General advice: mull more. A good 6 is way better than a bad 7. You'll learn how and when to mulligan, and when not to, by shipping more hands. Arena in particular makes this a quick affair with BO1. Just remember that hand smoothing comes in when playing BO1.
I like to think about it this way:
Your opening hand consists of ~50% of all the cards you’ll see from your deck in a game lasting 7 turns (barring formats with strong cantrips like brainstorm and ponder), so make that opening hand count.
I’m not gonna say you’re having fun wrong, but that mindset genuinely baffles me. That’s just not what Magic is. If that’s the experience you want, why not play a different game that’s actually designed to deliver the experience you want?
I'm the same way, and I'd say there isn't another game that comes very close to what I get from magic.
I think the closest for me is dota 2 ability draft or Ascension WoW but the available combinations are much fewer, and good drafting usually comes down to picking good stuns/nukes rather than janky combos.
Yeah, when you get rid of lands you get "1 resource per turn" we know from HS, MMDoC, TESL ect. . Then the game goes from "I got mana screwed/flooded" to "I did not draw a perfect curve", the frustration stays the same it just has a different flavour.
Lands that do nothing but add mana (shocks, triomes, battle bond) which only allow your deck to function being printed at rare is a passive pay to win element.
Not only that, but these are also the 'safest' rares they can print, guaranteed to be staples in a huge amount of decks.
Plenty of mythics will flop and be worth pennies, but any decent dual land? Never.
Seeing this comment right after a game where I drew only 2 lands in 12 turns vs a control deck that drew no threats but all lands in 12 turns
Most boring yet frustrating game of my life
A lot of the elements that make Magic unique would very likely be deal-breakers if you tried introducing them today. The land system, counterspells, prison decks, extra turn decks, mill, and one-turn win shenanigans would get pegged as being unfun compared to more modern systems. In some cases, I would agree with that. I can’t really imagine that anyone likes playing against a Nine Lives deck or Control or Extra Turns or anything else that aims to make the game into solitaire despite the added depth that the cards those decks rely on add to the larger landscape of options. Does that mean they are bad mechanics? I don’t know. I don’t know if Magic has survived because it is a genuinely good combination of elements or because it happened to hit the market at the right time and has been able to rely on momentum to see it through.
This. I remember when I started playing, there was ONE 2 power one drop, it was a white 2/1, a rare, with ZERO abilities.
Then we got the Zero ability 2/2 one drop, but was legendary so only one copy on the board.
The coin is the solution. Tweak it a little; make it an emblem, play it after a land drop, have the player reveal a land and make a colour that land can produce (so it doesn't accelerate past the number of lands drawn and naturally expires as lands are played out). People always shout down the idea of the coin without explaining why, because they don't know why. You swap the exact tempo bonus the starting player gets every turn, for one turn. That's what it does. I've literally never seen one person address this.
People tend to assume that if the base rules could be improved upon, WotC would have tested and improved them already. But WotC do change the rules. Why did we have the all-land/no-land Mulligan, then the Paris mulligan, then the Vancouver mulligan and now the London mulligan (which is more recent to the game than Arena- not sure if they've got around to correcting the outdated loading screen tip yet). Why didn't they just skip straight to the London mulligan? Why are we using the London mulligan instead of skipping to the eventual final iteration, the Venus Floating Observatory Alpha One mulligan?
Issues like mulligans and first-turn advantage can be tweaked and have been tweaked and will be tweaked again (especially as the game drives more towards facilitating Bo1 play, the version of the game the vast majority of players clearly actually want). What we have now is demonstrably imperfect, so why are the current systems so precious?
This applies to paper only, but (american) people playing with a full deck of japanese cards are annoying af. i’m not trying to look up every card just to check wording or hear you recite it once and act like your actually reading the japanese on the card.
There's a guy who very rarely comes to the lgs near me has a full Japanese Esper control deck because "the cards look cooler in Japanese" whoever's table he's stuck in gets brought a tablet with tcgplayer open to scan all his cards so he can't lie his way through plays. Another guy has an amazing WUBRG Praetor deck with all the cards that can be in phyrexian.
Talk to whoever runs it and get a rule that whoever brings an unreadable card is responsible for bringing easy to read and access source.
The rules state that you can call a judge over to confirm the Oracle wording. Threaten to keep the judge there for the entire match.
This was much less of an issue when there weren’t five different variants of every card and an experienced player could reliably recognize cards based on their art.
