i haven’t played magic the gathering in ages but i still follow it for some reason. if you’re not checked in with the game, here’s what’s been going on in recent years: it’s been enshittifying. i’m fascinated by when gacha games (which this essentially is) start putting the screws to players. here are some of the ways it’s gone down
- the game used to have rigorous processes for managing balance, processes which sometimes failed spectacularly, but held up most of the time. empirically, that’s pretty much gone. almost all of the cards that have ever been banned in the standard format have come from the last several years, and they printed a mechanic so broken that they errata’d it to cost more. to be clear, this is a game that is played with physical cards that the text can’t be changed on. the situation was so dire that they just said “ok everyone should know, ignore the text on the cards, they are too broken the way we made them.”
- they thought a bit about how the majority of their playerbase wasn’t playing the somewhat competitive 1 vs 1 style the game was originally designed for. instead, most people play several person free for all formats, in particular these days a format called commander. so they’ve been absolutely shredding these people’s wallets and ruining their games by designing rare cards specifically to end up being powerful in commander. recently they printed a commander card so busted in various formats that the former friend of mine who designed it ended up falling on his sword, writing an extremely apologetic essay about how he personally fucked up by letting it slip through.
- there’s a whole much larger drama around the commander format that i haven’t got the energy to go into here. the most tolerable summary is that they printed a card so ridiculous that the format dissolved and was remade under a wave of death threats when it was banned. i know that doesn’t make sense, just trust me, or write your own summary of it.
- they found out that the more cards they come out with, the more cards they sell, so they’ve just been cranking out designs at greater and greater volume. at any given time there is a massive chunk of cards that are about to hit the shelves, and which they’re ‘teasing’ and fomoing players about. the game is about 30 years old and they’ve been hitting a pace of printing something like 10% to 15% of all cards ever, every year.
- every once in a while they release joke sets, with weird or silly mechanics like having to yell things or tearing up cards. generally, these cards are not allowed in semi competitive play. well, they thought the most recent one would sell better if that wasn’t the case, so they marked as many of these cards as they could as being tournament legal (but to keep the outcry tamped down, not in their standard format). one of these cards in particular, a goblin that makes you put stickers on things, was so miserable to have in tournament play that they ended up backtracking and banning all the joke cards.
- they found out they could make a big chunk of money by ditching their own setting and making cards for licensed IPs. they’ve been printing ever increasing numbers of cards themed around everything from the walking dead to fortnite to marvel to street fighter to spongebob, which sell like hotcakes. people who are invested in the style and theme of magic the gathering aren’t super pleased. again, to placate the haters, these cards are not allowed in the standard competitive format, giving people who want to do wizard shit a refuge.
the last bullet point brings us to today: just kidding, frog boiled, you will now have captain america and kefka fighting each other at your table whether you like it or not. reactions are not entirely positive:
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gc3w97/universes_beyond_will_enter_through_standard/
something that’s quite interesting to me is how few people i’ve seen bootlick for wizards of the coast in recent years. i’ve looked at reactions to other games enshittifying and always saw lots of defenders of the company in charge, with four lines of attack being most common:
- they have to put bread on the table
- whew i know this seems bad but i would be ok with it if they just gave us 2% more crumbs. it’s sooooo close to the right level of abuse
- stop being poor
- bro, just vote with your dollar bro
i’ve been seeing very little of that in regards to mtg. some people have denied the pot was getting warmer, but mostly, people have just turned into haters. not sure why; perhaps it has to do with the small scale social aspect of magic. if you’re playing marvel snap and having the blood drained out of your neck, you don’t really have a group of specific people you’re experiencing that in concert with; with mtg you do. it could be the strength of small scale personal ties that both keeps people invested in this game, and makes people angry at how that investment is being treated
unfortunately i don’t see any reason that this anger is likely to put a stop to things. after all, arch-enshittifier facebook is still making ultrabucks, despite having destroyed its reputation on every possible level and despite constantly enraging its users. you can do horrible things to people and just coast! it works!
EDIT: this is election relevant btw https://awful.systems/comment/5086076
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40+ year old unpopular opinion: MTG has always been pay to win.
I was too poor to dump money into the game as a kid and an adult.
Whatever critcisisms about “enshittification” this game was born to enshittify based on being pay to win.
Yeah that was my read of the game from my first exposure to it. “You have to buy cards sight-unseen hoping to get good ones? That’s a scam.”
It’s like they looked at Dungeons and Dragons product churn and thought “No, that’s not shitty enough”
Yeah my thought always was if it was a real game they would allow home printed copies.
