Thursday, November 13, 2014

Aaron Forsythe Interview

There's some really good things to glean from this interview with Aaron Forsythe. But what I don't get is statements like this, in regards to Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise:
Ten Copper: Of course, of course. So are they headed for a ban? Or are you going to unban cards that have similar effects?
Aaron: We are going to let our next batch of Modern Grand Prix play out with these cards in the format, and we’re going to let Legacy go for a while. We have our normal banned and restricted list change coming up prior to the Fate Reforged release, we’re gonna stick to that. To say we’re not looking at it would be — we are absolutely looking at what those cards are doing, they are definitely on our radar.
I don’t want to scare anyone in case we end up not doing anything, but I mean… Jeskai Ascendancy in Modern is a big deal. Dig Through Time in all of the Eternal formats is a big deal. Treasure Cruise in all of the older formats is a big deal. So yes, they kinda set off our alarm bells, but we’re going to get more data, we’re going to do our due diligence, we’re certainly not going to overreact to a tweet, or an article, or one single event or anything. We’re definitely not banning Khans of Tarkir! (a reference to a joke made earlier-ed.)
These are some of the more powerful cards we’ve introduced to those formats in a while.
Ten Copper: Did you suspect this would happen?
Aaron: We suspected it going in. We don’t put a lot of time and effort into testing those older formats, we just kinda let things… we’ll see what happens, and we have the banned list as a ‘catch-all’ for any problems that may arise. They’ve caught our attention, we’re going to see what happens, and use that data to make the best decision.

So you "suspected" that cheap card drawing effects would be extremely powerful? What kind of excuse is that, especially if you end up having to ban those cards?

Don't get me wrong: I don't think that printing Treasure Cruise or Dig Through Time was a horrible idea but there is no way that the Director of Magic's R&D doesn't know how powerful drawing cards is, nor the kind of impact that it can have on a format. Drawing cards has been a powerful thing since Ancestral Recall and a broken one since Necropotence.

The problem is that there isn't a counterbalancing analog to the power of drawing cards, or at least WotC hasn't made one available. So every time Wizards produces a card or uses a mechanic that allows players to draw cards for less mana than than they put into it, they know that it's going to produce a blue-dominated metagame which is what we have now, especially in Modern.

Magic doesn't need more blue dominated games. It needs ways to balance those out.

No comments:

Post a Comment