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.

AC/DC

 High Voltage is the newest format in Marvel Snap and this one is great. 

If you haven't heard about it yet, here's an overview in written form but the quick and dirty is; 

Games are only three rounds, and you get increasing amounts of energy each round.

Now, there were some red flags for me before I started playing High Voltage; a new card was part of the winnings and there was a new currency (volts) to earn. I was worried that this would turn into a massive grind, the way Deadpool's Diner did. 

I am very pleased to let you know that High Voltage is a TON of fun (again).

The games are very fast. Losing doesn't incur a penalty; you get volts if you win, and you get volts if you fulfill bounties. That's it-losing doesn't mean you lose volts. Playing at a steady rate will eventually rank you up to the rewards. There's zero drawback to play that I can tell and because the games are risk free, here's a great chance for players to just mess around. 

On top of that, if you lose, you just bounce to the next one. Lingering isn't the point.

So maybe y'all can stop with that Odin/Mystique/Gambit/Wong nonsense. 

Wargaming

This is an absolutely fascinating video that a friend sent me on the games that governments are using to iterate on warfare. 

I can't say it's the most soothing video. But it is engaging and thought provoking. 

I think it's particularly important to talk about now, while the influence of gamers can be felt, while boardgames are possibly their most popular state ever in the popular culture. As with any media, being aware of how we might be manipulated helps us determine the messages that we are being sent-and the appropriateness of them. Who is behind these ideas? Deciding how serious gaming can be used-as the tool that it has clearly become-feels important.

At the very least, we should give these ideas some attention.

Free Pizza:: Venom Season

 

Sometimes, you gotta play dirty.

Hela is certainly making a run for 'best deck in the format' right now so to hell with it, let's play. 

Why? Because I couldn't find anything interesting or fun to do. That's a drag but when that's a drag, fuck it, let's just win.

My little note of cleverness was to sub out Moon Knight (which was getting me more often than it should) with Sword Master and add in Spider-Woman as a target specifically for it. I'm sure someone else did that--or maybe I read someone else doing it. Either way; the deck carried me well from low 80's into the 90th rank.

Now I'm fucking around and the meta seems very screwy but not in a fun way. We'll see what we see in the coming weeks. 

Break it down

I cut nearly 1/3 of this deck-19 cards- right off the bat. 

Because this was a Cataclysm deck, at the end of the day. But times have changed a LOT. What good are Battlemages or Volvers when you can cast Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath?

Cataclysm means I need to be able to wreck someone after I cast that, but creature spells have become so cheap and so powerful Cataclysm doesn't have the impact it did in Weapon of Choice.

Options: Trostani, Three Whispers, Shakedown Heavy, Prowling Serpopard, the Adversary cycle from Midnight Hunt, Anafenza the Foremost, Garruk's Harbinger, Scrapshooter, and Laughing Jasper Flint. 

And these are all really interesting cards, but I have to admit that I'm definitely mired in the stylings of a very old deck. 

Yes, I know there are combo finishers in certain versions of Aluren; Acererak the Archlich is a one card finisher and using Cavern Harpy + Parasitic Strix can do it too. But I never really liked those. 

The latter because it represents an easy way out. I'm not saying I shouldn't have the combo in there as one-ofs. Sometimes you just need to win. But I don't like it, because it doesn't feel like any real setup was done, no work. Aluren is out: Do you have the combo? Then the game is over. 

I realize it's ego, but winning that way doesn't feel worthy of my efforts. 

Acererak is even worse: I hate what dungeons did to Magic and don't like this method either. 

So why even run the deck at all, right? 

Because fuck it, that's why. 

Fortunately, there are some good choices for me that I hadn't thought of--and I found those by doing some research at Moxfield.

Nah.

The Kickstarter for a new game from Wise Wizard has gone up and the base concept seems neat. I like the notion of laying tiles, and building a deck from them...then I got to the art section and noped right out.

Because it doesn't matter that they are trying to justify AI "used as an artist tool, NOT an artist replacement". By default, what AI does right now is plagiarism. Any work made with AI is scraping the work made by actual people and spitting it out without crediting them. 

And hey, I've seen some neat stuff that people have done using AI prompts. But they weren't making money from it, nor were they trying to pass it off as their own. That isn't what WW is doing here. It's even worse-it's plagiarizing other artists and THEN running it through their artist to make the claim that they are paying an artist!

So no.

It Was Only A Matter Of Time

Anyone who has a sense of the history of things would tell you that Commander being a format that was shepherded by the community was never going to last. At the very least, Hasbro was never going to allow the most popular format to be managed by people who (ostensibly) had the players' best interests at the foremost, instead of the company's. Sooner or later, the corporation was going to take it away from the players.

And now it is done. It happened for the most epically shitty reasons I can think of-the "community" freaking out to the point of sending threats to the Rules Committee. That was never OK, it isn't OK and I don't want people who react like that to be part of my game. 

I also think this bodes ill for the format at large. WotC had a shield from their design mistakes by having the community police the format, and the existence of the Rules Committee meant that the community had a real voice in how that format played out. That's all gone now and I don't think things are going to be the same.

It'll start off slow, of course. These things always do. But eventually Commander will change in ways that are going to surprise the community and I don't think it'll be in a good way. However, if it means that the people making decisions are shielded from the absolute bullshit of community members who think death threats are a good thing regarding a card game then fine. 

Y'all made your bed. Sleep in it.