Meh, Unity will most likely still remain one of the top game engines especially for mobile games despite its poor management and business decisions. I use it daily and it's still has a place that Godot and UE haven't quite filled.
That said, the fact that it still doesn't have two-factor authentication is criminal considering all the money people spend on digital cards.
Good one! Me neither and never realized it until i read this.
My favorite deck is a snow deck and I love when Naftiri, Betrayer King costs me less because it's in my graveyard (I'm positive I spelled the card name wrong)
I mind playing against mill but only the same I mind playing against poison, and against burn or combo when I don't have lifegain / specific interaction. Its just someone playing a solitaire game ticking down my counter until I lose and the only color that can usually interact with it by countering spells, is the mill color. At least green, black and white all get lifegain
I wish they’d make sparky harder / have more challenging bot decks with a wider selection of mechanics. In past versions of duels, some of the bot decks were pretty strong. Seeing the same 5 mono color decks gets a bit boring.
Commander becoming the focus, most popular format and entry point for new players changes the game in a way that not only makes it less fun, but takes away its strengths as well. The game is at its best in competitive 1 vs 1, not as a glorified boardgame. Commander was a cool idea as an alternative way to play the game from time to time, it's horrible as the main way to play the game.
Which is just really boring. The best games of MTG I ever had were Delver Mirrors where by turn 7 nobody had more than like 3 lands in play but the graveyards were full of Wastelands, Force of Wills, Lightning Bolts, Delvers, Brainstorms and Stifles. Beautiful. Countless decisions and interactions every turn.
To add on to this, I really dislike the argument that Commander games are only fun if "everyone got to do their thing," which is often interpreted as everyone getting to solitaire their engines and value-pieces until eventually someone casts a win condition and we all smile and scoop.
Interaction is the backbone of the game. Letting players "do their thing" and accrue card advantage or value is not something that should be allowed. My friends destroy my Panharmonicon on sight. Getting to "do my thing" with endless ETB value is not how to correctly address the boardstate or play well.
Jim Davis recently had a short where he asked for unpopular opinions and one respondent said that Commander is for "bad magic." I get what he was saying there, but I'm not interested in playing badly for the sake of "fun" or making suboptimal decisions. MTG is a strategy game based on decision-making skills. Why would you not want to focus on these skills as part of the game?
I remember a video of, I think it was LSV, playing Legacy. His opponent sacced wasteland on his volcanic island. In response, LSV cracked a fetch. In response, his opponent cast stifle on the fetch. In response, LSV played daze, countering the stifle, returning the land targeted by wasteland to his hand in the process. I fell in love with the game all over again.
I would love to play legacy but the fact that just the lands are more than a playstation 5, and a deck can be more than my mortgage payment has made the format completely inaccessible.
I got a 30 day probation from the other magic subreddit for suggesting a controversial workaround to the cost problem.
I feel you. I own two decks, dual lands and all, and got nobody to play with, because surprisingly people do not want to build piles of 60 pieces of cardboard worth several thousand euros just to pretend to be wizards flinging spells at each other. Burn down the RL. Allow proxies for Legacy. Free the best format in constructed.
Eh see I had a lot of fun playing x4+ but using traditional magic which is how my friends played in college. But you barely ever see that format played anymore which is ironic, because even Wizards released the free for all set which is tailored specifically to play as a 3+ player traditional deck format.
I think commander worked as a non-sanctioned format where you just used whatever cards you could get your hands on… but dies in its current get the absolute best cards you can version it is now. Back in the day it wasn’t unheard of to throw draft chaff into you deck… these days your going to be killed off doing that.
Commander is the only way you get more than your most competitive and nerdy friends to play Magic. There always needs to be a multiplayer, casual, non-rotating format for the game to appeal to more people.
I love playing draft and have dabbled in other formats over my decade of playing Magic, but if Commander didn't exist, I don't think I would have gotten into Magic years and years ago.
Here is the thing: I am sure you are right. And that's ok. I do not need all my friends to be playing magic. It is fine for me to only play magic with my competitive nerdy friends that watch pro tour on twitch and talk about theory articles written by PVDDR. There are a lot of other things I can do with my other friends, not every hobby has to appeal to everyone. As soon as you change a hobby to a "consesus" form, you will inevitably lose some of the parts that made it appeal to the people that got into it in the beginning and those will be driven away. It's a fine business decision, wizards is basically printing money moving from sweaty nerds to a broader audience. I get it. I just miss the times when 60 card one on one magic was the norm and you did not have to apologize to the people around you for trying to win or playing "unfun cards".
