OSSR: Magic: the Gathering : Fallen Empires

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Ancient History
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OSSR: Magic: the Gathering : Fallen Empires

Post by Ancient History »

OSSR: Magic the Gathering
Fallen Empires

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No.

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There we go.

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Yes, that's non-foiled wrapping, so if you really cared you could see some of the card names without opening them using bright lights and shit. But no one did.
AncientH:

Fallen Empires was the fifth expansion for Magic: the Gathering, and the first one that came out after I started playing the game around mid-1994. It was an important set in many respects, not necessarily because it introduced important mechanics (it largely didn't), or many classic cards (does anyone still remember Homarids?), but because it was probably the official start of proper world-building for Magic in a sense that hadn't been attempted before (yes, there was Antiquities, but that was sort of retroactively incorporated in Ice Age) - and, after the further debacle of Homelands it would serve M:tG well as a foundation for Ice Age

It was my first set. It was terrible. But I am nostalgic about it, because even Young Bobby remembers when game shops proliferated in every mall, and packs of Fallen Empires could be had for a buck or less. Heady days indeed, in an era when getting a free card in a comic book or magazine was a big deal.
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FrankT:

In 1994, Fallen Empires was an economic disaster for Wizards of the Coast. They produced more packs of Fallen Empires than any previous expansion, making it have very high supply. And by “high supply” we mean crazy high supply: Fallen Empires had a print run about 7 times that of the previous set (The Dark). But it wasn't just also had literally no “chase cards,” meaning that demand was very low.

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The Law of Supply and Demand actually just defines a price point where all commodities for sale would be sold. In reality, markets often don't clear.

High Supply combined with Low Demand caused the price to crash. Holdouts could sell a pack of Arabian Nights for big moneys, but the price of a Fallen Empires pack actually went down. The most powerful card in Arabian Nights is the Library of Alexandria, and a near mint copy sells for nearly four hundred dollars today. By contrast, the most powerful card in Fallen Empires is the Hymn to Tourach, and you can buy one for less than two dollars. This low value actually still couldn't reach the equilibrium and there are still unopened packs to this day.

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Whole boxes of them, still wrapped. If you care. Which you do not.

Now obviously Magic the Gathering survived this particular fiasco. The state of game design has improved a lot over the years, and future sets were more popular. Later sets were actually printed in higher numbers than Fallen Empires and still managed to sell through, because the game continued to become more popular. Hell, there are professional players and shit. That's weird in its own right, but back in 1994 Wizards of the Coast was a fringe company and they lost a lot of money on Fallen Empires.

I'm not actually sure how many sections we're going to do here, because a card set doesn't really have a beginning and an end. We're going to rant until we're done I guess. We'll try to talk about why Fallen Empires was like it was, and why that was bad. And also how the game's direction was changed for good and ill by the fact that Fallen Empires happened and also by the fact that it was poorly received.
AncientH:

Frank is stronger on the mechanics, so I'm mostly going to be playing Team Nostalgia on this one, and even I recognize that Fallen Empires was terrible. Although perhaps not as terrible as Homelands. But I'm also more sensitive to the story stuff than Frank, which is why he is much better at mechanics and playing Magic and I make Hare decks and write odd fanfic. Normally this would be a problem, but in this case it's actually a bonus because the creators of Fallen Empires weren't terribly good at mechanics either.

And when I say that, what I mean is that the creators weren't looking at concepts like "Tempo" or "card advantage" like you would today - these are emergent concepts of play which are very useful and make powerful decks and card strategies, but they weren't obvious in the early days of the hobby. No, the creators of Fallen Empires were thinking thematically, and once you grok that a lot of apparently stupid choices that make FE one of the weakest sets of all time make a lot more sense.

It's not just that the designers wanted to hit every card with a balance stick until it's 3rd edition equivalent looked pretty by comparison, it's that the designers really did think in terms of the game from a theme level - for example, the idea of summoning big monsters to attack your opponent with instead of little ones, or waiting three turns for counters to accumulate to X happens. They really did think that the games would play out for twenty-odd turns and that people should be rewarded for saving their money in the bank letting their counter accumulate.

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Release me

So when you see in Fallen Empires a lot of cards involving Elves, there is the strong impression that the designers really did expect you to build an Elf-themed deck, not necessarily a deck that used a clever combination of mechanics that only worked if the critters involved were elves. It's a quite natural reaction for many new players (like moi) to think that all these like-named cards should somehow work together and form a viable deck. This is not the case. Yes, you can do a Goblin deck these days, but you don't do a Goblin deck by sticking one or two copies of every card that has "Goblin" on it in a stack and declaring yourself a winner. I understand the appeal of that, but at the same time I also recognize that is fucking retarded, because it's not keywords that win games in Magic - it's the mechanics.

So this is part of what I mean when I say the game was built more thematically than mechanically - because it's obvious from the cards and how they do (and don't) interact that the designers were thinking along certain lines of play and deck construction but not others. Instinctively you can see what they were going for, trying to build up factions for players to gravitate to like they were Terrans, Protoss, or Zerg. But mechanically, those factions are largely empty of any real synergy and the basic "moral mechanics" of spore counters and charge counters and oh-my-dark-fucking-gods-how-many-counters-are-there just lead to a lot of painful accountancy with little real benefit. Like I said, a lot of play considerations like tempo and card advantage were clearly not under consideration here.

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So many counters. Remember when these things were only used for filling fucking flower vases and shit?
FrankT:

One of the core conceits of Magic the Gatheric is the wheel of hate.

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Different kind of hate.

There are five colors and each color has two colors that it is supposed to not get along with terribly well. Each color is supposed to have some spells to throw a spanner into the works of the colors that it doesn't like. Red hates White and Blue, Green hates Black and Blue, White hates Red and Black, Blue hates Green and Red, and Black hates everyone Green and White. All super duper symmetrical. The hate cards were generally things that you didn't put in your deck, because they only triggered if your opponent was playing the right color. So they introduced the concept of “sideboards,” where players could have some extra cards that they could optionally hot swap into their deck in game 2. This made the hate cards a lot more playable, since they wouldn't clutter your hand unless and until you already knew you had an appropriate opponent. That being said, the original hate cards were ridiculously powerful at times but incredibly blunt.

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Fucking seriously?

I mean, don't get me wrong, that card will end the game if played against a White deck. And it does literally nothing against a deck with no White. It's not subtle or interesting. It's not un-powerful, but it's a bad card and the guy who wrote it should feel bad. Today, when a hate card gets published, it's usually a bit more subtle than that.

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Much better.

That card has the same literal effect no matter who you are facing. It just happens that this card is very useful at stalling an early rush powered by small creatures and cheap burn spells. Like a tournament quality Red deck strategy happens to be. So people sideboard this card in against the Red Rush, but because it happens to perform well against the playstyle of the hated color. Rather than because it simply bluntly tells a player to spread cheeks if they happen to have brought a Red deck to the table. It's subtle, it's elegant, and I heartily approve.

