Haha, I love that. Good lesson there lol

I honestly don’t see a reason to ever unban them. These three have been proven to be unsuitable for the format, and if people really want to play them, I don’t see why they wouldn’t just be made available in Tier 4. Or some Tier that has no banned cards for the people who want to play that way.

Not to mention that these cards were the heart of the entire controversy that ended the Commander Rules Committee and caused the death threats to come out from some players. That alone would be enough to me to never bring these cards back to the format ever again.

I will secod MakePlayingCards.com as someone else mentioned. However, with the tariff situation this may end up being far too costly to do anymore. We will have to wait and see. I have used MPC a lot in the past and it’s always a great experience. The S33 is just like a Magic card.

If you just want to flat rate the cost and have the easiest experience, I would go with https://www.mtgproxy.com/. I’ve seen good youtube reviews of them and I’m about to order some PreModern proxies soon from here.

First off, I didn’t realize MaRo did this for Tempest too. This is awesome.

Tempest block is when I started but Urza’s block was my favorite. I was a little too young to go out and draft those sets but I remember following every spoiler and loving every card that came out in Saga, Legacy, Destiny. I also remember my peak excitement as a child was getting a USG booster box for Christmas and cracking a Gaea’s Cradle. Needed 4 of those for a deck and I didn’t have the $80 for a playset (lol).

Crazy that MaRo was the only designer for Urza’s Destiny. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what a designer does here, but that seems really short staffed at a time when the game was very popular.

Original Goblin General (Goblin Marshall) was very much like a Deranged Hermit and I think the tweak they made was better. I really liked the take he had on Echo + Death Triggers. I think that is just a great example of tradeoffs in the older game. It was a cool idea to staple cycling as a (2) + Sacrifice mechanic for permanents.

It would be pretty incredible if they brought Urza’s block draft to Arena for an event. I think that would definitely get be back playing regularly.

Through the Omenpath’s discussion here: https://mtgzone.com/post/1558394

Still can’t believe this is the digital plan for the Marvel set.

I think this is just insane and super confusing. Another huge indicator that the Marvel sets (and probably all of UB) should have never entered Standard. Just make them Commander-only, and you never have this problem. They could release certain UB sets to Arena and not have to push the others if there were digital licensing issues.

Now, instead, we have a huge break in paper/digital that will presumably last and repeat forever. This makes deck list sharing and importing more difficult. This makes watching the game much more difficult. This makes learning the limited environment much more difficult. This is just way confusing and way stupid imo. I guess it’s a huge win for Arena players who didn’t want Marvel in the game but that’s about the only positive I can come up with.

I think this has to be it. No way Marvel wants “Spider man card game” to turn up Arena first in search results over Marvel Snap. And this confused me when they first announced a Marvel set given that Snap was already a thing.

I think this is a win for Arena, but it will be super confusing not having the same card names/artwork across paper and digital especially for anyone who plays both. Have to learn everything twice I guess. Deck list importing just got a lot harder too.

Still, it’s made me much less interested in Standard given that it was nice to have a lower power format but now it feels almost as fast as other formats.

I remember heavily playing 4c Party back when it was in Standard and that was a viable deck in the format. It would not even get 1 win in the current meta by a long shot. Standard right now feels like what Modern was before Horizons and I just don’t think there exists a slow constructed format anymore. Nor do I think there will ever be one again.

Yea this is absolutely the direction they’re going. I feel like they desperately want to use AI art. They must be salivating at the cost savings from removing artists and set designers from the creative team. I can’t imagine the playerbase accepting that but who knows, they’ve/we’ve accepted everything so far.

Completely agree. I also think THB wasn’t tested outside of limited, and I think nothing was starting with WAR.

I can’t help but feel a lot of this could be fixed by creating a separate game. At first I thought UB should be the separate game, and I still do, but it’s clear Hasbro will never do that. Perhaps the best outcome could have been a game that returns to the old frame, the old release schedule, the old artwork, and the old play/card design philosophy and just sell it as Classic Magic or something. I would play the crap out of that game, and it would still even be Standard legal since all of the cards are compatible with the original game.

I know it’s just a dream at this point, but I think there is still a huge demand for something that’s basically premodern with new cards.