If you want specific cards, buy those cards.
Nobody is forcing you to buy packs. Only buy those if you want the thrill of mystery.
i mean i describe it as a gacha game in the third sentence, i’m pretty clear about that. mtg has always been exploitative, they’re just taking it to another level now
I was at Gamestop and saw their CCG wall.
Thirty dollars for a single pack of cardboard.
They’re out of their damn minds.
(Yes, I know that’s the collectors edition nonsense and not representative of the actual pricing and blah blah blah blah, but the fact it exists at all…)
Thirty dollars for a single pack of cardboard.
Old pack? Or collector booster?
Collectors booster, but still: it’s a stupid amount of money for 15 pieces of cardboard.
Wait until you hear about the secondary card market.
Well yes, and I don’t, in any way, own any cards worth more than $5000.
Or uh, maybe have a MTG collection that’s probably worth nearly as much as my house.
Nope.
Not me.
okay I’m curious, is that worth in sunk cost (dollars spent), or some ostensible secondary market valuation?
I stopped playing way back during the Urza block. You needed a $500 deck to be competitive in 1999. I can’t imagine what it costs these days.
Yeah I started playing magic in 94ish? That was my thought as well.
I have never up voted something purely on reaction to the title, but I knew what this was going to be as soon as I saw it.
Mtg is dead to me now. I don’t give a fuck about secret lair, I hate playing commander, and I absolutely despise these off-theme universes beyond sets.
I haven’t bought any cards in ages because I just don’t feel like collecting anymore. Nevertheless, the game continues on without me. I am no longer the target demographic, and it sucks, because magic was special.
Reading news like this about MTG makes me feel so torn.
On the one hand it’s juicy, like reading those AITA threads on Reddit.
On the other this is a game that was a big part of my childhood and early adulthood, and it makes me sad that MTG has not been that game for a very long time.
While magic has always been exploitative, this feels like ‘there is just too much’. Not sure if that makes sense. But more and more I see these franchises bloat and bloat and bloat with more and more content. And it just shatters any desire I have to even get back into it. And this isn’t just a problem with magic, it is a problem with all these IPs. It feels very late stage superhero comics, where every character had such a long incomprehensive background that it was impossible to follow (and also a lot of 'to understand this storyline completely, you need to also buy a few random comics from a different story line. What do you mean to understand the last star wars movie I need to have played fortnite?).
And you know when the IP’s fill up too much and the sales finally slump they will just kill half the content anyway, to refill it with more slop later (AI is going to be grand for this), or rebrand it, marvel ultimates style (but wait, it is all part of a universe, so it is all true. Eurgh). At least star wars killed their expanded universe so these old storylines no longer intersect (ow wait, they are selectively bringing stuff back of course. But wait, if new Thrawn has not done what old Thrawn has done, how is he cool? He didn’t even throw rocks at people, this is all a scam!)
And don’t take me as some sort of design minimalist btw, I do at times like kitchen sink designs (like nethack/slash’em for example). But this eternal milking and adding more and more to IPs is just too much. And it isn’t just the world building, it is also nothing is just one thing anymore. Everything has the book(*)/videogame/movie/boardgame/bathsoap/mouthwash tiein. Anyway bit of a rant sorry.
*: you know the strange character that was underdeveloped in Rebel Moon (No not that one. The other one)? Well it is worked out better in Rebel Moon the directors cut. You saw that and it actually made the plot worse because of a glaring plot hole? Well that is explained in the book. AAAA
Edit: and it isn’t just IPs who go for more and more. Presenting the Chick-Fil-A streaming/entertainment app (amazing how in a way the USA has seen the pillarisation problem of the past Netherlands and thought, we are going to do that but with a lot of capitalism added on top).
E2: More examples comparing somewhat regular outputs with ever expanding IP slops. All of HP Lovecrafts fiction work basically fits into 3 books. Look at the size of the mythos that spawned. But also compared the impressive output of somebody like Charles Stross, he has written about ~45 books (from a quick count of wikipedia, not counting collections/reprints). Compare that to Warhammer 40k’s Horus Heresy, this book series (it is also 2 board games, and a card game) is 64 books long. With the last story, being written over 10 books (and 3 of those 10 are basically a trilogy). That is an insane amount of books, and it is only about a small part of the whole universe. People have to be unemployed to keep up with this kind of shit.
the Chick-Fil-A streaming/entertainment app
the worst chicken place[*] has a fucking streaming app? of course it fucking does, chick-fil-a can’t fuck off
[*] if anyone replies to this to kneejerk slobber over chick-fil-a’s nasty fucking chicken: why. which part of it is good. it’s not the sauces or the brine or the breading and it’s definitely not some combination of all those things. why the fuck is this garbage fried chicken popular when literally every other choice is better. please for the love of fuck eat some Church’s or try a local place, you’ll discover the idea of flavor and it’ll astound you
No idea about the chicken as im not american. Just know they are openly bigots or at least celebrated by them. So this felt like a shitty attempt to create a culture war broad brand of crap. Only dress yourself in chickafil crap to show you are not lgbt and watch the unfunny anti lgbt cartoons etc.