Anyway, Fallen Empires did two things with the concept of Hate. The first was to make a new set of standard Hate cards which were terrible and I'll get to them in a bit. And the second was to make additional factions that hated each other within the colors. So there was a war within Red between Dwarves and Orcs. And that is the kind of thing that is obviously very difficult to do, because the basic conceit of Magic is that you are fighting your opponent's deck with whatever it happens to have in it. So for a Dwarvish anti-Orc card to actually be useful, you'd need to be facing a deck that was not only the same color as you, but which was trying to make a tribal deck around the other tribe from the one you used. That just obviously wasn't going to happen. Orcs and Dwarves would have to both be viable and frequently used, and even then we're talking about a matchup that would happen against one opponent in ten or less. It was fucked on first principles.

For this sort of thing to have worked at all, there would have had to be a set of “deck archetypes” that would appear in constructed deck environments and then the Hate cards would be directed at the archetype that their opponent's faction happened to be part of. So maybe Orcs would be useful in an aggro deck, and Dwarves would be good in a Control deck, and there could be some Orcish cards that you'd sideboard in against Control decks and Dwarvish cards that you'd sideboard in against Aggro decks. Design really would have had to be thinking several steps ahead for this to be even remotely viable. But it wasn't. Instead we got shit like this:

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It's like you're not even trying.

None of the civil wars within the colors ever played out anywhere, because the basic premise was flawed. Even if the Dwarf anti-Orc cards were any good against Orc decks (which they were not), you'd still never pack them because “Orc Decks” was obviously too small of a slice of the potential opposition for that to be a worhtwhile life choice. You might as well make cards that punish enemy players whose name is David. But basically the idea of dividing up constructed decks into archetypes wasn't really mature in 1994, and the idea that the design team could successfully predict what the future archetypes were going to look like was pretty much a fairy tale at that point. So this project was doomed from the beginning and it's still kind of surprising that no one put their foot down before this went to print.
AncientH:

Another reason the internal wars within the colors don't work in Fallen Empires is that while you understand thematically that orcs and goblins are fighting Dwarfs, thallids are fighting elves, homarids are fighting mermen, thrulls are fighting the Order of the Ebon Hand, and Icatia is fighting against the Order of Light Beer Leitbur...mechanically, the civil wars thing doesn't really hold up on the tabletop. There's just no Orc-centric anti-Dwarf cards, or downsides for an Order of the Ebon Hand deck to use thrulls...in fact, there's just not enough cards in the set to play any faction pure and whole with the cards you had for 3rd edition. There's only 3 dwarfs in the entire fucking FE set; it's not much of a faction.

Even when you get something like Tidal Influence that's supposed to be this, it's a footbullet:

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And to top that all off, the sides tend to be...I won't say complementary, but you get shit like Elvish Farmer which produces saproling tokens, and Praetor of the Ebon Hand which gets a bonus from eating thrulls. It's not like you have a special mechanic for capturing thrulls or saprolings from opponents (exception: Thrull Champion) or some exclusive mechanic that causes you to lose elves the more saprolings you have, so from a mechanical point of view the cards aren't antagonistic - and some of their effects actually work together. Because after all, they're all the same color.

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FrankT:

The color Hate cards are no less blunt than the ones from the basic set – they just happen to also be pretty much crap.

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You can't see it, but I'm giving myself a facepalm because of this card.

Obviously, Thelon's Curse doesn't do dick diddly unless your opponent is trying to kill you with Blue creatures. Which means already that even if it works, it's insultingly blunt. And there's a lot specifically wrong with this as well. It doesn't even work, since at this point the Blue decks tended to be “Permission Decks” which used Blue for card advantage and counterspells and then used another color to actually get creatures to beat you to death with. And if they did use Blue creatures at all they tended to show up in small numbers and be defended with counterspells and removal. So not only did this spell do actually nothing to most Blue decks, on those few decks it actually did anything to the mana drain was disappointingly small.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but there was no point at that point in that sort of thing being a thing. There's a new set coming out on October 2nd of 2015 and it might have cards that are overtly worse than cards in Theros (and expansion that came out in September of 2013). But that's OK, or at least accepted by the Magic community because also on the same day all the cards in the Theros expansion will stop being tournament legal in the most popular format. So if Battle For Zendikar has a version of a popular card from Theros that's weaker, that means that cards of that type simply are weaker in the new environment. But Fallen Empires existed at a time when there was no tournament rotation. A new card became legal and no cards left the environment because of it. A new card therefore had to be doing something new for people to want it at all. Or if not new, then at least better than what was already available.

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And if a Green deck really wanted to reduce the amount of Blue mana a Blue deck had on hand... they had an app for that in the basic set.

So this year, the basic mana elf is rotating out in a bit over a month. So whatever mana generating Elves Zendikar gives us will be desired to some extent for players of the standard format. They could be better or worse than the Elvish Mystic and people will still play with them. But when Fallen Empires came out, Thelon's Curse was never going to see play unless it was competitive with existing options like Tsunami. And it fucking wasn't, so that card was a god damn coaster. And that is why Thelon's Curse is a twenty year old rare card that you can buy in mint condition for thirty cents. It was never playable in any format and still isn't.
AncientH:

This kind of thing was sort of endemic in the early Magic sets. I like to call it Elder Dragon Syndrome, because I fucking can.

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The thing about Elder Dragons is that they look very impressive. They're legends, and they are flying 7/7s that can go toe-to-toe with a Pit Fiend. But they are largely terrible because they are fucking expensive, and three colors with upkeep, and their abilities do not match the price tag. Said skills do not pay the bills, even if it is fun to let Nicol Bolas ping your opponent with Fire Whip and discard their entire hand.

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The thing is though - and Frank and I talked about this, and will in greater depth later - FE doesn't even have an Elder Dragon. There's no big critter or "ooh, shiny!" card that really stands out in the set. The winner is, and always has been, Hymn to Tourach, which is a rather common card - and absolutely awesome.
FrankT:

I do not like rare cards being substantially better than common cards. There are a lot of things that I think are wrong about that. I make a lot of money now, but I remember being a poor kid who brought a pbj sandwich to school every day because he couldn't afford pizza. There were decks back in the day that I would have loved to make that I could not make because I did not have the funds. Even today there are decks that I can't make properly because I just can't justify slapping down three hundred dollars for a deck of cards. Individual lands cost nearly twenty five bucks and I'm just not willing to do that. Even though I now could, I still don't. Because I remember being the poor kid and I just find the whole thing offensive on a bunch of levels.

