Is this the worst mechanic MTG ever made?
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Is this the worst mechanic MTG ever made?
Is this the worst mechanic MTG ever made?
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Still not as bad as venture into the dungeon
>venture
I genuinely can't believe they actually made an even worse version that forces everyone at the table to play the stupid mini game for the rest of the game once someone plays a single card that interacts with it.
The specifics of the bonuses aside, temptation by the Ring being all upside is such a ridiculous failure of flavor it qualifies as the worst mechanic for me. Apparently it being downside "felt bad" by playtesters, to which I say 1) good and 2) maybe rethink the entire idea instead of jamming it in like this and missing the point entirely.
right, black does "powerful effect with downside" all the time it cant have been that hard.
Really depends on what kind of "worst" you mean, OP. Worst as in busted powerful? Probably original Companion or Storm. Worst as in useless? Definitely not. Worst as in boring or unfun, I don't think so. I enjoyed the Ring tempts you mechanic at prerelease. Worst as in feeling out of place in Magic? Honestly I still don't think so, even if we ignore other Universe Beyond and Un-sets I think venturing into the dungeon is dumber.
I don't think the Ring mechanic is the WORST mechanic in any particular way. The flavor fail mentions is the worst part about it in my opinion.
This is the same company that saw "evil ring that drives people to self-destructive madness and betrayal" and thought it would be really cool to make a one-of-a-kind rainbow foil card hidden in one booster pack to encourage degenerate gamblers to buy cards by the truckload in hopes of winning that golden lottery ticket, like that wasn't the most fricking vile use of Tolkien's stories imaginable.
>greedy money grubbying corporation exploits its paypiggy customer base.
Imagine my shock.
Makes me wonder what the big man would have thought of it. Chris is raping his father's legacy.
Chris is dead, anon.
The only reason this happened at all is because Tolkien's estate is no longer in the control of his family.
Christopher hadn't been capable of managing the estate since around 2015, and he died in 2020.
His daughter Rachel had been doing the real work in managing the estate since around then.
>woman takes over management
>franchise immediately goes to shit
color me shocked.
Chris has been dead for 4 years anon. He was the last line of defense against the cumsoomer tide. Lawd them Rangs would never have happened under his watch.
Not even close. The ring is complex in theory but in practice it's an aura that can't be removed and gets better over time. It's honestly not complicated at all, you just need a reminder card.
>Apparently it being downside "felt bad" by playtesters
If it had a real, threatening downside it would be unplayable outside of kitchen table and we'd be having the same conversation.
>If it had a real, threatening downside it would be unplayable outside of kitchen table and we'd be having the same conversation.
Isn't it already unplayable?
Besides, it doesn't need to be a massive downside. You could easily make the life loss on the last effect apply to all players.
you can do worse than "essentially just an aura enchantment", like Venture Into the Dungeon with the random bullshit you need to track through, Daybound where you have to count the number of spells per turn every turn instead of only when there's a werewolf on the board, Companion which was so busted they had to errata that shit and now first-printing Companion cards literally work differently than the card text says, or Stickers which would have been perfectly fine if they stayed an Un-set gimmick but the morons at wotc decided they should be legal for formats other than Un-set kitchen table limited.
the only notably bad thing with The Ring's Temptation is the flavor fail pointed out.
Black person if having an appreciable downside was enough to invalidate cards outside of kitchen table, the entire color black would not exist at tourneys.
What black cards with real downsides see play? The 6/6 demon that drains your opponent and is part of an A+B combo?
None because they don't print card with downsides anymore so you can just play all the best stuff without thinking. Arguably Liliana of the veil but she barely sees play and it was barely a downside when she did.
>Stickers which would have been perfectly fine if they stayed an Un-set gimmick but the morons at wotc decided they should be legal for formats other than Un-set kitchen table limited.
It really can't get worse than stickers.
