[OSSR]Magic: the Gathering: Ice Age

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Ug, Homelands. I remember having a deck mostly made of 4th ed, Homelands, Ice Age, and some 3rd and Fallen Empires and constantly getting my shit pushed in by everyone who had been playing longer than I had and had decks that would have cost me several hundred dollars to replicate at that time.

I believe I already told the story of when WotC told me to fuck off personally because I pointed out that they kept putting out shitty expansions and removing any card back that was worth a goddamn from print was kind of bogus to new players...

[GâtFromKI]

Well, if I have to have some Homelands cards in my deck, and I'm playing Blue anyway...I guess...

Memory lapse was good at the time, at least in casual play; if you play a slow control deck, it slows down your opponent during the first few turns more efficiently than a counterspell.

I can't think of any other useful Homeland card.

What I remember is the number of people who stopped playing at the time. At my school, there were a few people who began playing magic with Arabian nights and Antiquities, and many people began to play with Fallen Empire. So they had cards from 4th ed, Fallen Empire, Ice Age, and Homeland, and they were playing against Arabian Night and Antiquities decks: it was basically unplayable, and most of them stopped caring about MtG.

[RobbyPants]

What I remember is the number of people who stopped playing at the time. At my school, there were a few people who began playing magic with Arabian nights and Antiquities, and many people began to play with Fallen Empire. So they had cards from 4th ed, Fallen Empire, Ice Age, and Homeland, and they were playing against Arabian Night and Antiquities decks: it was basically unplayable, and most of them stopped caring about MtG.

My cousin and I both started during Fallen Empires. At that time, I didn't have a job, but he had a paper route. Also, about six month in, his older brother gave him all of his cards, which were pretty much all pre-FE.

From a card perspective, he could kick my ass every game. I only held my own because neither of us really knew what we were doing, so he wasn't leveraging his good cards as much as he could have. There was a time when we both thought Sand Silos (the only storage land we'd seen at that point) was broken because you could build up for a massive Fireball. Our games took so many turns to resolve. I'm sure the devs of cards like Time Bomb had players like us in mind.

[Username17]

You can also make a good case that Magic still doesn't have its shit together. Consider the following:



So there's this keyword "ally" which is all about the multi-color coalition that's fighting the colorless cthulhu monsters. And as you can see, it's supposed to have this color fixing thing, where the allies give you access to multiple colors and then reward you for using multiple colors. It even has some cards where the whole thing works really well, like this Skyrider Elf:



As you can see, any ally encampments or ally beastcallers you happen to have can be tapped for whatever weird mana your lands don't make and boost the Skyrider Elf. That's nicely done synergy and a nicely self-explanatory combo. Let's see how this works with, say, White cards:





Something's wrong here... All of those Ally cards lack the "ally" tag. Hell, they aren't even creatures when being cast, they don't get colored mana from the ally encampment and don't get any mana from the beastcaller. They all make allies. Hell, Gideon not only is called an "Ally" in his title, but thematically he's actually the leader of the multicolored ally faction. But none of them actually can be effectively paid for by the cards whose literal purpose is paying multicolored mana costs to bring allies into play.

The worst one is United Front. It literally is one ally per different color of mana you have, which sounds like exactly what you want a card whose purpose is to give you a mana of any color that can only be used to make allies. I mean, that's the entire point of that card. But they can't work together.

Now I know some knucklehead in R&D decided that putting tribal tags on non-creature cards would make things more complicated. I know that had to be it, because tribal tags on sorceries has been a thing in the past. It's even been a thing in Zendikar.



But if you've never been a tournament quality magic player and you aren't an actual computer, explaining why you can't use an Ally Encampment to pay a Red mana into United Front to put an extra 1/1 Ally token into play or pay the second White mana on "Gideon, Ally of Zendikar" is in fact fucking complicated. That makes no intuitive sense at all. You can't explain it "in world," nor can you explain it in terms of before and after game states. The only explanation is a dry crank through of the ugly internal workings of the game and its keyword interactions.

It's actually about as bad as back when Elven Riders weren't Elves.


Wasn't an Elf until 6th edition.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

Now I know some knucklehead in R&D decided that putting tribal tags on non-creature cards would make things more complicated. I know that had to be it, because tribal tags on sorceries has been a thing in the past.

They said basically that:

For those unaware what happened with tribal, let me explain. In Lorwyn block, we were doing a tribal theme and liked the idea of having noncreature cards have creature types so we could interact with them. In order to make it work, the Rules Manager at the time, Mark Gottlieb, made a new card type that allowed noncreature cards to have creature subtypes.

We quickly found we had a problem. If tribal existed, we wanted to make sure we tagged things, because we didn't want one Goblin-themed card to be a Goblin while another Goblin-themed card wasn't. This required us using it all over the place. The problem was, the vast majority of the time it didn't matter. For example, we tried using tribal cards in Innistrad, and 95% of the time it didn't matter—in a set with a strong tribal theme. That meant we were adding words to a lot of cards for very little gameplay improvement, so we decided the correct thing to do was stop using it.

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/ar ... 2015-11-16

Planeswalkers are a slightly different matter -- Planeswalkers don't get other types (e.g., Tezzeret is supposed to be an artifact) because they specifically don't want you to be able to use things like Lin Sivvi or Tinker to get out Planeswalkers.

[Ravengm]

Now I know some knucklehead in R&D decided that putting tribal tags on non-creature cards would make things more complicated. I know that had to be it, because tribal tags on sorceries has been a thing in the past. It's even been a thing in Zendikar.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it is. Check out this article and scroll down to Moan of the Unhallowed.

We playtested with tribal, and I kept getting the same note that it seldom seemed to matter. In the end, we made the call that it wasn't adding enough to the game play to offset its inclusion, which both made the cards wordier and caused more confusion.

[Username17]

Yeah. Basically the Magic team noticed that they have made a fucking shit tonne of cards that should have tags on them that will only matter in certain circumstances. That in fact their giant errata of all the creature cards back in 2007 left the job only half done and there are a lot more cards that still need the treatment.

And then they decided that fixing that problem entailed a lot of work and they didn't want to do it.

United Front not having the Ally tag on it in a set where making colored mana only for allies is a thing is fucking inexcusable.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

That's not exactly what they said -- they claim that their primary concern is that adding tribe tags to spells "made the cards wordier and caused more confusion."

But there is an example of what you're talking about: MaRo has said that if he had a time machine, he would make Instant a supertype, so our "Instant" cards would be "Instant Sorcery", but changing that without a time machine would be too much work.

[name_here]

I don't find the terminology in this case very confusing, but it is kind of a stupid outcome.

I can see R&D's point in general, but in that particular case those cards really do need to have the Ally tag, either as a tribal sorcery thing or by having the card just say "This card counts as an Ally Creature as well as a sorcery for the purpose of spending mana."

[CapnTthePirateG]

Has magic ever been explainable "in world"? Like if I discard Iona, Shield of Emeria, and then reanimate her, how does that work?

[Josh_Kablack]

Has magic ever been explainable "in world"?

No.

Fire elementals have no resistance to fireballs, a thicket basilisk's petrifying gaze slays a obsidianus golem, a force field doesn't reduce damage if you also block, neither the black lotus nor the black vice are black cards,, glasses of urza have an effect totally different than sunglasses of urza, and that's just from alpha.