The Gaming Den

I mostly listen to media analysis stuff, notably the Not A Cast Podcast and We've got Ward.

How about the Polymorph subschool spells they started printing in the PHB II? Those seemed relatively balanced.

Also the 2nd edition Polymorphs are just better balanced spells How so? It's been 20 years since I played 2nd edition and games seldom got high enough level to use them. It's not tussock is just being dumb as usual. In 2e polymorph other randomly kills people due to the system shock rules so you ca...

Do they give an etymology to the term "Green Sun Princes"? It is a decent enough name for villains. I recall that the various evil primordials were a huge disappointment, being malevolent dragons and pixies and shit rather than elder things (I liked the robot primordial; the Alchemical bo...

No, we get that part. What I don't get is what is the end goal of this exercise. Are we still trying to be Magic but slightly different? Then why change names. If we are changing names why even be Magic at that point? There isn't a particular end goal, it's just a thought experiment I thought was i...

When you say 'it's like Magic, but different', every element is called into question. Think of it like Pathfinder - it's like 3.5 but different. You can't actually assume something works like it did in 3.5 - if you want to be correct you actually have to check every bloody thing. Classes, spells, f...

It's true that once you've instituted a new color pie with new symbols nothing stops you from making other sweeping changes. There is a good reason not to do that to start with, which is to retain a shared context. The more of the rules and assumptions that are retained the easier it is for new prop...

Honestly I'm willing to tap out on the cyclers thing, but the redone color pie isn't meaningless. When effects were divided in the original color pie the card advantage, tempo, ect were not understood and thus for the first 10 years balance between colors was fucked. To a certain degree it was never...

If you want to make the number of non-games near zero that's a thing you could do. You could make everyone create four separate 20-card decks and choose which one they draw from whenever they draw a card. You could make any card playable as a resource card by playing it face down. You could have th...

The ideal number of "non-games" is zero, arguably this is impossible but in general decision that make them less likely are good decisions. Basically the idea is to make landcycling an evergreen mechanic and print cards with the effect that people would actually want to play. Something lik...

I think you're vastly underestimating what Relic and Advice are capable of, and you're reading Paired Lives wrong. Guardian Project draws you a card any time you play a unique creature. Paired Lives tutors for a different creature every time you play any creature and puts that creature right onto th...

The misses on Kaladesh were such a black eye that they ended up creating a whole team of former elite tournament players to destructively test new sets going forward. I thought they already did that after Urza block? Anyway it is a little fruitless just to argue in spherical frictionless vacuum, it...

Now your attempt at current examples is just full of complete fucking fail. Wilderness Reclamation fit into exactly one top deck, and it's one that already existed and it's called Nexus Turbofog and it has a no-shit winrate of over 75% when the field isn't prepared for it and a winrate of about 40%...

And yes, I have read up on the period you keep wanking to. There's a Throwback Gauntlet that lists Nine Decks from that two year period. All I can say is: "Meh." We could make a bigger and deeper gauntlet from major Tier 1 Decks from February of 2019 than WotC managed to highlight from th...

Question, did you play magic during mid 00's? Because I've been gesturing in the direction of original Ravnica Block and I feel like that's falling on deaf ears. There were a fair number of weird synergy cards like I'm proposing and that format if rembered fondly as one of the most diverse of all ti...

There's an unstated assumption here that all synergy decks (and indeed all synergictic cards) can only be hyper linear. Essentially you model for synergy is "the tribal deck" where your deck an elf deck and you play elves and elf accessories. That's not how synergy decks have worked for th...

And it's always going to be like that. The "value" decks are always going to have a larger card pool to seriously consider than the "synergy" decks. This is obviously and definitionally the case. You are mathematically provedly wrong. And also historically experientially demonst...

But let's be fucking real for a moment: the entire decision tree of everything to put into or not put into your Red Deck Wins list is not as deep as the question of which 4-drops to include or exclude in a Golgari list. It just fucking isn't. It's not even particularly close. I think you've missed ...

That story is only possible because Midrange decks aren't just a pile of the best cards in their colors. They are actually very interesting and there's a lot going on. The choices of cards that provide value and the cards that interact and the cards that threaten are very impactful. And the fact th...

From my perspective as long as the play is very different the other stuff is basically just details. Would you still find the white deck design interesting if it wasn't rare? "What should general play look like?" is a much different question than "What decks delightfully tickled the ...

Calling Grixis Energy an "artless" deck is basically insane. Not only did it have a lot more meaningful deck building decisions than White Weenie, it had a lot more meaningful play decisions. You're well within your rights to enjoy playing White Weenie more than Grixis Energy, but it's ju...

All of these kinds of changes would lead to very different deck construction. If you just make Magic Cards but the 1, 2, and 3 cost spells are really powerful - then we pretty much know what's going to happen. See this is where we are likely at odds. I'd argue that pushing high cost cards is what h...

If you want people to play cards that cost 5+ mana that are merely big threats that put a clock on the opponent, you're going to have to fundamentally change how the game works. Perhaps freespawn bullshit blockers to clog up the battlefield for the first few turns like in Artifact, or have escalati...

Spectral Force can only attack once if it doesn't meet conditions or combo with other cards. Your Timeworn Golem attacks 3 times and is sufficient to kill your opponent by itself . Only two times actually. It comes into play tapped and only untaps itself twice. Also they've seriously printed a 5 ma...

Regardless, you seem to be trying to push everything, which is likely going to go the Yugioh route sooner rather than later. The basic logic of short curves is that 1 power on turn 1, 2 power on turn 2, 3 power on turn 3 and 4 power on turn 4 is enough to kill with cards to spare on turn 5 without ...