Ideally the ring would be incredibly powerful, have a mechanic where it changes controller easily, and have a hideous downside whenever controlled by someone other than its owner
Perhaps the Ring would have the hideous downside all the time with Sauron being able to nulify it?
hate cards that mention other cards.
That's completely fair. The ring tempts you shouldn't even be a mechanic.
I think it's fine, but it should work more like how Monarch works. Where you get a bonus for being the Ring Bearer and opponents can claim the title by dealing combat damage to you.
No
I mean, if we were being thematically accurate than The One Ring card would only be able to be destroyed by MT Doom
>For its owner, it's an Aura with an alt win condition that triggers if it's in play for X turns (which don't need to be continuous)
>If it leaves play it goes to the opponent's hand
>While in your opponent's hand it functions as a Black Lotus or something, but after use it returns to its owner and advances their alt-win counter by multiple turns
>playtesters
>ummm so I play this card. Draw 15 cards and lose 1 life.
>umm wow. This card just feels bad to play. Why is the downside so bad?
Playtesters are fricking moronic and should never be listened to.
at least with something like the ring tempts you, you can summarize it in a way that’s easy to keep in your head, that being "one of their guys gets skulk and does a bunch of other bullshit”
You can understand on an intuitive level how to play against and around that once you’ve seen it actually play out. Venture just means ‘idk a bunch of random unrelated bullshit happens’
just look at this fricking atrocity, none of these effects have anything to do with one another whatsoever, it's just a random heap of vaguely useful effects
when your oppontent ventures into the dungeon, that could mean any one of 87 different things and only about 3 of them are impactful. Maddening
Every mechanic that can't be summed up into one or two words is shit and should be removed from the game. In fact I wish they'd create and support a format where only simple cards are allowed, no wall of text nonsense, no pie breaks and genuine disincentive to splash beyond spending 20 bucks on a single shocklands. No frickin wall of text cards, no fricking planeswalkers, no whale song cards that are intentionally broken to spurn on nerds to buy boosters. Just super lean, simple cards that are well designed. That's what everyone wants whether they know it or not. That's why commander became so huge. Because the concept of what Magic should be is and what it currently is is night and day. It should never have been allowed to get to a point where people can look at a 1 mana 1/2 with haste and their first thought is "meh".
isn't that just premodern?
not that there weren't some cards back then with a paragraph on them too, but they were a lot rarer. and most of those things you mention didn't exist. and a lot of the worst offenders are explicitly banned or got much simplified oracle text anyway.
obviously wotc will never "support" that, because they intend to keep printing this kind of crap and they want you to play it, but it's a format that people play.
>commander
>the format that originally gained popularity for being a slower, bulkier format where the wonky, complex cards that were to innefficient to play anywhere else could see play
>got huge because people liked lean design
I agree with you that the games got significant mechanics bloat but you're totally fricking wrong. The mechanics bloat is BECAUSE they're pandering to edhtards who love that shit.
The problem is that this game already exists, it's just "Magic a few years at most post-release". CCG:s will inevitably become bloated since there's just so many simple variations of effects you can make before you have to get creative and that leads to more and more complex cards.
Power-creep has always been a problem and Wizards is well aware of it. Problem is they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. Cards were purposefully starved of power after Ravnica block and it almost killed the game. They pushed the panic button and made Eldrazi and rode on the success of power-creep until now. I'm a full believer that all TCG suffer the same issue, if you are constantly pumping out cards the only incentive is to buy stronger cards every circuit and since the whole point of having a TCG is for people to buy cards then it's always going to occur. Only answer is to switch off to new TCG or suffer from power-creep which warps the starting gameplay intentions of any TCG as a whole.
I play enough commander to sincerely believe power creep is actually complete bullshit of an argument. MTG doesn't have power creep, it just has a proliferation (ha!) of more complex interactions over time. Some of the most bullshit combos in the game that result in infinite loop wins is because some card printed in the 80's interacts with something from 2003 which gets popped off by a card from 2023 which results in an instant win.
>power creep dosen't exist.