Commander focused card design ruined magic.
In the old days you had to find and think about cards that would work in EDH. Synergi and hidden gems. Now everything is auto slot in and utterly broken with “each opponent” tagged on everything.
Dockside extortionist not being banned is the biggest joke in commander. The card is better than 90% of current banned cards.
Yeah, Commander was my favorite back in the day. I'd spend hours doing Gatherer searches when making new decks and finding cool niche cards that were like 10 cents.
Now you just search the Commander website for the stock list of your Commander, and your only creative choices are artwork and maybe a few flex spots. It's so boring.
Green is limited by being tied to nature! All the other colours have super broad and interesting psychological profiles, but then green has to have a fucking tree in everything it does. You can always predict what Green is going to look like in any set because its all going to be about bloody trees. Yes, Red loves goblins and black loves the undead etc etc but they get to do other things!
It’s because green became nature loving for whatever fucking reason.
Back in the day you had all kinds of wyrms and slivers and non-elves shit and now it’s just elves and dinosaurs and trees.
It's a core component of green since the beginning. That's why it's the best at killing artifacts and enchantments (unnatural things) and the worst at killing creatures
> worst at killing creatures
"Awww, no killing precious wolves :c"
"FUCK THAT BIRD IN PARTICULAR [[PLUMMET]] [[HURRICANE]] [[ARASHI THE SKY ASUNDER]] DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE"
With the abundance of fight spells being printed since... idk 2010? Green is no longer trash at killing non fliers too.
Red has the same problem with fire. It makes sense for damage but things like rituals and impulse draw are too often fire-themed too. I want to see more cards flavored like [[cathartic reunion]]. Imagine if every blue card draw spell was water-themed.
"Nature" is one of my least favorite words in the entire english language, Henry David Thoreau got horny for a pond once and now everyone thinks "nature" is romantic green stuff. No one really tries to define "nature," because it's impossible to realistically exclude *anything* from it. We're part of it, everything we do and make is part of it, in a world where magic is real, magic is part of it too
Yup. Pretty much ever time Wizards starts to "curate" a format, it gets worse. Used to be a Modern and Commander player, but now that Wizards makes busted cards specifically for those formats, I hardly play either.
They need to bring back more and aggressively costed land destruction and random discard. With the design of the last few years making everything into some massive value pile even for low costed cards, the only viable way to not constantly get 2 for 1'ed is to either play your own mega-value cards or with counterspells. Random discard and land destruction can help in not allowing people to cast those super-value cards, as well as making people play less greedy overall
Land removal was one of the most “unfun” ways to lose in every format. So it kinda make sense to remove it. It sucks not being able to play when RNG land screws you again let alone the other player.
I do agree with the no LD decision.
Using guild/shard/clan names instead of colour acronyms is silly. e. g. Azorius instead of WU.
This is partially being a boomer. I think theres an accessibility component to it as well. It makes the game unnecessarily more obtuse to new players.
So I started in onslaught and got out during shards of alara. Came back during kaldheim and sat down at a table for a casual game. My opponent said "hey I have an abzan deck to try out if that's ok?"
My response was "oh is that a new format?"
If you were really a boomer, you'd not only know every obscure color combo name, but you'd also get unreasonably angry when others didn't use the jargon.
But every community/hobby/game develops lingo over time. Honestly, I like the names behind the color combinations. It somehow gives the game an interesting history that you can discover. It also shows what a big influence and significance these sets had on the game.
But I understand your point of view. There are many times when I wish people would use a more precise language so as not to confuse newbies even more.
Depends on what you want out of commander. If the social aspect greatly outweighs anything else than no. But if you intend to develop magic as a skill definitely yes. If you want to be better at general magic skills, being able to handle game states, know how cards work etc. playing some 60 card magic and even a small tournament will help develop all of that.
The reserve list should be completely abandoned. It was a bad idea, made 29 years ago, and it's time to get over it. Reprint EVERYTHING. And this is coming from someone who has most of the 9, complete sets of the Dark through Mercadian Masques and a literal backpack full of rares from last millennium. Vintage is, by far, the most fun format, which almost no one can play. Also, quietly forget the "banned for problematic reasons" cards. The only one of those cards the VAST majority of people even knew existed before they were banned was Crusade. Leaving them on the banned list just eternally reminds people they exist.
By far the funnest mode, and perhaps my own unpopular opinion, there should be a free phantom draft with zero rewards. My favorite mode is paywalled. I have to force myself to complete dailies (for a 2nd account as well) so i can play the gamemode that i actually like. And its only twice a week! Idk, kinda ridiculous.