But here's the thing: chase cards sell packs. I hate the idea that there are Mythic Rares. There are mythic rares that I would like to own that I do not own and will not own because I am not going to throw down that kind of money on a children's card game. But I would like to own them. And the number of packs you'd have to open in order to get those mythics is very high. On average you get about one of any particular mythic rare after opening four boxes of Boosters. I'm not going to do that, even for sets I like quite a bit (like Magic Origins and Khans of Tarkir). But some people will. In fact, some people will want to get their grubby hands on four copies of a specific Mythic, and if they want to do that by opening packs they will need to open the packs in fifteen boxes of boosters.

That probably sounds insane to you, and it sounds insane to me. But if there are Mythics that people genuinely want, there are people with more money than pride who will just go ahead and do that. And that sells product. It is clearly good for the financial health of Wizards of the Coast for there to be incentives for some dumb assholes to buy fifteen boxes of booster packs to chase multiple copies of super rare cards. These “chase cards” increase the demand for the set, which supports a higher supply and keeps MaRo in hookers and blow. A box of Fallen Empires had 60 booster packs of eight cards each, and none of them were both good and rare.

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This card is very good, but it was also “very common.”

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This card is relatively rare, but it sucks and no one wants it. Also I have no idea what's going on in the picture. Like, a bunny is dragging a Thrull to a dark fantasy tribunal. And the explanation is way too complicated.
AncientH:

Keep in mind: the random sample of cards in each booster is what gives Magic an addiction rating close to crack cocaine.

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It's really no different than playing the lottery, except it's legal for kids to buy boosters with their lunch money, praying for a rare. It's the collector jones which really pushed the surge in Magic speculation in the mid-90s, before InQuest price guides went insane. And no, I'm not going to regale you with tales about when Black Lotus was the by-word for expensive fucking trophy cards - because by the time I got to the game it was already illegal in tournaments. I never even saw a Mox in regular play. I came into a game that was a couple years old and I was already behind the power curve. But that's okay, because I was happy with my Land Leeches and Giant Strength, and putting Unholy Strength on my Black Knight. That sort of shit really appealed to me back in the days when I didn't have enough friends to play D&D with and Lone Wolf books by myself were getting a little fucking lonely. Fallen Empires never gave me the opportunity to "flatten the field" - but it was at least a way that I, a newcomer to the hobby with some cash to spend could get in the game...and of course, you never knew; maybe you would find the cards for a killer deck.

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Man, I forgot these things only had 8 cards, too.
FrankT:

Next up: Fractional Reserve Banking.
Last edited by Ancient History on Fri Aug 28, 2015 3:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Eikre »

Fuck yeah. You guys get to thinking about this from the CCG power creep topic?
This signature is here just so you don't otherwise mistake the last sentence of my post for one.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Fallen Empire cards were among the first I had of MTG, I really liked the art for the Order of the Ebon Hand cards and Hymn to Tourach was perhaps the first card that made me go "hmm, this is really mana efficient for what it does".

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Mostly for the art

I didn't play with only Fallen Empires though, so when I made a themed elf deck it had mercadian masque stuff in there.

With today's designers they could revisit Fallen Empires and make the top-down approach work (Invasion did revisit the saporlings a bit), thrulls and black clerics with synergy, and doing tidal effects like Vampire Nocturnis where you reveal the top card of your deck and if it's blue all your homarids get buffed.

dwarves and orcs being soft counters to each other would be interesting, like how that 1/3 lifegain cleric is strong against red aggro.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Orgg no like Plant
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Post by Red_Rob »

Our little group loved Fallen Empires when it came out. It helped that whilst finding any Magic packs had been almost impossible up to that point, suddenly there were loads of Fallen Empires for sale...
In 1994, Fallen Empires was an economic disaster for Wizards of the Coast. They produced more packs of Fallen Empires than any previous expansion, making it have very high supply. And by “high supply” we mean crazy high supply: Fallen Empires had a print run about 7 times that of the previous set (The Dark).
Apparently up until Fallen Empires WotC was known for only fulfilling about a tenth of a stores orders due to printing shortages and supply problems. Due to this most stores got in the habit of ordering 10x what they needed. When Fallen Empires rolled around and they told store owners they had fixed these issues most stores ignored them and placed their usual 10x orders. WotC then printed accordingly and caused a massive market flood.

Still, I'd wager that having commonly available product that new players could buy at a reasonable rate probably helped the early adoption of Magic considerably. I know we spent plenty of our pocket money on Fallen Empires packs when there was little else available.
The thing about Elder Dragons is that they look very impressive. They're legends, and they are flying 7/7s that can go toe-to-toe with a Pit Fiend. But they are largely terrible because they are fucking expensive, and three colors with upkeep, and their abilities do not match the price tag.
The thing about early magic was that there were no real tournaments, there was no concept of tempo or card advantage, and there was no internet to tell you what was hot or not. Before Inquest started printing card lists you didn't even know what cards were out there unless you had some inside info. Often the first time you saw a card was when someone played it against you. In this environment cards like the Elder Dragons that would today be classed as Timmy-only oddities, quaint but not really worth playing, drove people wild. Even once people wised up to their true power level they so wanted these cards to be good they made up entire formats just to cater for them.
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Post by Ancient History »

Eikre wrote:Fuck yeah. You guys get to thinking about this from the CCG power creep topic?
It did get me to thinking, yeah. Not because there was a lot of power creep in Fallen Empires, but because for CCGs I first became aware of power creep through Magic, especially Portal.
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Post by mlangsdorf »

I briefly got into Magic around the time of Fallen Empires: just late enough to have missed Legends while it was in the store and affordable. I remember a friend of mine buying 4 boosters of Legends for $100 (which was a tidy chunk of change for me in college, even working part time as an engineering intern for good pay, and a lot for him working as a waiter) and coming out ahead because there was a $110 rare in the packs that he could sell to cover his costs and still have 3 rares and 8 uncommons that were worth money.

So I was highly anticipating Fallen Empires, and with a bunch of my college friends, went in big time to buy entire boxes of the damn thing. And for my efforts, I got a bunch of shit cards that even as a casual player with a limited card pool could tell were shit cards. There was no way I would be selling the rares to pay for the cost of buying the booster boxes.

The entire experience soured me on Magic quite heavily, and I went back to spending my money on role-playing game books and miniatures. And L5R eventually, because I just couldn't fucking learn from one mistake apparently.
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Post by Mistborn »

Red_Rob wrote:The thing about early magic was that there were no real tournaments, there was no concept of tempo or card advantage, and there was no internet to tell you what was hot or not.
Pretty much this is the point in magics history before the classic deck archatypes were even codified. It's still a year untill Brian Wiessman writes the book on control, and two years before Paul Sligh starts winning tournaments with Goblins of the Flarg.
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Post by TheFlatline »

FE was when I hit Magic as well, and I stayed through ice age/homelands.

1.25 per expansion pack vs like... 5 for Ice Age. And in the mid to early 90's, that was a *big* deal.
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Post by talozin »

mlangsdorf wrote:I briefly got into Magic around the time of Fallen Empires: just late enough to have missed Legends while it was in the store and affordable.
Man, I can't remember Legends ever being both in the store and affordable. It didn't help that I spent the years when Magic was first blowing up in Oklahoma City and Bumfuck New England respectively -- neither of which were exactly hotbeds of gaming fandom.