Yeah sure anon. 20 years ago this would be a rare card that people would use alot. Now it's chaff.
20 years ago would be... darksteel?
Nah. It wouldn't be playable in combo winter.
NTA but that card is not that good. It's not gonna see play in pauper and it's only impressive because it's like a lorwyn uncommon in a common slot. Which is absolutely a sign of power creep, but that would never be a rare.
>that would never be a rare.
You do know that Savannah Lion's used to be a decent card, right? Its a rare. This reckless lackey absolutely would have gotten play, and yes, it could have been a rare at one point in time.
>20 years ago
my homie 20 years ago this would be beyond irrelevant thanks to urza saga.
>moron confidently writing about a concept he fundamentally misunderstands
You didn't need to include that you're a coomander player, your post makes that abundantly clear.
I disagree. I've been playing since Odyssey block, if you don't think that power-creep is a real issue with real consequences then you haven't been playing magic long enough.
>power creep ia a bullshit argument
Yet the same set wouldn't even print something on the level of counterspell or lightning bolt, let alone moxen or timewalk.
Really makes you think (if you have a brain)
I guess yugioh and Pokemon doesn't have powercreep either, since they don't allow Pot of Greed or Professor Oak.
I have no idea, I don't play those games. Maybe come up with a real argument and learn how to express it in English?
He’s making the point that extreme powercreep is reserved mostly for creature/monster cards who constantly get bigger and bigger statlines and more and more text abilities.
Whereas spell/noncreature cards have a tendency to be powerful in early sets (like pot of greed, oak, bolt, ritual, swords, etc) and then become dramatically toned down in a sort of reverse power creep.
All 3 big TCGs followed this pattern, probably because it’s harder to balance noncreature cards since they have no formal, written “stats” like hp, atk/def, power/toughness etc
Both his grammar and expression were on point, you're just stupid. Literally everyone else got his comparison.
Maybe you should just have a nice day, it seems you have nothing of value to contribute.
Imagine being so far up your own ass like this while denying reality.
>I play enough commander to sincerely believe power creep is actually complete bullshit of an argument.
Lol
Lmao even
Did you start playing at ravnica allegiance? There's no way you don't think power creep is a thing unless you jumped into this game during fire design
So true
I always thought they should release a set called MTG Remastered or something with different cardbacks which would just be an idealized version of the game, with color pie being king and with certain mechanics/game rules being redone or being fine-tuned based on what we've learned over the last quarter century
It's what most players want. Thing is nobody with influence cares enough anymore to try and create a streamlined alternative. EDH became a thing because nerds 25 years ago loved the game but hated how streamlined it was getting with only power creep meta cards being worth playing and pie breaks making colors/tribes irrelevant, so they sat around hashing up new rules that would let the mundane cards have a chance to shine. Those type of people no longer exist in higher up parts of the hobby, even if they're just local judges. The tryhards have taken over, and instead of analyzing why they like MTG but hate the p2w gg by turn 2 60 card standard everyone who doesn't want to or can't just buy victory flocks into Commander. Any innovation now has to come from WOTC itself, and given the absolute state of its ban boards do you really think they're capable of coming up with anything good?
yes
>like MTG but hate the p2w gg
This is why I stopped playing Magic back during Arabian Nights.
>MTG Remastered or something with different cardbacks which would just be an idealized version of the game
>It's what most players want
To add my two cents, I'll mention that it would have to be without mythic rarity to avoid power creep/pay-to-win, and probably w/out planeswalkers. They MIGHT be be able to get away w/a few basic planeswalkers, but they'd have to be at the power level of the original Lorwyn ones, back when they were just rares.
>Zoomer attention span
I guarantee you "do A then B then C" is easier to understand than Banding.
moron
He's right though
mtg is reaching a mechanics saturation point
>mtg is reaching a mechanics saturation point
what, did you just time travel here from the year 2000?
bloating so far past the mechanics saturation point that the game forms a singularity that pulls in all other games is mtg's whole identity. they've reskinned the same card dozens of times in some cases, and every new set has at least a couple cards that read like memes from old un-sets making fun of excessive rules.