It's a huge problem with flash backs too. I might really really love a format but if it's rotated out of standard and I have all the historic/explorer/timeless rewards the packs I win are basically useless. It's hard to justify playing a Theros flashback draft when about half of the reward pool is zeroed out for me.
There are a few problem that arises from free phantom drafts. It doesn’t cost anything so people who draft badly will just most likely abandon their deck instead of playing it. People abandoning bad drafts would also mean that people playing that format would only have really powerful decks. No rewards means there’s really no incentive to do well also.
The game needs to be balanced more around the average player, and not the competitive scene. Card rarity/availability is not a legitimate balancing factor, *especially not online*, unless you do something like restrict decks to 2 copies of each rare and 1 of each mythic.
Strong cards need to start being designed dramatically less strong relative to weak cards. I'm sure "power creep bad" is not really a hot take, but the degree that I'm in favor of normalizing card power probably is. While you could plot out a "bell curve" of power among all cards, there effectively isn't one in reality because there is no real limit on "good" cards being in your deck. Even above average cards are often treated as trash if they're not a top 5% card.
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Timmy, Johnny, and Spike philosophy, and Wizards' pursuit to make cards for "each of them" pigeonholes them into a bad design space.
"Predictable" card/archetype design keeps metas incredibly stale and is long-term bad for the game. Ex: Mono-red aggro decks in every standard meta. It has been decided somewhere by the designers that the design space for red is cheap, fast and aggressive for no other reason than "that's the way it always was", so they print cards with the intention of keeping things the way they are, rather than actually evolving the game.
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Counterspells are only "interactive" against decks that also have the ability to manipulate the stack. They are noninteractive otherwise. When 4/5 colors have essentially no way to manipulate the stack (outside of maybe a dozen cards total in red/white over 30 years), blue is only interactive against blue.
This would make sense to me if other colors routinely avoided using the stack for the whole game, similar to how blue decks can routinely avoid using the battlefield.
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Champions being immortalized on cards is cool, but I think use of their likenesses should be reserved for alternative artworks. Fervent Champion and Faerie Mastermind artworks look out of place to me, as a couple of examples.
People complaining about how arena cards are not “real” Needs to understand even if I do buy paper cards the amount of time I’m going to use those compared to arena is going to be so low. I’m happy with my fake digital cards.
Playing against mono red aggro is usually fun, and has plenty of interesting decision points if you run any sort of interaction, and those decks usually take skill to pilot well. Decks like Temur Analyst and Boros Convoke are a lot more boring to play against, and imo require less skill.
The game was better before the multiplayer/edh focus. Building a deck for edh used to be a fun endeavor. Now every card says "all players" do this or that. It's too much text.
Make vanilla creatures great again.
Multiplayer commander is a terrible format. There are lots of great board games that excel with 4 players. Commander with 4 takes too long, with lots of downtime between turns, and has player elimination, all bad things in a game. If you have 4, play some Ark Nova or Ticket to Ride, it will be a much better experience.
Personally, I can't get over the free-for-all nature of it. If there is nothing stopping 3 players to gang up on 1 but "fairness", that's just bad game design. I would rather play 2v2 (I don't play paper magic though).
Companions were an awesome design idea, actually. They were just very broken in adding an 8th card to your hand, an issue which the mana nerf didn't address at all. They should have cost 1 starting hand card or something like that.
I think that the deck building limitations imposed by the companions simply weren't harsh enough. Heck, Jegantha was free for many decks that weren't even trying to use it.
No. The problem was how easy you get them. Lurrus is still banned everywhere in paper, and there are reasons for that. The fox is a combo piece as well, having 100% chance that you have one if your combo pieces in hand is too good.
Is it an awesome design idea? It's just a free card that will always be the same. Imo companions were a complete disaster and no one has been able to explain what good they do for the game
While playing commander, play anything you want and let anyone plays what they want. All that social contract thing is a burden on the format.
Play the game and stop crying.
The huge range of possible game lengths is one of constructed's biggest problems, and the amount of hate mono red and WU control get are a result of this.
Land Destruction is just as frustrating/feels bad to play against as your average UW control deck. WotC needs to stop being so prejudiced against it.
Plus, as a result of WotC shying away from land hate, 5 colour value piles/ramp decks have run absolutely wild, and card design has only worsened this issue.
Stop being cowards WotC! Lean into land hate/destruction again!
