add in sideboard cards that could act as safety valves in case they made, say, a set with impossibly powerful artifacts, well the core set could have 'destroy all artifact' cards to help keep things in check*.

*I never saw evidence of this--that's just what WotC said they were doing.

Then I believe in 2010, they started putting new cards in the core sets: hey, something for the older players too! 

They still sold like crap. Even though many cards were amazing, it just wasn't enough: the core sets rarely got the kind of attention others got, and the player base felt it. So they were discontinued. But: WotC still has a problem. How do we create an on ramp for new players?

Foundations seems to be their latest stab at that. And don't get me wrong, it looks like a proper Magic set-well done and with a Jumpstart supplemental set? I've always liked Jumpstart formats, and this one also looks like a banger. 

I'm just here to tell you that this isn't new. If Foundations sets are where they put more Magic product (as opposed to Universes Beyond stuff) then cool! Happy to see that. 

Because I don't think there's anything wrong with a core set. I wish they'd used those sets to reprint valuable, necessary game pieces (I'm almost exclusively thinking of lands here. Manabases should be cheap.). I am glad to see that they're using them to fill out the lore with characters and places from Magic's many worlds. I don't even object to the Fishing Pole card! Sure, it's bland but it's Magic bland.

Heck, it even might have a few cards bad enough to add to my Garbage cube! Looking at you, Chandra.

Inevitable

Well, the 2025 lineup for Magic was released and...boy is it a lot of shit I don't care about. 

First; there are only three Magic sets. The rest are Universes Beyond sets. Universes Beyond was always something I was happy to let other people enjoy but they weren't for me. Aside from the occasional remarkably powerful cards (you know what I'm talking about) I felt happy to ignore them.

Well, starting April next year, all Universes Beyond sets will be Standard legal so...that is six sets a year that they are hoping we'll hook into. SIX. 

That is just too goddamn much for me. Magic is my hobby, not my personality and it already takes up a huge chunk of my brain. 

I get the reasoning; UB sets bring in a bunch of new players-and then the only sixty-card formats they can play with their shiny new cards is Modern, where they will be buttstomped by players who have been playing Modern for years. 

Standard is more newbie-friendly. More players buying those cards for that format may help de-centralize the Commander format which...has gotten far too much weight. In my opinion.

I get the reasoning: WotC has literal decades of designing cards for the lower power environment that in Standard, and making cards for Modern power levels and getting people to care about those is far more challenging. 

But I also don't like what this does to the game. 

From a story perspective; All of the work done to build up a distinct world--like the worlds being borrowed for UB--gets diminished. But it isn't just the story, the IP at large gets watered down. At what point does Magic cease to be a distinct game and become just a rulebook that you can fold anything you want into? Monopoly skins as Magic product.

How is that special? 

From a consumer perspective; For me this is just such a naked money grab that it is difficult for me to believe that people with the game's best interest at heart is there.     

Which dampens my enthusiasm for all of the product. And OK, I'm not the audience for some of that product but I am in the audience for most of it! Or I was. 

Now...well, I guess I'm the audience for about half. 

You Can Check It Out

 A whole lot of cards have been through the gambit. Screaming Nemesis, Graveyard Trespasser, Tainted Adversary, and Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury were among the many cards I swapped in. 

A lot of these have felt suboptimal or just not quite doing what I hoped. Others were clearly awesome, or should definitely find a way into the sideboard, like Graveyard Trespasser. 

But one problem I stumbled into often was that I would need to reuse my cards. Scrapshooter has done some excellent work-but I find that I need to use the ability a second time. Running Cavern Harpy is fine but the restriction of only getting a Black or Blue creature was limiting. 

Stonecloaker has been my current solution to this (and was also why I was testing Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury).

I still need to do some work but I thought this might be a good time to check into the manabase, running it through the Deckstats algo. That's when I discovered I had another problem: The online version I've been running has Abrupt Decay, but the paper one does not. That's a pretty massive deal, since Decay solves so many problems that Aluren opens the door to. 

So now I have to look a little deeper, and that's before I look at the manabase!

Going to be an interesting one--if I can get the game reps in.

Don't Provoke

Here was the first draft:

 4 Birds of Paradise
2 Sylvan Caryatid
1 Scrapshooter
1 Intrepid Adversary
1 Primal Adversary
1 Spectral Adversary
1 Prowling Serpopard
2 Shakedown Heavy
1 Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath\
2 Cavern Harpy
1 Aether Channeler
1 Leovold, Emissary of Trest
1 Imperial Recruiter
1 Niambi, Esteemed Speaker|
1 Satoru, the Infiltrator
1 Garruk's Harbinger

1 Sterling Grove
4 Aluren

4 Eladamri's Call
3 Abrupt Decay

4 City of Brass
1 Windswept Heath
2 Wooded Foothills
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Bayou
3 Savannah
3 Reflecting Pool
3 Thran Quarry
4 Gemstone Mine

4 Ponder

My first impressions; Primal Adversary isn't right here, in a deck where the mana is already fungible. I am not sure about the Sylvan Caryatids; I like that they are hexproof but I don't like the defender quality. Nightshade Dryad is on deck. Imperial Recruiter is coming out for Endurance. 

I know I just said I didn't like one-shot combo decks, but I feel like there's enough range that having an out isn't a bad thing. A way to "just win" does matter, especially since I'm playing a slower version of the deck. So some adjustments still to be made.