I imagine there's probably some deck out there somewhere whose wincon is bloating the game with so many mechanics to track that your opponent would rather concede then play one more round with you.
that's fairy theme parks. My opponent's turn in commander took THIRTY FRICKING MINUTES to resolve EACH TIME.
He LOST
>playing edh last weekend with bros.
>friend playing a slightly modified enchantment precon
>after turn 4, each turn he takes longer and longer.
>because we play heavy interaction the game goes into turn 8+
>took 40 mins to resolve his last turn
>loses after he passed turn to combat damage
He did nothing but draw cards and play more enchantments that let him draw more cards.
I hate this shit so much. I don't mind one thirty minute turn if it finishes the goddamn game but when your turns are long and you lose anyway, you need to frickoff from that deck. Hate that shit even more than poison spam.
Disagree. I like battles.
companion is worse, multiplayer mechanics like initiative are worse.
Planeswalkers
Companion is worse. No other mechanic so perfectly summarizes the failings of the last 8 years of Play Design.
initiative.
intiative is just Edge mechanic from Jyhad, 1994 idea invented by Garfield himself
I just profoundly dislike how every other new mechanic is some dumb minigame that makes no sense outside of its own set.
>venture into the dungeon
>take the initiative
>the Ring tempts you
>when day becomes night or night becomes day (this one is especially offensive because you have to track it for the rest of the fricking game)
>investigate
>it becomes solved
>cloak the top two cards of your library
>it becomes plotted
>when you commit a crime
This shit has to stop.
Isn't investigate just "create a token that lets you draw a card"
Yes, but what bothers me about that one is that none of the other artifact tokens are keyworded that way.
Cloak and Plotting are just retools of Morph (or maybe Manifest but that's still a decade old mechanic that never got a full-scale revisit) and Fortell respectively.
The problem is that a lot of mechanics that WoTC made through last few years were either over-complicated and non-intuitive crap that works only online and in paper game or were just lame twists of already existing mechanics.
They had few cool ideas - keyword tokens actually make fricking sense and feel like expansion of already existing concept. Ward is just watered down Hexproof but the flexible cost open some interesting design spaces. various small Artifact tokens are cool but tbh there's too much of them.
Also Mark Rosewater should have his head cut off and shoved up his ass not only for creating stickers but also for defending them and basically insulting players for rightfully calling them shitty mechanic. Holy frick what a piece of fricking shit loser.
I prefer the shitty mechanics that are too lame or theme-heavy to ever be more than a one-and-done over the shitty mechanics that keep getting printed.
Treasures need to stop, should have never been an evergreen mechanic and they allow for degenerate play and devalue color identity more than any other.
At this point the only fix is to errata treasure tokens to be one colorless mana instead of one mana of any color for them to actually be reigned in.
One colorless mana, and they always enter tapped.
It's hard to say what's the worst mechanics, some are worse for different reasons.
Like Day/Night is easy to understand but is a pain because both players have to keep track of it even if you only have one creature using it. At least the ring doesn't matter once they kill your ringbearer.
Or you get stuff like Companion, with a card so strong it was BANNED IN VINTAGE and they had to just completely change the rules of the game.