Lol at you starting the fast food discussion btw.
asking why chick-fil-a’s bland-ass chicken is good is a better insomnia cure than counting sheep
Ayo brother I am with you, Chick-fil-A is pretty bottom tier chicken. It’s like what white people who think ketchup is spicy think of when they think of good fried chicken.
they are pretty good as far as fast food chicken goes. Their chicken sandwiches are well above most places. Sure i could get better at a restaurant but i don’t always have time to do that as those require a decent chunk of time.
The streaming app is fuckin stupid though.
who the fuck said anything about a restaurant? go eat better fast food
istg I don’t think I’ll ever truly grok US corporate stans
listen I’m sure chicken has whatever this “flavor” thing is when you catch it, kill it, and fry it yourself, but until then I’m going with the only fast food chicken ever invented: Bigotry Filet
And what would you recommend for supposedly better fast food chicken? Certainly not McDonald’s certainly not Burger King definitely not KFC’s overcooked dry as fuck chicken. Maybe sonic? I don’t know if they even have chicken I haven’t looked
Raising Cane’s Chicken is so good 🤤
fuck yeah Cane’s!
literally the one I recommended in my post?
why was your list of chicken places so bad by the way?
You didn’t recommend anywhere in particular you just made a vague list of try anything else. But there aren’t really that many other options in a lot of places. As another commenter has pointed out. I think the closest thing I have is probably Ezell’s Famous Chicken but they mostly focus on full pieces of fried chicken rather than chicken sandwiches and while they are better than Chick-fil-A they take significantly longer I wouldn’t really classify them as fast food they sit somewhere between fast food and a restaurant. Let’s call it fast-ish food with my average wait being 15-20min. Definitely somewhere I will go when I have the time. And for the most part I just cook food at home and don’t even really eat fast food but there are times when I’m busy, tired, or in the middle of something and need food really quick. And if I’m wanting some chicken unfortunately Chick-fil-A is my best option if I need it fast
Spending this many words to say “it’s too hard to feed myself anything but basic-ass pickle chicken” is just sad.
misreading my own rant back to me was a real weird move, but you’re already searching for good chicken in a Burger King so I think we’ve established how one might be tricked into thinking chick-fil-a’s good
Because those are your only options beyond bigotry chikin in most places. If you live somewhere with other dedicated fried chicken options, you’re aleady significantly ahead.
it’s really weird to get excited on the internet about the desperation option to be honest
but also I’d still take KFC over chick-fil-a on flavor and vibes alone
@wizardbeard @self you need to come to London https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFmxd9L1btyXig-2Dp9XnA
when I was in college one of my old high school buddies who kinda fell off the deep end after graduation got really into magic. he would spend most of his pay every week on magic cards and would come to the college campus and hang out at the cafeteria to play magic with a few students. it was seriously disturbing to watch because he was always kind of an outcast and came from a VERY weird family and he got sucked in about as hard as any drug addict.
monkey brain likes to see number go up really hard. gambling, crypto, stock trading, even if you give people meaningless, worthless number like reddit karma or whatever game points you can imagine they’ll still try to make it go up. it is possible to use it for good, but it’s mostly not used so
Cardboard crack. That’s what we always called it as kids. To be clear we all played, and joked about being “that” into it, but yeah…there’s whales for every game, and plenty of them don’t actually have the money to be that into it.
It’s the imbalance of power. No one wants to be the gatekeeper at the local game store telling the 12 year old kid “Sorry, you can’t play your Spongebob deck here tonight”, whereas as the ones printing the cards, they can be gatekeepers of “Sorry, you can’t play your deck without the One Ring here tonight” off of the basis of “normal” power creep.
The writing has been on the wall since they reprinted Alpha as non playable $250 packs.