I managed to get some Antiquities cards thanks to a friend who took pity on me and sent me a box in the mail. But Arabian Nights, Legends, The Dark, forget about it. Even the basic set was tough to come by until Revised.
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Re: OSSR: Magic: the Gathering : Fallen Empires

Post by RobbyPants »

Ancient History wrote: It was my first set. It was terrible. But I am nostalgic about it, because even Young Bobby remembers when game shops proliferated in every mall, and packs of Fallen Empires could be had for a buck or less.
Yep. This set was released the same month I started playing. I got a single starter for my birthday, and when I had to start forking over my own money to buy cards, FE was pretty much what I gravitated toward. I saw the cheap price tag, and couldn't resist.

Even back then, before I really understood the meta game behind the mechanics, I could tell there was something not quite right with the set.

OgreBattle wrote: Image
Mostly for the art
Fuck, yeah! 15-year-old Rob totally wanted to make a D&D picture based on that picture, alone.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Red_Rob wrote:The thing about early magic was that there were no real tournaments, there was no concept of tempo or card advantage, and there was no internet to tell you what was hot or not..
All of this is incorrect.

There was no ProTour, and the concepts of Tempo and Card Advantage were not fully codified, but I was personally entered in tournaments before Fallen Empires and playing decks which were either about Tempo (Kurd Ape, Grizzly Bear, Lightning Bolt) or Card Advantage (Braingeyser, Hypno Spector)

Here's a report of the 1993 GenCon Tournament:

http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazi ... arcana/249

Here's a rec.games.deckmaster FAQ
from pre-The Dark release: http://howell.seattle.wa.us/games/mtg/rgdfaq.html
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Post by Red_Rob »

Josh_Kablack wrote:All of this is incorrect.
Well... incorrect is maybe a bit strong.
There was no ProTour, and the concepts of Tempo and Card Advantage were not fully codified
Minus a bit of hyperbole, that's pretty much what I said. Yeah okay, there was the odd tournament, but nothing like the fully reported and analyzed tournament scene we have today. And as for tempo and card advantage - have you read that tournament report you linked to? The finalists in the Gencon tournament spend multiple turns just playing land, Disenchanting an Unholy Strength and casting Giant Spider... It was a more innocent time was my point. There was no real consensus on the right way to play and no tournament scene figuring out environments in a few weeks.

And as for being able to find a usenet group to answer rules questions if you had access to a dialup modem in 1993... I guess that might have been the case. From my own experience it wasn't until a lot later that internet access became ubiquitous enough that most players were regularly getting information from the 'net.
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Post by maglag »

Red_Rob wrote:
Josh_Kablack wrote:All of this is incorrect.
Well... incorrect is maybe a bit strong.
There was no ProTour, and the concepts of Tempo and Card Advantage were not fully codified
Minus a bit of hyperbole, that's pretty much what I said. Yeah okay, there was the odd tournament, but nothing like the fully reported and analyzed tournament scene we have today. And as for tempo and card advantage - have you read that tournament report you linked to? The finalists in the Gencon tournament spend multiple turns just playing land, Disenchanting an Unholy Strength and casting Giant Spider... It was a more innocent time was my point.
The red/black guy played something every turn.

And he was the one victorious, applying enough pressure to simply overpower Circle of Protection: Red, which was probably a sideboard card.

So what innocence? The better built aggro deck won, but the other guy was shrewd enough to include one of the best anti-red cards ever printed as a contigency. The G/W player was expecting Red decks to give him trouble.

Plus, the card pool was a lot more limited. Even if you had today's processed knowledge, you wouldn't be able to build an "optimized" control/aggro deck simply because there weren't enough clone cards to completely fill a deck yet.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

I ragequit sometime after fallen empires. I remember them coming out with a new edition and they put so many shitty cards in the mix with none that were worth a damn. I wrote WotC and told them that by diluting the pool with so many shit cards they were increasing the barrier to entry and they wrote me a letter back telling me to fuck right off.

I will say that the new cards that I've seen do look more interesting from a tactical standpoint and I would like ii give it a try again if I knew more players.

(also, the fact that I was a pariah in my group for being an idiot. I admit to not being very bright about a lot of things, but the main issue was I didn't pronounce "thrull" as "thrall" because the consensus was that was an "a" in the name).
Last edited by Count Arioch the 28th on Sat Aug 29, 2015 12:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ancient History »

We'll address the Jethro issue.
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Post by Ancient History »

OSSR: Magic: The Gathering:
Fallen Empires: Reviewed: Colons

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Why? No seriously, Why?!
AncientH:

It may be going too far to say that each set has its gimmick, but even back in those days the designers at Wizards of the Coast were mucking about with new mechanics in each set, and subsets of cards with similar mechanics. So we got the Store lands - a bit like mana batteries but less useful - and sacrifice lands like Dwarven Ruins, which were basically "like a mountain, but with a little bit extra."

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I'll save the rant about basic lands vs. non-basic lands for Frank.

Sacrifice was a rather big theme in Fallen Empires, and again it looks rather like the balance stick was applied a bit too liberally, or else they were thinking more thematically than mechanically. Certainly, there are far more cards in the set that require sacrifice than any that came immediately before or after it. In a way, though, I think this was a positive development. Yes, it meant that you had some absolutely rubbish cards in Fallen Empires, like Elven Lyre...

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Wait, did I just pay three mana for a +2/+2 teot? God dammit!

...it also acclimated people to the idea that every card on the table could be a resource, if you cared to view it that way. It was this detachment from the nominal purpose of cards which really fed some of the great Blue and Black decks of Ice Age. Not unique to FE by any means, but I think the heavy emphasis on sacrifice in FE really set the standard for thinking differently about resources in Magic.

Of course, the theme of sacrifice is also moral accounting - the idea that you can't get something for nothing. When you compare this to rather straight effects like Lightning Bolt (R = 3 damage), it's definitely setting up an expectation in players of needing to make a choice - do you sacrifice (whatever), to gain (some temporary advantage)? Now, if the advantage is big enough and the cost proximate, you might have a real choice on your hands. Consider Goblin Grenade as today's moral lesson:

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Same cost as Lightning Bolt, but you have to sacrifice a Goblin and it deals a little more damage (we won't go into the Sorcery vs. Instant debate). This is probably one of the better sacrifice cards in the set, because Goblins were relatively cheap, the mana costs are equivalent, and you get something for your sacrifice - more damage - that is greater than Lightning Bolt. And if you are running a deck with Goblins, you presumably have a lot of Goblin Warrens and things and can pump out very many Goblins indeed, so this card looks fairly attractive.

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Would Goblin tokens be little red beads or little green beads?