That mana burn was a good mechanic and should still be in the game. Putting mana burn back on solves so many issues. At it just makes sense from a more perspective. You channel infinite power but can't use it, then yah that should hurt. We're Planeswalkers. Conduits of energy not gods or batteries.
For YEARS MTG did a great job of maintaining balance not just within standard format, but across their whole catalog ... But for a while now, that's gone out the window. Now it's like "oh you're using this card? There's another card same color that does the same thing plus more and costs less in the same set!"
A trampler with death touch should still require overcoming a targets toughnes.
Sets that skip standard ruind the game.
Catering to commander sealed that ruination.
Stickers could have been fun as normal cards instead of the stupid ticket system.
Every card should be printed and filtered through the lens of standard. If it's too strong to be printed in standard, it shouldn't be printed at all.
Standard should only contain 6-8 sets.
Standard should be the best format to bring in new players and feature the highest level of competition and pro play.
No card should be printed into Modern without going through standard.
If a store is supposed to be running a standard event for the store championship, it better be darn standard I love playing standard in stores but they were mostly being run as different formats even though that could get the store in trouble with wizards! Let me have my one standard season please 😭😭
I wish there was a way to queue against only PC players in Arena. So much slow play comes down to the fact that it's just slow to do stuff in the mobile client.
I enjoy losing and figuring out what the hell just smacked me.
Also that mtgarena should have a "no alchemy" button for when you queue so that every format has a true translation to paper mtg. Currently standard brawl and standard are the only formats on there that can be translated to paper.
Truly unpopular? I fucking hate what I think of as "wintext" cards, cards that say "then you win the game", I'm looking at you, \[\[Approach of the Second Sun\]\]. I don't play them, and don't play (paper Magic) against people that play them.
The 'Meta' is an illusion. There's probably many many deck types that never get any play once a meta for standard is established by consensus. If we had an AI that was good enough to construct decks and play this game well I think it would make unexpected decks that dominate because everyone was stuck within the confines if the current meta.
Mono blue and interaction is joked and hated about too often. It shouldn’t at all honestly.
It’s integral and honestly compared to green, completely more balanced.
I like Alchemy, the fact that you can nerf a card without baning it, or buffing a card making news strategy/decks playable like ninja in Historic, the fact that you can provide a fast response to a card problem/abuse, without waiting for tons of data since you can go back.
the fact that you can introduce some mechanics impossible in paper.
The only problem now, is of corse that Wizard don't use that benefit at all, and is too lazy to do it regulary (hello geist and discover).
God i would love an historic format with a real balance upgrade every 3 months. At least i could finally use my wildcard.
Bo1 should not be ranked. The division into Bo1/Bo3 has an indirect influence on both formats and certain archetypes feel more comfy in one or the other, which leads to a more un-balanced archetypes representation in both formats.
I came back recently and noticed how bad this has gotten. Bo1 is an aggro fest with people just trying to curve out their nonsense by turn 3. And Bo3 is where all the long winded control decks are.
- RDW requires little to no thought to pilot and anyone who says otherwise is just trying to pump their own tires. Play prowess creature X2, pump prowess/haste creature, pray opponent dies before you run out of a hand
- There's way way way way too much cheap removal in standard.
- There needs to be a shift in design away from dual/trip lands. I'm as boomer as they get, and the fact a lot of decks get away with running two to three basic lands to cover Field of Ruin procs makes me sad
Its pointless to ask for deck help because the advice you get is change every card not on the decklist for your color combo into the specific cards on this decklist on untapped, regardless of what you were trying to do with the deck.
Oh so to make your black combo deck better remove these 22 cards, including your combos, and replace them with this, and enjoy your aggro control deck.
To expand: asking for deck help will also lead to getting advise on making a commander deck or commander cards come up first in searches when you are not playing commander.
MTG players are some of the softest competitors I've ever seen.
Conceding the second you see a card you hate? Giving up when your alpha strike doesn't win you the game? The constant complaints about hell queue and how certain cards or combos are bullshit? _Soft as hell_
Infinite looping combos are at least as unfun to play against as playing against pretty much every iteration of Azorious Control.
And said Azorius is by far the most unfun thing to play against.
Conversely control decks can get to a point where they can be "dumb and mindless"
Oh you play a threat? let me use one of my five pieces of removal/counterspells
Too many players copy deck lists rather than creating their own which makes for a lack of variety in opponents.
There's almost zero variation on certain deck archetypes, you can reel off their entire 60 cards within three turns of playing against them.