That was when i stopped playing, i knew it was all downhill from there and looking back i was correct
there’s a whole much larger drama around the commander format that i haven’t got the energy to go into here. the most tolerable summary is that they printed a card so ridiculous that the format dissolved and was remade under a wave of death threats when it was banned. i know that doesn’t make sense, just trust me, or write your own summary of it.
now i really wanna know
also, thinking about it, this is shockingly on topic for tech takes
Right, so this is fucking wild and it turns out a shocking number of Magic players are fucking awful.
Back in the late 90s, judges needed a way to pass the time for hours while they waited on calls so they came up with a multiplayer format called Elder Dragon Highlander(EDH). The idea was that you would have a “Commander” which had to be one of the 5 Elder Dragons, and all the cards in your deck had to match the colors of your commander.
The format stayed that way for about a decade, slowly collecting new players before it was decided that you could run any legendary creature as your commander. During that period they needed a way to control cards that were too powerful and formed a body to manage a banlist. This body was the Rules Committee(RC), which was a group of volunteers that kept tabs on the format.
Then the format started to gain some traction and around 2011 Wizards got involved and released the first batch of product made explicitly for the format, it was a big success and sold well enough to have Wizards make a followup product in 2013.
Somewhere around this period, the Rules Committee started to get into closer talks with Wizards about future products and getting the format onto Magic Online which led to them changing the banlist for the first time entirely removing a batch of cards that were Banned as your commander, but legal in the other 99, to just outright banned. This made a lot of people mad, but ultimately it was a good decision.
Wizards went on to print a new commander product every year after this and it went on to surpass both standard and limited as the most popular format. Wizards then started to cater to the format specifically in sets, printing more and more cards that were really powerful in a multiplayer format, but middling power in 1v1.
With the huge influx of players, the Rules Committee created a new body called the Commander Advisory Group, which consisted of some extra people that could offer their opinions on any changes the RC was going to make
This came to a head with the release of Commander Legends and a card called “Jeweled Lotus”. Jeweled Lotus was a card that was essentially a direct copy of Black Lotus(The rarest, most powerful, most expensive magic card) but it only works in Commander(outside of some specific corner cases). This card was the rarest in the set, but fit into literally every deck in the format. unsurprisingly, the card retailed for ~$100 USD and if you had one your deck was just more optimal than any of the players that didn’t.
The format stayed pretty static at this point for a few years, but last month they issued a new batch of bans, the 2 most contentious were Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt(another very powerful, very expensive card that has been legal since the start of the format). This caused an alarming number of people to send real actual death threats to the Rules Committee and the Commander Advisory Group. The people that managed the commander format were all volunteers and they didn’t have the resources or the desire to deal with that, so they quite understandably relinquished control of the format to Wizards.
The problem with this change is that the RC did not have a profit-motive to ensure that the most recent product stayed legal so that it can sell packs. This is not true of Wizards, and has been shown to be a known problem with The One Ring in Modern(a whole separate debacle that I won’t get into here).
Wizards has also announced a new “power-level” system to help players figure out if the deck they’re playing is a good fit for the rest of the table (which, to be fair, has always been a problem with the format) but they system they have hinted towards has a lot of problems and could lead to some angle shooting from assholes to take advantage of newer players.
Right now, Commander is in some rough waters, and a lot of people don’t have faith in Wizards to properly police it with the goals of making it fun rather than just profitable.
It’s really what it sounds like: the format rules were, mostly, defined by a group of players on a shockingly named rules committee.
They banned some cards, and some of the fedora-wearing stinkbears that play MTG threw a fit, and sent an absolute flood of shit to them, including piles of death threats.
The rules committee decided the $0 they’re paid for doing this isn’t worth this bullshit, and then turned the governance over to WotC, effectively giving the fox the keys to the hen house and probably destroying the last remaining playable form of MTG because some assholes had their fee-fees hurt because they were no longer able to just bullshit steamroller everyone they played against.
TLDR: this is yet another example of why we cannot have nice things.
It does feel like this was textbook rot economy BS, right? Destroying an (I assume) profitable product in search of increased growth, no matter how unsustainable? I only ever picked it up properly through Arena, which definitely colors my experiences with it. The whole engine seems set up to only support 1v1 play rather than any of the fun play-with-your-friends formats that are really the lifeblood of most players. This is also the reason why StarCraft 2 never fully eclipsed Brood War, even among hardcore professional competitive types. But so many of the set design issues, mechanic failures, and balance issues have also impacted their preferred format (and the Arena main focus), Standard. Like, the Companion mechanic was the last attempt to try and convert Commander players into standard players, and then they gave up. There’s a half-baked 1v1 commander in Arena now (Brawl) which has never been fully supported the way Standard is even though they ostensibly use the same card pool.