Most of the set doesn't have such attractive options, however. The artifacts are particularly bad, and for much of the set the mechanic is very unevenly distributed, with sacrifice being a focus of Red, Green, and Black, but only very limited in White and Blue...in fact, one of the few White sacrifice cards is the Icatian Moneylender:

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And here again is a moral mechanic, albeit a different one: a little pain in advance, but save him up and reap the interest. This particular card was on the nose, but the whole counter-accounting scheme was endemic in Fallen Empires.
FrankT:

Technically, Magic the Gathering had already officially jumped the shark as far as fucked up token accounting with The Dark and Frankenstein's Monster. For no particular reason it covered itself with three different flavors of tokens, and good gods man, why would you do that?!

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All that text and it's a 5/4 for 6 that delves your graveyard away. It could actually cost zero mana and you still wouldn't put it in a deck very often.

But Fallen Empires was when the token accounting really went apeshit. It wasn't just a card here or there, the words “token” or “counter” appear on Fallen Empires cards more than seventy times. And there are only 102 cards. True story, there are only 88 definite articles on those cards, meaning that the word “counter” is used only slightly less frequently in this set than the word “the.” The aforementioned Elvish Farmer gains spore counters and exchanges 3 of them for saproling tokens, and exchanges those for life two at a time. So you're supposed to use it to gain ⅔ of a life point per turn, but it does so by tracking three different things. That's way too fucking complicated. It is a fucking nightmare to track this shit.

Now leaving aside the fact that this system is too much trouble to use, you really have to ask what it was for in the first place? Clearly this is basically a case of the design team trying to solve the problem of how to represent a non-integer quantity. Magic the Gathering gives you twenty life, and you gain or lose it in lots of 1. The game could have been made with more granularity in its life points, for example in the Ikki Tousen card game that's blatantly based on M:tG you start with four thousand life and things normally do damage in 100 point increments (which essentially means that your life points are twice as granular as they are in M:tG proper). In Yugioh, you have eight thousand life points at the start of play, and things do damage in 100 increments (making it four times as granular as M:tG). These epicycles* were put in because someone wished that they could make things in Magic the Gathering more granular. And the answer was “yes,” but more importantly the answer was “do not fucking do that.” There are good solid reasons to with that Magic had gone with something more granular at the beginning, but making things be more granular with intermediary counters and shit is the game design equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum. It's way too fucking hard and the payoff in terms of design space is minimal.

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*: Explained!

I can see why a designer would get their panties in a knot about the fact that they couldn't make a monster that did more damage than an Earth Elemental and less damage than a Fire Elemental, but the fact remains that it doesn't actually matter. There is no shortage of design space for creatures that hit things, and eventually you have to accept that your game is going to have some level of granularity and then fucking work with that. Pokemon called their damage tokens “ten hit points” leaving the possibility of 5 hit point half-damage tokens, but that was stupid and the few attempts to do anything with that design space were crap. Yugioh of course calls its life tokens “100 life” meaning that you could theoretically do 3% of a life token or some fucking thing, and that's the worst thing I've ever heard and we'll say no more of it. What's actually important is the ratio between how big your strikes are against your opponent and how much life they had. Richard Garfield really liked tinier ratios with more room for skirmishing and maneuvering and that is why his next game (Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, or as the first edition was called: “Jyhad”) gave players 30 life and set the basic attack (called a “bleed”) to 1 life.

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Or you could just write more abilities for new creatures. That would also work.

This represents a fundamental laziness on the part of the designers I think. You don't really need to make new cards with numbers in between the numbers of the old cards. The 20 life paradigm is completely arbitrary, but no better or worse than the 40 honor you're supposed to track in L5R or the effectively 80 life points you have in Yugioh. There's no call to add complexity to the game to increase or decrease the granularity of life points, because it doesn't really matter. You're never going to run out of quirky shit you can put on creatures to make one feel different from another.

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Seriously, you can just keep writing variations on creature abilities until the sun burns out. The number of combinations are intractably large. There aren't even any creatures with deathtouch and trample yet.

Of course, the question of whether it's “worth the complexity” to put extra layers of accounting in to increase granularity is rather beside the point however. The reality is of course that it does not matter whether designers wanted to be able to make cards that inflict or cure amounts of damage that are between zero and one. Because gaining even one life point per turn is something that most decks would be unlikely to wipe their ass with. The thing is that for all the fact that as a designer you might not like the fact that you can't give out an amount of life between zero and one, actual lifegain usually has to be more than 1 point or people just don't give a fuck.

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This is a sideboard card against rush decks. This is 10 life in one go and players do not main deck it because life gain does not win games. They sure as fuck aren't going to care about a life gain strategy that gives you 10 life in 15 fucking turns.
AncientH:

It gets worse than that in many respects, because the counter/token mechanics are partially integrated into the accumulating-interest and sacrifice mechanics - it's like a fucking contractum trinius where they want to give the feel for a Zero-Sum Game and a morality play about investing your resources wisely at the same time.

And the thing is, if you do what they suggest, you are going to lose. Because most Magic games don't play out in thirty or forty turns; I can't really remember the last time I played a game where I reached the bottom of the deck just by natural card drawing.

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I would also like to remind everyone that this was a long time before token cards were a thing, and most tokens were either little glass beads, or slips of paper, or if you were really good those little cardboard tokens given out in bagged copies of Inquest.

But the Fallen Empires love of counters and tokens goes very much beyond simple economies. You have a genuine predilection here for swarms of little things that aren't cards, often for very vaguely defined reasons. For example:

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If you can't read that, it gives you four 1/1 white tokens for six mana. That's genuinely terrible. They're not even Goblins you could convert into grenades or thrulls you could convert into...any of the myriad things that thrulls could be turned into. Granted, it populates the battlefield, but you could pay one mana and get a 1/1 white critter like Benalish Hero, or two mana and get a 2/2 first striker like White Knight. If this was a Black or Red card that made a bunch of token critters for ready sacrifice, I could understand it, even if I thought it was still overpriced. But for White? White doesn't sacrifice its citizens! Which is, again I think, an expression of the thematic design constraints that the creators were working under. They didn't want White sacrificing its citizens to kill demons (<insert all jokes about White's connection with religions and suicide bombers made>).

Black on the other hand was really very good about it. The thrulls might be one of Magic's early original IP races, and even if their exact physical makeup was always a bit iffy in the card art...

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Who designed this thing, Clive Barker?

...the idea of a race of critters bred explicitly for sacrifice has a lot of resonance with Black, which rather embraces the whole sacrifice concept a lot more readily than the other colors. So perhaps its no surprise that a lot of the better cards in this set are black.

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I think Wizards should have insisted that Anson Maddocks finish the art for this card.

So the whole thematic design and morality mechanic angle seems to have been very prevalent in the creation of the Fallen Empires set, and this is perhaps nowhere more evident than in many of the non-basic land cards. FT has a good rant about this, so take it away Frank!
FrankT:

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That's a lot of text for a really irritating effect.