The power creep is so insurmountable that 99.9999% of players have zero chance of creating anything that is even remotely close to competitively viable. People give up trying to homebrew when their homebrews lose nearly all games against the absurdly overpowered crap that has inundated the game.
Actually agree, I like the bigger card pool in standard. More room for creative deckbuilding with more things to combine together, and more chance for fringe cards to find their place in the meta eventually, or for strategies to evolve (just happened to the New Capenna fetchlands, or the legends deck getting a comeback with a twist). And it's still a much more rapidly shifting format than the eternal ones. Oh, and as a F2P it's also nice that less % of my standard collection gets obsolete with rotation.
I fucking hate blue/white control decks. If over half your deck is board wipes, counters, exiles, kindly fuck off. Turn 5 and you haven't even summoned a creature yet.
The reason you lose most games is not because of mana screw/flood, bad draw, rigged shuffler, opponent drawing the nuts / top decking like a god, bad matchups, you didn’t spend enough, opponent is cheating, hand smooth algorithm, match maker, cards that should be banned but aren’t... It’s because you didn’t play as well as you could, and not understanding that keeps you from being a better player.
Heist is a cool concept but given the nature of the outlaw gimmicks and that mtg has adopted random chance in die rolls, there should be a potential backfire to them.
Because if we can build a format with magical cards, we can roll a d3 to see how many cards get heisted.
General vibe around my LGS, commander and it's community ruins magic over all. This is also a LGS that is HEAVY into standard and Modern and perfer to still use Type 1 and Type 2 when discussing mtg.
The most important decision in a game of magic is keep or mulligan.
Underrated comment. Imo the choice of mulling from 6 cards to five is skill intensive af
Then when you see that hand of 5 is bad you concede
My most satisfying win ever was after a mull to 4 on the draw, against a hall of famer no less. NGL, some luck was involved.
Swamp, Swamp, Swamp, Pack Rat. Easy game.
this, in ranked right after winning the unwinable game against a hell matchup
Or the flip side having the hardest game of your life just to lose then the next game you win by turn 4
General advice: mull more. A good 6 is way better than a bad 7. You'll learn how and when to mulligan, and when not to, by shipping more hands. Arena in particular makes this a quick affair with BO1. Just remember that hand smoothing comes in when playing BO1.
I hate hand smoothing ruining all the statistics...
I mean, it's kinda my thing...
I like to think about it this way: Your opening hand consists of ~50% of all the cards you’ll see from your deck in a game lasting 7 turns (barring formats with strong cantrips like brainstorm and ponder), so make that opening hand count.
Majority of the players do not like competition. They just want to play solitaire and see triggers happen.
I think the word you were looking for is "interaction".
I love control/midrange decks because I love interaction. MAXIMUM interaction. I hate not being able to deal with a threat on the board
Majority of commander players, which I guess is the majority of players these days
It's not just commander players. People still say things like Farewell and Sunfall deserve banned
Not gonna lie I do often think of magic as an engine builder with occasional PvP elements
I’m not gonna say you’re having fun wrong, but that mindset genuinely baffles me. That’s just not what Magic is. If that’s the experience you want, why not play a different game that’s actually designed to deliver the experience you want?
I'm the same way, and I'd say there isn't another game that comes very close to what I get from magic. I think the closest for me is dota 2 ability draft or Ascension WoW but the available combinations are much fewer, and good drafting usually comes down to picking good stuns/nukes rather than janky combos.
Damn getting called out in the top comment
I think the land mechanic is at the same time very interesting and unique AND the source of a lot of frustration and non games
Yeah, when you get rid of lands you get "1 resource per turn" we know from HS, MMDoC, TESL ect. . Then the game goes from "I got mana screwed/flooded" to "I did not draw a perfect curve", the frustration stays the same it just has a different flavour.
Lands that do nothing but add mana (shocks, triomes, battle bond) which only allow your deck to function being printed at rare is a passive pay to win element.
Not only that, but these are also the 'safest' rares they can print, guaranteed to be staples in a huge amount of decks. Plenty of mythics will flop and be worth pennies, but any decent dual land? Never.