While they’ve been fighting their most popular format for control of the game, their other big changes have been similarly half-baked attempts to bring in new outside players. I can’t speak to how well they actually worked, but I don’t know how much of the audience that was brought in by a 40k or Fallout tie-in are going to picking up the game and starting to actually play (or more importantly from WotC’s perspective, buy). I don’t imagine it’s a very large fraction, and it has diluted the MtG brand beyond recognition.
Wild shit, actually this is the only thing I wanted to know about MTG since I cashed out like ten years ago because I could break even on all MTG expenses.
In my time Scavenging Ooze was considered a gamebreaking EDH card. What was this one?
https://scryfall.com/card/mh3/193/nadu-winged-wisdom
apply shuko etc as needed
I stopped playing in the late '90s but my first take on that card is that 3 mana for a flying 3/4 is ridiculously OP. In my day 3 mana would get you a 1/3 with flying.
Serendib Efreet was a well-costed 3/4 flying for 3 and that’s how we liked it!
Wow in the command zone too
yeah it’s comical. again, i haven’t played in ages, but from my understanding the worst part is that the usual combos are not perfectly guaranteed, meaning everyone has to sit there watching you flip over the top card of your deck like 40+ times before finding out if you fizzled or not
Hasbro wants more money and they realized magic and DnD are the ticket
“good thing I’ve never been addicted to a trading card game”, I vocalize, as I chain myself to the radiator so I don’t bring up my favorite non-magic TCG in this thread too
it’s okay, I know how to defuse this
“it’s hearthstone, isn’t it?”
Is it Lorcana?
you’ll never trick me into talking about magic’s cooler brother
netrunner is super not exploitative though!! also god it’s just so very cool and well designed
It’s just sad that it’s not officially alive anymore. But last I checked Nissei did a great job.
yes!!! it’s awesome!!! and it’s also interesting to trace its development from Garfield’s original vision of a game with MtG’s same gacha mechanics (and hacking/bluffing and economics rather than combat) but which never reached a critical mass of popularity, to Fantasy Flight’s version with the gacha mechanics scrubbed proving you can do a worthwhile MtG-style game without scarcity, to the current community-run game that’s entirely free
…but the game being free isn’t stopping my brain, raised on the Pokémon TCG, from wanting to impulse buy a print copy of the latest couple expansion packs. weird how that works
and I’m the only one I know who plays it too so reasonably I should just play jinteki (online multiplayer, also community run, also free) but the urge to buy cards isn’t reasonable
The Cyberpunk 2020 supplement Rache Bartmoss’ Brainware Blowout featured rules on using Netrunner cards instead of the RPG’s existing system to simulate netrunning during game sessions.
also, I really need to grab this even though I don’t play Cyberpunk 2020, cause I’ve really wanted to adapt Netrunner into the decking mechanic for an RPG campaign
I was about to laugh about 2020 being cyberpunk, but come to think about it 2020 was the most cyberpunk year so far with everyone stuck inside doing everything on the internet.
if you live near rhode island hit me up to play haha
no such luck :( I wish my local TCG scene was cooler!
…but the game being free isn’t stopping my brain, raised on the Pokémon TCG, from wanting to impulse buy a print copy of the latest couple expansion packs. weird how that works
I mean the expansion packs are cool, and Fantasy Flight deserves to get that bag
Pfft. Real hoopy froods play Heroclix.
I do not play Heroclix but I bought some about 20 years ago.
Jesus christ 20 years? Huh. Also I didn’t notice but it was discontinued in 2008.
Heroclix is so last month. Heroscape on the other hand, has some legs.
Also I didn’t notice but it was discontinued in 2008.
Heroclix? It is still in production.
Doh! Should have read the full Wikipedia article.
As an alternative that does not require booster packs or such nonsense i can highly recommend Compile and the Vale of eternity. Both very good cardgames that capture different feelings of playing a deckbuilder.
Never cared for CCGs since they are by definition pay to win.
What are the names of the cards you are referencing? It’s hard to fully understand it sympathize without the specifics.
too many banned cards to list. the errata’d mechanic is companion. the busted commander card is nadu. the format dissolving card is jeweled lotus. the sticker card is a sort of nameless goblin sometimes referred to as “sticker goblin”
Ahh. Got it. thanks for the details!
It’s funny how much nicer the pokemon cards look - the foils and etc. - compared to MTG. The misprints and printing quality have also gone downhill.