This is very well written, and one of the best pieces of content we have on this site. You are really amazing, Evu. I have much more to say in another comment after I finish reading everything in full, but I just wanted to echo that I’ve felt this way for about a year myself, probably longer. It’s just getting too hard to enjoy the game, and it’s even harder with MTGZone because I really WANT to enjoy the game and be active here and in other communities but I just can’t find the love anymore.

every card that sees play these days does so many things that it’s not even comparable to old standard anymore

This is my biggest gripe with design overall. It has shown its effects most predominantly in Standard since Standard was one of the slowest formats, but I think this problem has caused every format to get a lot faster.

I’m 100% with you, and I desperately want a non-limited, much slower format but I don’t know how on earth we get there with Hasbro/WoTC making it pretty clear that they care way more about sales revenue than the game being fun.

I personally think these are all positive bans. It’s unfortunate that bans are needed every cycle lately, but these are all good ones to me.

Breach is a card that should never have been printed. Yawgmoth’s Will was already insane, and printing the same thing for 1 mana cheaper was a huge mistake imo. This is just now finally catching up to reality. There was talk of banning Mox Opal but I think that is too premature when the obvious issue right now is Breach.

Sowing Mycospawn should never have been printed. And Troll was enabling too much efficiency for Blue/Black decks. I think both of those were the right hits right now. I know there’s tons of talk about banning Reanimate, Daze, Entomb, etc but these are absolutely the right hits for now in my opinion. I think waiting to see what a format without Troll looks like is better than hastily banning any of the core cards. I’d like to see Bowmasters gone next.

I personally think these are all positive bans. It’s unfortunate that bans are needed every cycle lately, but these are all good ones to me.

Breach is a card that should never have been printed. Yawgmoth’s Will was already insane, and printing the same thing for 1 mana cheaper was a huge mistake imo. This is just now finally catching up to reality. There was talk of banning Mox Opal but I think that is too premature when the obvious issue right now is Breach.

Sowing Mycospawn should never have been printed. And Troll was enabling too much efficiency for Blue/Black decks. I think both of those were the right hits right now. I know there’s tons of talk about banning Reanimate, Daze, Entomb, etc but these are absolutely the right hits for now in my opinion. I think waiting to see what a format without Troll looks like is better than hastily banning any of the core cards. I’d like to see Bowmasters gone next.

Enigma Jewel is one I personally specced on. I knew that card was busted beyond belief and made a dimir Jewel/Rats deck for Pioneer last year before the UB announcements. I have not played 1 game with the deck but at least there are marginal gains on the Enigma Jewel playset lol.

This was fantastic and so is Matt Nass. My main takeaway from this was with the lands in the deck, how much we could use Blood Moon in standard right now 😆 My mouth is salivating at the idea of punishing that mana base.

Reposting my comment with this account for visibility as it appears my mtgzone account still is not visible outside the instance.

Non-magic, but I may have to open up a discussion on the Lemmy hosting discord for this. I actually thought it was working after an update we applied but I’ll see what they and Andrew can help with.

I’m curious to know how many price increases and card or pack decreases have happened over the last 2-3 years. Hasbro’s insane requirement of WoTC to increase revenue 50% year over year, and WoTC’s constant pushing of all costs onto the consumer has gotten us to this point.

I’m also curious what this looks like even just 1 or 2 years down the line. 50% YoY is impossible to maintain, so what happens when they don’t hit the target? What happens when they decrease revenue for a quarter or fiscal year? What happens if it bears true that some UB sets are hits, and others are flops? What happens if we hit a recession?

They’ve traded the health of the underlying game for short term profits under the tenuous assertion that people will always continue to pay.

I have a lot of thoughts on this but I’ll keep it crazy short (lol).

First, that was incredible and I totally felt his excitement the whole time. However, what am I watching! Timeless has effectively now become Yugioh, and it’s not even a joke, that’s what Yugioh game play is like.

I started out really interested in Timeless as a format, but this is what you get when you take free interaction out of Legacy. It’s a joke format to me right now, and adding Chrome Mox makes it unplayable. I think it was unplayable before with the prevalence of combo decks, but this is truly something else. This guy won the game on the opponent’s upkeep without any lands in hand or in play…

I don’t think Wizards gives a shit really, they don’t care about 60 card constructed at all imo, but I can’t seem them adding Force of Negation in 2025 when it was actually needed in 2024. I’m very curious to know how big that Timeless playerbase is.