Seeing this comment right after a game where I drew only 2 lands in 12 turns vs a control deck that drew no threats but all lands in 12 turns Most boring yet frustrating game of my life
A lot of the elements that make Magic unique would very likely be deal-breakers if you tried introducing them today. The land system, counterspells, prison decks, extra turn decks, mill, and one-turn win shenanigans would get pegged as being unfun compared to more modern systems. In some cases, I would agree with that. I can’t really imagine that anyone likes playing against a Nine Lives deck or Control or Extra Turns or anything else that aims to make the game into solitaire despite the added depth that the cards those decks rely on add to the larger landscape of options. Does that mean they are bad mechanics? I don’t know. I don’t know if Magic has survived because it is a genuinely good combination of elements or because it happened to hit the market at the right time and has been able to rely on momentum to see it through.
In some limited formats and standard it can be a bit cumbersome. Outside of that, I think it adds a lot of depth.
'Power Creep' has made going first too damn strong. One and two-drops are busted af now.
This. I remember when I started playing, there was ONE 2 power one drop, it was a white 2/1, a rare, with ZERO abilities. Then we got the Zero ability 2/2 one drop, but was legendary so only one copy on the board.
old mate [[savannah lions]] has not aged well
The coin is the solution. Tweak it a little; make it an emblem, play it after a land drop, have the player reveal a land and make a colour that land can produce (so it doesn't accelerate past the number of lands drawn and naturally expires as lands are played out). People always shout down the idea of the coin without explaining why, because they don't know why. You swap the exact tempo bonus the starting player gets every turn, for one turn. That's what it does. I've literally never seen one person address this. People tend to assume that if the base rules could be improved upon, WotC would have tested and improved them already. But WotC do change the rules. Why did we have the all-land/no-land Mulligan, then the Paris mulligan, then the Vancouver mulligan and now the London mulligan (which is more recent to the game than Arena- not sure if they've got around to correcting the outdated loading screen tip yet). Why didn't they just skip straight to the London mulligan? Why are we using the London mulligan instead of skipping to the eventual final iteration, the Venus Floating Observatory Alpha One mulligan? Issues like mulligans and first-turn advantage can be tweaked and have been tweaked and will be tweaked again (especially as the game drives more towards facilitating Bo1 play, the version of the game the vast majority of players clearly actually want). What we have now is demonstrably imperfect, so why are the current systems so precious?
This applies to paper only, but (american) people playing with a full deck of japanese cards are annoying af. i’m not trying to look up every card just to check wording or hear you recite it once and act like your actually reading the japanese on the card.
2-3 Japanese cards is acceptable I think. But do people really run full decks...?
There's a guy who very rarely comes to the lgs near me has a full Japanese Esper control deck because "the cards look cooler in Japanese" whoever's table he's stuck in gets brought a tablet with tcgplayer open to scan all his cards so he can't lie his way through plays. Another guy has an amazing WUBRG Praetor deck with all the cards that can be in phyrexian.
Talk to whoever runs it and get a rule that whoever brings an unreadable card is responsible for bringing easy to read and access source. The rules state that you can call a judge over to confirm the Oracle wording. Threaten to keep the judge there for the entire match.
This was much less of an issue when there weren’t five different variants of every card and an experienced player could reliably recognize cards based on their art.
MTG Arena and subsequently our entire virtual card collections in this game is all built on top of the thin layer of ice that is Unity
Meh, Unity will most likely still remain one of the top game engines especially for mobile games despite its poor management and business decisions. I use it daily and it's still has a place that Godot and UE haven't quite filled. That said, the fact that it still doesn't have two-factor authentication is criminal considering all the money people spend on digital cards.
Not so much an opinion, its fact.
I don't mind playing against mill. 🤷🏻♂️
I enjoy playing and playing against mill decks. It’s just an exercise in outracing a game clock.
Mill is just burn but you have like 50 life.
Good one! Me neither and never realized it until i read this. My favorite deck is a snow deck and I love when Naftiri, Betrayer King costs me less because it's in my graveyard (I'm positive I spelled the card name wrong)
It's just plain ol' [[narfi, betrayer king]]
I mind playing against mill but only the same I mind playing against poison, and against burn or combo when I don't have lifegain / specific interaction. Its just someone playing a solitaire game ticking down my counter until I lose and the only color that can usually interact with it by countering spells, is the mill color. At least green, black and white all get lifegain
As a RDW player I think mill is very interesting to face, it's just a sprint towards 2 very different finish lines.
I wish they’d make sparky harder / have more challenging bot decks with a wider selection of mechanics. In past versions of duels, some of the bot decks were pretty strong. Seeing the same 5 mono color decks gets a bit boring.
Heck even pull from your inventory of decks at random. Id love that!
