• Admin @ mtgzone.com, a Magic: the Gathering community
  • More at andrewgioia.com
  • Playing and collecting MTG since Mirage!
  • I ♥️ Legacy Lands, Premodern Parfait Oath, Modern Amulet Titan, and elf tribal

  • 77 Posts
  • 100 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • First and foremost, I’m sorry you’ll be coming around here less :( You’re an amazing contributor and wish you all the best.

    This is an amazing post and I could not sign off any more on everything you’ve written here. I’ve felt similarly for a long time and you’ve articulated the exact same sentiments.

    I have a visceral negative reaction when I look at UB cards or think about playing games with them.

    I just simply do not want to sit across the table from all of these pop culture references or kids shows or even the crazy card frame treatments that aren’t even legible. It’s become a different game entirely and this is really the crux of it for me too.

    Agreed on all of the power creep feelings too. To add on a bit, it has seemed to me that Wizards has undergone an intense campaign to do away with bad topdecks. Every draw needs to “feel good,” and ripping a Llanowar Elf on turn 9 or land after land “doesn’t feel good.” No Bad Topdecks has meant that every card has to be relevant early and late, which is why I think we see Kicker and its variants so much, or DFC lands more and more, or cheap cards with expensive activated abilities, or abilities that can be played after you cast the card, or just straight up two cards jammed into one all the time.

    Thank you for being such a wonderful person and for being here ❤️ I hope you find something better and even more so that we see you around still!





  • Maro says the same thing in all of these so it shouldn’t really be a surprise anymore, doesn’t make it less frustrating for me. Perhaps the most frustrating thing though is how he always avoids the actual substance of this recurring player complaint.

    Things everyone already understands yet MaRo keeps distracting with: that WotC is a business and needs to focus on profit, that WotC will inherently cater to the market segments that spend the most, and that the UB sets to date are popular.

    There are so many nuances that he ignores or blanket “data” that he won’t share that take these from useless to disingenuous and I think thats why his corporate explanations always feel bad to me.

    I have two main issues that I feel never get properly addressed in these, and won’t get properly addressed:

    1. Chasing profits or short term profit maximization does not need to be assumed to be correct. It’s a valid criticism to say that chasing near term UB sales may not actually be the best business decision in the long term! To just hand wave that away every time as “well people buy UB so we are going to cater to that” is very unfair. What if barely any of these new players convert to longer term players or what if none buy another UB or MTG product? What if by chasing short term profits, WotC wakes up in 3 years with no core player base and new/UB player base interested? MaRo never addresses this point (obviously) and it really takes away from his credibility here.

    2. The marketing research they do is also highly suspect and another related thing he just hand waves. “Research” indicates UB=good so they’re doing it. I think the fact that Hasbro has otherwise failed to succeed in its other product lines should weigh heavily in whether they conduct accurate product research.

      It’s very easy for them to say successful UBs are successful because UB=good. But bad ones, like Transformers, are ignored or because of other variables. Not all UBs are equal. LotR, the wildly successful one, cannot be lumped together with Spongebob such that all UB sets are treated equally. They’re wildly different fanbases and have totally different impacts on the lore, nostalgia, and game feel.




  • Yeah they’ve been ratcheting it up it looks like, I just checked the price of a Duskmourn bundle and MSRP is $51 (thought they’re selling for $42 still). Crazy.

    I too had purchased these things for the slight discount on packs and the oversized dice. To move that to the premium bundle is sad yet unsurprising. Also never going to be buying these again unfortunately.














  • Wow I never would have expected this change, or that this was even something WotC was discussing. This feels like a massive change and really hurts defending players.

    Their justification is essentially:

    [Blocking order is] somewhat unintuitive, adds a fair bit of rules baggage, and losing it means more interesting decisions and less double-dipping if you know the tricks.

    Not sure how it’s any more or less intuitive or how it adds any more rules baggage than the new rule creates, they just hand wave these things and gloss over the reasoning. Curious how it develops but off the cuff not really happy about this change.

















  • You’re absolutely right and Mark’s straw man arguments like that are pretty frustrating. I have the same meaning as you when I say stop designing for Commander as I’m sure the vast majority of others do. I don’t know if he’s being intentionally dishonest or if he just doesn’t get it still but it is 100% stop printing overstatted Commander cards that warp eternal formats and these ability soup engines-and-payoffs.

    Re: playtesting I wish they would come out and say what their playtesting process is. How many people are in each group, how long do cards get active testing, etc. Barring those details I kind of disagree that they can’t do more and while they definitely cannot catch everything, their process should be sufficient to not let a Nadu get by.