The place where Magic is most constrained by its starting design decisions is actually basic land. The Mountain or Forest is basically a monad: the smallest possible thing in the game. It provides exactly one colored mana per turn, and has no other effects. And yet, people need land in their decks. Back in the day people packed about &#8531; land, and eventually people figured out that you got a bit more dependability at about 40% land. But the point is that it's a major part of peoples' decks and they left themselves no design space to work with at all. A Swamp doesn't really have anything about it that it could trade for something else, so additional lands have been repetitious and frequently overpowered or useless because there's no fucking design space to work with.

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This card literally doesn't have text or numbers on it.

While I have no real sympathy for people who want to go back in time and put Magic on a 40 or 50 life scale so that you could have more different damage outputs for dragons of different sizes, the land issue is a much bigger thing. Magic has suffered for over twenty years from the fact that there aren't any moving parts on an Island or a Plains. Obviously if you could do it all over again in the early nineties you'd make sure that there were a bunch of different Forests of different rarities and they all had a small secondary effect in addition to the effect of making a single Green mana. So you'd have one Forest that could be used to give a bonus to Faeries instead of tapping for mana and another Forest that could tap for two mana that could only be spent on Wurms or whatever the fuck. I mean, obviously. Because having done that you'd have been able to make hundreds or thousands of flavorful variants of Swamps and Mountains without breaking a sweat. But by setting the original balance bar at a tiny and indivisible quantity, making any kind of new land has been a huge struggle.

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Which is why I'm so puzzled by the Ikki Tousen game. How could you possibly not have noticed that Magic had a problem with land design space by the second decade of the twenty first century?

To bring this all back to the set we are nominally talking about, Fallen Empires had two different forms of alternate basic lands: Storage Lands and Sac Lands. Both of those monkeyed with the way land generates mana over time, because that's pretty much the only toggle Magic the Gathering left to itself. A normal land produces exactly one mana each turn, and the Fallen Empires lands produce zero mana on some turns and more than one mana on one turn. That's interesting, and to be sure there were decks that actually used them for stuff, but for the most part they were pretty useless and rarely saw play.

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Storage Lands don't even get a mana counter for turns you have them ready for use, so you not only have to leave them unused for several turns, you have to leave them inaccessible the entire time.

The issue here is that you don't get any mana on the first turn they come into play. That slows your deck down a lot. Hell, with the storage lands you don't get any mana for the next two (or more!) turns after they come into play. You have to be playing a really long game to get any mana out of a storage land at all. The sacrifice lands can be part of a balance strategy, but to use them as they are “supposed” to be used is simply to have it be so mind blowingly important to throw down a five-drop on turn 4 that it's worth being a land behind on turns 3, 5, 6, and every other turn after 6 until the game ends. It's hard to really wrap your mind around a scenario where
that would be true. And that is why the Fallen Empires funky lands can still be found in bulk cards piles two decades after being printed.

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Balance strategies are a weird and degenerate edge case and have no place in a civilized discussion.
AncientH:

It's an issue that goes beyond Fallen Empires, really, but you can see that it was definitely one that the game recognized - otherwise you'd start to see variations on a theme, as Magic does with all of its more successful mechanics. There would be dual sac lands where you could sacrifice an Ebon Stronghold equivalent for BR or BU or BG or whatever instead of BB. Magic does that crap all the time.

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Admittedly, there is this, which was inspired in large part by Ebon Stronghold.

And this was - although this is only really something visible with hindsight - putting a lot of pressure on tapping as a mechanic, and generated even more interest in tapping and untapping; these fiddly meta-mechanics really fed into the expansion of control, especially Blue control. After all, if you're playing against someone actually using a Store land, untapping their land when they want it to be tapped isn't just fucking with them, it's taking their already-fucked tempo and punching it in the dick.

This brings me to an only very-vaguely related topic, but one I think we need to cover: variant art.

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These are, mechanically, all the same card. But they have different art. Like different covers on comic books, this makes them more collectible without actually expanding the play space. It also makes the set look a little bigger in your head than it actually was, because there are three or four different variations of many cards, so you can see what is mechanically the same card and not recognize it. It's entirely a non-game aspect to the whole thing, but it was also probably a very shrewd marketing maneuver by some young asshole.
FrankT:

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That is fucking illegible. Let's break out the magnifying glass.
Tidal Influence, cleaned up text version wrote:Cast Tidal Influence only if no permanents named Tidal Influence are on the battlefield.
Tidal Influence enters the battlefield with a tide counter on it.
At the beginning of your upkeep, put a tide counter on Tidal Influence.
As long as there is exactly one tide counter on Tidal Influence, all blue creatures get -2/-0.
As long as there are exactly three tide counters on Tidal Influence, all blue creatures get +2/+0.
Whenever there are four tide counters on Tidal Influence, remove all tide counters from it.
So to elaborate: when you cast it, all Blue creatures are -2/-0 until your next upkeep. Then they have no penalties for a round of turns, then they get +2/+0 for a round of turns, then there is a turn of no bonuses for a turn and then it starts over. It's a repeating four turn clock where on turns 1, 5, and 9 there is a penalty and on turns 3, 7, and 11 there is a bonus. You could conceivably come out ahead on this, especially if you have a bunch of 1/1 bullshit that doesn't much care about the penalty but cares a lot about the bonus; or a bunch of fogs or something to wait out the shitty turns. But this is a card in your deck, a card in your hand, and mana you could have spent on anything else.

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Let's be honest, people don't even usually play Kytheon's Tactics because it is not very good. But at least it doesn't screw you over when you cast it and then wait for two whole more turns to pass before giving your creatures a smaller bonus.

The thing that really blows my mind is that Tidal Influence is a card that is only even worth considering over a one-turn combat trick spell if it's going to come up weal at least two times. But it does not do that until six turns after you cast it. And let's be honest, it's not worth considering unless it hits several creatures with at least two bonus tides, so really it couldn't possibly be worth considering unless you were absolutely certain that you were going to see major combat at least twice 7 turns into a mature board state. That's so alien that it's hard for me to wrap my mind around.

Let's be really on the level here: even if the game drags on long enough that you get bonus tide effects three times, the card is still pretty much shit. But the real take home is that the designers were envisioning a scenario where you would make plans about what your troops would be doing 11 turns in the future. Long games on a scale that even stasis permission decks could not abide.

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This made for long ass games, but it still was ended by a Serra Angel in five turns.
AncientH:

It gets worse, because Tidal Influence is intended to synch with the mechanics for the Homarid Blue faction:

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Put a tide counter on Homarid when it is brought into play and during your upkeep. If there is one tide counter on Homarid, it gets -1/-1. If there are three tide counters on Homarid, it gets +1/+1. When there are four tide counters on Homarid, remove them all.
You don't have to wonder why Homarids didn't fucking make the evolutionary survival-of-the-fittest test to really expand into other sets.
FrankT:

Fallen Empires had only 102 cards, and was thematically based around five intra-color civil wars. This meant that Even if every card in the set had a faction identity, there'd only be about 10 cards per faction. And that would only barely be enough to build decks of the team. As it happens, a whole lot of the cards were just stand-ins that weren't directly related to any of the factions.

