I feel there are much better examples, but I wanted to stop thinking about it.

A relatable sentiment.

I admire the restraint it took to write calmly about a subject that must be pretty personal for Mark.

I think Mark is misunderstanding what “stop designing for Commander” means. His response here would be more appropriate if fans were saying “stop balancing for Commander” – which of course nobody is. I don’t know about anyone else, but speaking for myself, when I say “stop designing for Commander” I mean “stop printing undercosted legends with as many abilities as you can jam into a text box”. It is okay – preferable, even – if one card can’t do everything by itself.

I think Mark is probably right about playtesting, in that no amount of additional resources would be enough to guarantee they’d catch every mistake. But I still don’t love the “eh, what can you do” attitude. I keep thinking, maybe they could hire a consultant with experience in an industry where rigorous testing is the norm. There’s got to be room to improve their processes.

Yeah. Which is why they’ll never do it, I know…

I’m just saying if they’d banned it after the “card starts to dominate” stage they could have spared you and everyone else from the “try to play around them” stage, saving both money and heartache.

Of course, in my fantasy world, they would stop constantly pushing power level so much, and we’d all have to go through this whole cycle a lot less often.

Also, I can’t speak for everyone, but I caved and started playing decks with Sheoldred, and I’d still be delighted if that card were banned tomorrow. Admittedly I spent Arena wildcards on it rather than actual money. But the point I’m trying to make is, I’d rather have a fun Magic format than economic recompense. The purpose of spending the money in the first place is to have fun playing Magic. Making Magic affordable is a laudable goal (which they could pursue in numerous other ways, many of which they are currently ignoring), but if making it fun doesn’t come first, what’s the point?

I can forgive a lot of the mistakes they made here; we’re all only human and I’m not going to pretend I’ve never shipped code with a bug that I really ought to have caught. They probably should never change any text without playtesting (unless it’s to make a card strictly worse, and even then you need to be pretty sure about the “strictly”), but I’ll bet they’ve gotten away with that a lot more than we realize.

But I think the cardinal sin here, and the mistake I can’t really understand, is that they changed an ability and “how does this interact with zero-mana spells or abilities” wasn’t in their top three considerations. Like, Cephalid Breakfast is over 20 years old. That type of interaction is not new or obscure; you can’t not have it on your radar.

As is tradition, this B&R announcement begins by saying that they will be changing the frequency of B&R announcements.

And then there’s this:

It is worth noting that we don’t plan on changing the current Standard B&R philosophy, meaning we still only want one window per year, barring an emergency, where we consider taking action in Standard.

I’m not sure I get the concept of non-emergency bans. If a card needs to be banned, ban it immediately; if it doesn’t, don’t ban it at all. This once-a-year interval makes even less sense for Standard than for other formats, since a year is proportionally longer for Standard.

I understand that they want people to feel confident that their chosen deck won’t disappear at a moment’s notice, I just don’t think that’s worth the trade-off of making everyone put up with an unbalanced format for months.

Ninja of the Deep Hours and Sprout Swarm are two of my favorite cards ever; it’s like they made this video just for me. Great showmanship to boot.

As I said elsewhere, I’ll miss the channel lands but not much else. I spent the last few days of the old Standard playing some of my decks that I don’t think will survive rotation, but I’m looking forward to making some new ones. I’ve lucked into opening three Darkstar Augurs so far and I definitely have plans for them.

Farewell is incredibly powerful, but it hasn’t even been the white sweeper of choice for a while. I’ve been seeing Sunfall much more often. Wandering Emperor doesn’t have any analogue to take its place, though, so it’ll be interesting to see how its disappearance affects white control.

Overall… it’s nice to see broken cards rotate out, but they printed some new broken cards to replace them, so… meh? I’m already eagerly anticipating the day next year when Sheoldred and Atraxa will depart. But there will still be plenty of newer nonsense then…

My initial reaction to Play Boosters was “okay, whatever” and I guess I still feel that way. OTJ was a fun draft format (even though I didn’t care much for the Wild West setting). Was it better or worse than sets designed with the old rarity distribution? Hard to say.

My buying habits are that I’m F2P on Arena and I buy one box of each Standard set from my LGS, which sits in my basement until hopefully I’ll draft it with friends some day. Prices on Arena didn’t change. I noticed that the price of the booster box went up, but not by enough to put me off buying.

So overall, seems like I’m fine with it.

They call them “Beyond Boosters” because, unlike normal boosters, they’re not made from meat.

October 2023: “Having too many types of booster is hurting sales, so we’re consolidating them.”

July 2024: “Hey check out this new type of booster we came up with.”

I must have watched too many Pre-Prereleases, because I heard this whole article in Nelson Salahub’s voice as I was reading it.

If there’s more fiction to come then I retract some of my complaining. I was assuming this was all there would be.

A fairly sudden ending. Feels like there’s a lot more story to tell, and it just wasn’t in the budget. We’re really not going to see fox Jace? Not going to get any character development for Zoraline? Why didn’t Glarb have the presence of mind to grab the egg before fleeing, making the party have to track him down? What’s the scoop on Gev’s tail? And how come there are only 16 unique cards spoiled so far and we still didn’t see most of those characters or locations?

Yeah, I mean, I play Standard for a variety of reasons, but “avoiding Universes Beyond cards” is definitely one of them.

I wonder how different the answer could be if they’d asked the question in a different way.

I’d like Modern better if it didn’t have UB cards, but banning UB cards alone wouldn’t be enough to get me to start playing Modern. So am I interested in a UB-free Modern? No, but that’s not approval of the current state of affairs.

Really enjoying the writing in this one so far. Good descriptions, good use of language.

We have cards already for Mabel and Hugs. From the story we also know that Finneas is an expert archer, Zoraline is a cleric, and Helga is a minor mage. Not sure about Gev’s class yet but he’s some sort of performer: he “wielded a pair of fire maces, swinging and spinning them in a dizzying display of grace and finesse, their flames leaving trails in the twilight.”

There’s a decent argument that Shuko and anything else that can be activated an unlimited number of times should be banned, because this isn’t the first time a combo like this has come around. But I think this article does a good job making the case that Nadu is broken even apart from that. (That doesn’t mean Wizards won’t hide behind a Shuko ban anyway…)

I’ve been playing Magic long enough to remember when a 3/4 for 3 mana would need a pretty significant drawback to even be printable. So I’m still surprised when they come out with broken nonsense like Nadu, even though I shouldn’t be by now.

This Pro Tour had lopsided numbers and non-interactive games and just wasn’t much fun to watch. Wizards should consider it a disaster, but whether they will probably depends a lot on MH3 sales numbers.

Well, if he’s cheated so much in the past that he can’t get the benefit of the doubt from the judges now, he won’t get a ton of sympathy from me either.