Or stickers, the initiative, discover, eminence, "activate once each turn"; even the new "plot" is bound to be broken "let me cast whatever I want and still have open mana for interaction"
I never got the "Day and Night is hard to keep track of" shit. No it's not, it's extremely simple and mostly unimportant unless one side is running a pure werewolf deck. Day/Night's problem is its trigger is ridiculously restrictive. If you're trying to run werewolves you have to hold off on casting ANY spell your whole turn (including putting something out there to become a werewolf in the first place), totally gimping yourself and giving the strategic initiative to the other player in order to give your creatures what are effectively a very few +1/+1 or +1/+0 counters, which won't matter because when it's your enemy's turn if they cast two spells it goes right back to being day again on your turn so you're right back to square one. You either have to hope your opponent doesn't cast any spells, or just one spell, sitting around juggling your wolves warforms with a creature/color type that relies on fast early game aggro to win. As soon as someone gets three lands down it's a near guarantee that it will never ever be night again for longer than one turn and rarely on yours. It's a mechanic that actively punishes red/green for putting creatures out on the field. lol lmao
Day and Night sucks ass because it's irrelevant. Either the other guy's deck is so shit you can win with a pile of untransformed humans after having 3-5 turns of free reign to out enough out there to matter, or the other guy's deck is competent or better and your humans sit around all game because it's extremely easy to turn night back to day and tempo will usually make it so that you're the one wasting your turns not casting anything trying to make it night because your opponent will never not cast spells unless they quite literally have nothing in hand to cast and if that's the case it's almost always a sign that they've run off so hard that their board is already full of shit that will skin your wolves.
>you have to hold off on casting ANY spell your whole turn
That's where instants, flash and channel come in.
Yeah just fill up your aggro Gruul deck full of a creature type that totally lacks flash and channel and use instants.
At that point don't even bother with the werewolves and use literally any other creature type.
>Well it took me perfect card draw and tutoring and mana ramp and doing so left me wide open and has given board control to my opponent when I'm supposed to be playing an aggressive aggro deck but I was able to get out the one single werewolf with flash on turn 2-3 hope I draw another one this turn so I can do so again next turn while I sit here not doing anything this turn to trigger night again
If you're filling up your aggro werewolf deck with flash creatures and instants you may as well take the next logical step and remove the werewolves entirely and replace them with goblins and elves.
It shouldnt exist in the game because this licsenced IP garbage should never been added in the first place
It would have been a lot better if it was a separate product line within the MTG ruleset. Make them gold bordered or something, these cards have no place in regular MTG formats. Also black Aragorn is an insult.
Black Aragorn is the least thing I care about, its just the fact that you can unironically have Optimus Prime fighting Gandalf fighting Ken&Ryu fighting Dr fricking Who who is wailing on Ian Malcolnm while Marneus Calgar is busy teabagging the corpse of Dogmeat before he goes to the graveyard and this is supposedly a game of Magic The Gathering™ and dont forget that they made a Un set with actual constructed legal cards and what the actual frick happened man
this is the ultimate showdown of the ultimate destiny
And remember that Post Fricking Malone has a card so "real person" isn't actually ruled out
I'd totally make a Mr Rogers group hug deck.
That makes me think, would Sisay be the commander to use or Kenrith if you wanted to make the ultimate pop-culture goyslop deck basically just jamming as many IP character legendaries as possible. Oh cant forget to ad a dungeon card and attraction and stickers too.
I'm no LOTR expert but isn't being tempted by the Ring supposed to be a bad thing? Why are these all positive effects?
New Players don't like downsides and they're the only customers wotc are interested in (because the whales will buy anything with a magic logo on it anyway regardless of quality)
Escalate was a popular mechanic despite being pure downside. This myth that downsides are disliked is because of wotc's shitty design formula where they take a card that's already bad, then add a downside on top of that. Even the weakest escalate card would be very powerful if you removed escalate. The same can't be said for something like echo.
Any card that requires outside resources like this to be played is shitty design and tells me that the play testers are using a digital client. Thats the ring, monarch, day/night and enter the dungeon.
The new Jace card also means we are going to have to start tracking the turn number as well... Wizards are fricking moronic or creatively bankrupt.
Monarch only requires outside support in the same way literally every card that uses counters or tokens (which have been around since forever) does. You just need some kind of token to pass around to remind who currently has monarch. I've seen people use face-down basic lands, dice, or an empty deckbox for that purpose.
My group has passed around a crown, a Pharaoh hat, and the Millennium Puzzle as a monarch symbol.
>card of the one ring
>all it does is benefit you
I know the movies are long but maybe they could have read a synopsis or something.
I like it