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This card is way more powerful than it is supposed to be because the discard effect is not a cost of the draw effect and happens first. But it's still too expensive for what it does, and more importantly it is not thematically associated with Icatians or Thalids or whatever.

So in actual fact there are only 6 Dwarf cards in the whole set, and two of them are just the sac and storage land for Red (which are Dwarf themed).You couldn't make a deck out of the Dwarf stuff in the set. It's not just that literally all of the Dwarf cards in this set are coasters (although they totally are), it's that there just aren't enough of them to make a deck. Even if for some reason you wanted to make a Dwarf Deck from Fallen Empires, you just fucking can't because the card set isn't big enough to give adequate coverage to any of the factions in it.

Compare and contrast to the latest thing like that: Khans of Tarkir. It has five factions (each of which are wedge colors, because that was the theme of the set), and the entire set has 269 cards. A lot of cards are not explicitly attached to one faction or another, but if you wanted to make a deck entirely out of Sultai cards (one of the five clans in the set, they are thematically South East Asians and use a lot of Khmer mythology) there are 36 cards with the Sultai Clan Watermark on them. So you could actually make a deck that would be playable and only a little bit terrible by just putting in one copy of each Sultai card and some land. You shouldn't do that if you want to win of course (not all Sultai cards are good), but you could.

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There'd even be some synergy here and there. You could seriously do worse.

So you certainly could make multiple playable factions in a set. Hell, later expansions did. But it requires an ambition to write cards proportional to the ambition to make factions. If you're going to have 10 factions, you need like 300 cards or more in the set. 102 cards was laughably insufficient.
AncientH:

They did include Dwarf cards before and after Fallen Empires, but the next set to feature Dwarfs prominently was Homelands, and that basically meant that Dwarfs were retired from the game for quite a while afterwards - because while Homelands might have more decent cards than FE, it was also much more expensive and still a very shit set. Same-same Orcs in many respects, although they didn't truly give way to Goblins until after Ice Age.

Total Aside: The D&D/Lord of the Ring conflation of Orcs and Goblins hit a really big snag in Magic: the Gathering because while Warhammer assumed that all Orcs and Goblins were classified as "Greenskins" for whatever purpose, in Magic (and D&D) they remained distinct species - it was Summon Orc or Summon Goblin, not Summon Greenskin. This meant that it was hard to have a deck, thematic or otherwise, that was centered around orcs and goblins. You couldn't sacrifice an orc to power a Goblin Grenade, for example. Goblins had been winning fairly early on in Magic's history, but I think Fallen Empires was the turning point where Goblins started to properly outclass Orcs at all levels - there was just much more you could do with Goblins than you could with Orcs, and the poor Orcish Lumberjack and Orcish Librarian were not sufficient to turn the tide of card gaming history.

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Granted, Orcs never entirely went away.
FrankT:

It takes more than shared card names to make a faction work in Magic. Every deck is a pile of cards and each game you're going to draw them in a randomized order. The cards you have need to work together to build towards your ultimate goal of winning the game. For a faction to gel, it needs to have cards that work towards winning the game in a similar way or which enhance a shared strategy or something. If one card is part of a fast
aggro burn deck and another card is part of a simmering control deck, they probably aren't going to be good in the same decks. And if you announce that they are from the same faction, all that will do is make theme decks shitty. There has to be something, some reason you would pack cards from the same faction together.

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Yes. Like that. That's the laziest fucking thing I've ever seen, but it does minimally fit the bill.

There are, to be fair, a few things in Fallen empires that support things in their faction. Initiates of the Ebon Hand turn colorless mana Black, which the Order of the Ebon Hand can use to slay enemies. That's synergy. It's a thing you can do. It means you can pack creatures that pump for Black mana and still have a side color. Which is good, because as previously noted there are not enough Ebon Hand cards to make a deck out of (a total of 7 even if you include the land and the color-hate spell that sucks).

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You wouldn't feel terrible packing both these guys in a Black/X deck. Throw in some Frozen Shades and Hymns to Tourach and you're kinda doing an Ebon Hand deck. This is the most functional faction in this entire set.

Later sets were able to get things a little bit more organic – where cards in the faction used complementary mechanics.

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These cards are both Mardu, and both able to do stuff on their own. But they also combo with each other nicely.

I kindof think that making 10 different mechanics to show off the special workings of ten different factions is the kind of thing that would strain the designers. In the last block they had ten factions spread over three sets with a good deal of overlap. But to be honest, not all of the faction mechanics are good or interesting. Ferocious and Formidable are only different in a math sense, and don't really encourage much of a specific style of play or create much synergy. Both effects just reward you for having big creatures, but “bigness” isn't in any particular way unique to any factions. The Sultai “Delve” power lets them spend cards out of their graveyard as mana, and while they have a couple cards that fill graveyards or capitalize on cards getting spent this way, this is obviously self-limiting. You will only be able to Delve a couple of times in the game because your graveyard is going to be empty.

With the resources available to the Magic design team in 1994, I don't think 10 factions was a realizable goal. The storyline probably needed for there to be like 2 factions that were the imperials and the revolutionaries that were each five colors. And then you could make a revolution or empire deck in whatever one or two color deck combo you wanted to make and move on with your life. I think that's about what they could have hoped to accomplish. But they went for a bigger story with a smaller pile of cards and it all turned into a clusterfail.
AncientH:

Frank focuses a lot on tournaments, because the constraints of tournaments make deckbuilding at once easier (there are fewer cards to build decks with) and more challenging (there are fewer cards to build decks with). Out in the wild, in casual play...shit gets very weird. It's a lot like mixing GURPS books, in that you can have a lot of cards of very different power levels and mechanics, and there's absolutely no way the designers were keeping all of the possibilities in mind when they were building the sets. They couldn't. Some of this stuff is obvious, like the various infinite-mana hacks or infinite-life hacks, and some of it is much more emergent - two cards from different sets which, on their own aren't special, but when used together have a particular synergy. Totemic decks built around Goblins or Elves or Thallids or whatnot are especially sensitive to this kind of thing.

So for example, after Fallen Empires did it's thing, there were no more Thrulls produced for several years. So that kind of put a hold of thrull-centric decks. But then, out of nowhere, they revisted thrulls!

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Okay, so it's a little thing - but the point is, one of the things that WotC started to do from Fallen Empires on is revisit these old concepts from time to time...and it is that recycling and revisiting of concepts that led to the development not only of a more elaborate and interesting game setting, but of refining the mechanics. You still can do very weird decks where you through every card with the word "Orc" into a deck, and it can be fun - if frustrating! - in casual play. You won't win.
FrankT:

Next up: rants about the Sarpadian Empires Chronicles. Also lobsters.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

This brings back so many memories from my days playing Magic.

"No, Arioch. The -2/0 from Tidal Influence never goes away, the +2/+0 only puts blue characters up to normal"

"No, Arioch. You can't cast spells after I cast Mana short, it takes the mana from your pool before it powers your spells, Mana Short counters all your spells cast this turn."

"No, Arioch. You don't get to cut my deck after I shuffle it in a very nonstandard way and every game I play starts with the same 5-6 cards, which you can prove because you've been documenting it because you think I'm cheating. Stop trying to cheat, Arioch!"

"No, Arioch. This informal tournament you just won doesn't count because your sideboard is literally 15 random cards that you never used because we wouldn't let you enter the tournament without one even though you don't actually use a sideboard. You're disqualified."

"Arioch, I have no idea how you just beat the kid that dropped $500 of his parents' money on a copy of the world champion deck in Inquest but you clearly cheated because you're not good at this game and you had to have cheated".

I'm thinking my negative feelings about magic might be because my friends in high school were all assholes.
Last edited by Count Arioch the 28th on Sat Aug 29, 2015 8:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Mistborn »

Ancient History wrote:If you can't read that, it gives you four 1/1 white tokens for six mana. That's genuinely terrible. They're not even Goblins you could convert into grenades or thrulls you could convert into...any of the myriad things that thrulls could be turned into. Granted, it populates the battlefield, but you could pay one mana and get a 1/1 white critter like Benalish Hero, or two mana and get a 2/2 first striker like White Knight. If this was a Black or Red card that made a bunch of token critters for ready sacrifice, I could understand it, even if I thought it was still overpriced. But for White? White doesn't sacrifice its citizens!
White doesn't make tokens for sacrifice it scales them multiplicatively with anthem effects. Like there have been cards similar to Icatian town that have won real tournaments.
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this card was banned in Innistrad block constructed
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Post by Red_Rob »

Ancient History wrote: FrankT: Fallen Empires had only 102 cards, and was thematically based around five intra-color civil wars. This meant that Even if every card in the set had a faction identity, there'd only be about 10 cards per faction. And that would only barely be enough to build decks of the team. As it happens, a whole lot of the cards were just stand-ins that weren't directly related to any of the factions.
It really isn't surprising that the factions weren't developed enough to make good decks with. For the longest time creatures in general and themed creature decks in particular were just pretty terrible. Reading the design report for Onslaught, a set released 7 years later you can see that the design team were dumbfounded at the suggestion you should make the tribes actually playable. At every turn they resisted the efforts of the rest of the team to make Goblin or Elf decks a thing because everyone knew that those types of decks were just for casual scrubs. So back in 1995 having a Dwarf deck or an Orc deck was just accepted as a janky mess that you played for fun. The idea that could be something that would actually win games was still half a decade away.
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name_here
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Post by name_here »

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:This brings back so many memories from my days playing Magic.

"No, Arioch. The -2/0 from Tidal Influence never goes away, the +2/+0 only puts blue characters up to normal"

"No, Arioch. You can't cast spells after I cast Mana short, it takes the mana from your pool before it powers your spells, Mana Short counters all your spells cast this turn."

"No, Arioch. You don't get to cut my deck after I shuffle it in a very nonstandard way and every game I play starts with the same 5-6 cards, which you can prove because you've been documenting it because you think I'm cheating. Stop trying to cheat, Arioch!"

"No, Arioch. This informal tournament you just won doesn't count because your sideboard is literally 15 random cards that you never used because we wouldn't let you enter the tournament without one even though you don't actually use a sideboard. You're disqualified."

"Arioch, I have no idea how you just beat the kid that dropped $500 of his parents' money on a copy of the world champion deck in Inquest but you clearly cheated because you're not good at this game and you had to have cheated".

I'm thinking my negative feelings about magic might be because my friends in high school were all assholes.
Yeah, definitely sounds like that was a big part.

Admittedly, the Mana Short one may have been honest confusion; Mt:G action resolution rules are pretty arcane and my brother once had a Black deck powered by misunderstanding them. IIRC, it went like this: technically you can use an instant or a creature ability between when damage is assigned to targets and when things die of taking damage, and it will resolve before the damage does. This was in Odyssey or Onslaught, and there were even more black sacrifice things than usual, so he'd declare blockers, let damage be assigned, and then sacrifice the blockers. I eventually looked it up, and discovered that you could totally do that, but damage would get reassigned if the blocker died before it resolved.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

Red_Rob wrote:[At every turn they resisted the efforts of the rest of the team to make Goblin or Elf decks a thing because everyone knew that those types of decks were just for casual scrubs.
At that point it seemed like "everyone knew that a creature heavy deck was just for casual scrubs".
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Post by Red_Rob »

Actually, there had pretty much always been a viable weenie deck. From White Weenie with Savannah Lions and Crusade, to the Necrodeck with Pump Knights, to the Sligh deck using cheap Red creatures and burn, filling your deck with cheap & efficient creatures that killed your opponent before their defences came on line had always been pretty viable. It was just that all these decks relied on using whatever were the most efficient creatures for their mana cost. Noone thought "a goblin deck" would do well at tournaments because then you were just restricting the creatures you could use for no real benefit.

Plus of course other than in a weenie strategy creatures were pretty bad. Outside of a few outliers (Juzam and Ernham Djinns spring to mind) creatures over 1 or 2 mana were considered a waste of time. You spent all your mana for the turn on a card that either got countered or terrored and couldn't even attack or tap for a turn. It's pretty telling that Alpha included the 2/1 Savannah Lions at 1 mana which could still be printed and show up in tournament decks today, and the Gray Ogre at 2/2 for 3 mana that was obsoleted in it's own set by Sedge troll.

For a while Magic R&D removed Serra Angel from the core set because it was above the curve of what a creature should be for 5 mana. It was only after they realised that in fact noone was playing creatures that cost more than 2 mana in tournaments that they reevaluated and began increasing the power level of creatures.
Simplified Tome Armor.

Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.

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“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
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Count Arioch the 28th
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

I had a red/green deck with a lot of the $TEXAS$/1 creatures that were in one of the sets (I picked Magic back up again briefly senior year of high school). That was a lot of fun, I just considered my creatures cheap direct damage that had a chance of sticking around for another round that I could Giant Growth. Then there was my red/blue cheap flier/unstable mutation deck. Had a lot of fun with both. Neither would have lasted 2 rounds in a tournament but they were fun.
In this moment, I am Ur-phoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my int score.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

By the way is there a term for when you are suddenly struck with the desire to make "my own not-MTG card game!" ala "fantasy Heartbreaker" is to making not-D&D's?

That paragraph on how MtG is cursed with sticking to basic lands is making me wonder how the game would look if every set had its own unique lands.
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