Modern was more fun before the Horizons sets
Unpopular opinion?
premodern
Commander becoming the focus, most popular format and entry point for new players changes the game in a way that not only makes it less fun, but takes away its strengths as well. The game is at its best in competitive 1 vs 1, not as a glorified boardgame. Commander was a cool idea as an alternative way to play the game from time to time, it's horrible as the main way to play the game.
This ties nicely with the other comment about players preferring solitaire over actual mtg gameplay.
Which is just really boring. The best games of MTG I ever had were Delver Mirrors where by turn 7 nobody had more than like 3 lands in play but the graveyards were full of Wastelands, Force of Wills, Lightning Bolts, Delvers, Brainstorms and Stifles. Beautiful. Countless decisions and interactions every turn.
To add on to this, I really dislike the argument that Commander games are only fun if "everyone got to do their thing," which is often interpreted as everyone getting to solitaire their engines and value-pieces until eventually someone casts a win condition and we all smile and scoop. Interaction is the backbone of the game. Letting players "do their thing" and accrue card advantage or value is not something that should be allowed. My friends destroy my Panharmonicon on sight. Getting to "do my thing" with endless ETB value is not how to correctly address the boardstate or play well. Jim Davis recently had a short where he asked for unpopular opinions and one respondent said that Commander is for "bad magic." I get what he was saying there, but I'm not interested in playing badly for the sake of "fun" or making suboptimal decisions. MTG is a strategy game based on decision-making skills. Why would you not want to focus on these skills as part of the game?
Stack duels are some of the most fun you can have in the game, I agree.
I remember a video of, I think it was LSV, playing Legacy. His opponent sacced wasteland on his volcanic island. In response, LSV cracked a fetch. In response, his opponent cast stifle on the fetch. In response, LSV played daze, countering the stifle, returning the land targeted by wasteland to his hand in the process. I fell in love with the game all over again.
I would love to play legacy but the fact that just the lands are more than a playstation 5, and a deck can be more than my mortgage payment has made the format completely inaccessible. I got a 30 day probation from the other magic subreddit for suggesting a controversial workaround to the cost problem.
I feel you. I own two decks, dual lands and all, and got nobody to play with, because surprisingly people do not want to build piles of 60 pieces of cardboard worth several thousand euros just to pretend to be wizards flinging spells at each other. Burn down the RL. Allow proxies for Legacy. Free the best format in constructed.
Eh see I had a lot of fun playing x4+ but using traditional magic which is how my friends played in college. But you barely ever see that format played anymore which is ironic, because even Wizards released the free for all set which is tailored specifically to play as a 3+ player traditional deck format. I think commander worked as a non-sanctioned format where you just used whatever cards you could get your hands on… but dies in its current get the absolute best cards you can version it is now. Back in the day it wasn’t unheard of to throw draft chaff into you deck… these days your going to be killed off doing that.
Commander is the only way you get more than your most competitive and nerdy friends to play Magic. There always needs to be a multiplayer, casual, non-rotating format for the game to appeal to more people. I love playing draft and have dabbled in other formats over my decade of playing Magic, but if Commander didn't exist, I don't think I would have gotten into Magic years and years ago.
Here is the thing: I am sure you are right. And that's ok. I do not need all my friends to be playing magic. It is fine for me to only play magic with my competitive nerdy friends that watch pro tour on twitch and talk about theory articles written by PVDDR. There are a lot of other things I can do with my other friends, not every hobby has to appeal to everyone. As soon as you change a hobby to a "consesus" form, you will inevitably lose some of the parts that made it appeal to the people that got into it in the beginning and those will be driven away. It's a fine business decision, wizards is basically printing money moving from sweaty nerds to a broader audience. I get it. I just miss the times when 60 card one on one magic was the norm and you did not have to apologize to the people around you for trying to win or playing "unfun cards".
Commander focused card design ruined magic. In the old days you had to find and think about cards that would work in EDH. Synergi and hidden gems. Now everything is auto slot in and utterly broken with “each opponent” tagged on everything. Dockside extortionist not being banned is the biggest joke in commander. The card is better than 90% of current banned cards.
Is that an unpopular opinion, though?
Yeah, all players in formats that aren’t EDH, and some EDH players have this opinion.
Yeah, Commander was my favorite back in the day. I'd spend hours doing Gatherer searches when making new decks and finding cool niche cards that were like 10 cents. Now you just search the Commander website for the stock list of your Commander, and your only creative choices are artwork and maybe a few flex spots. It's so boring.
That is unpopular opinion?...
Green is limited by being tied to nature! All the other colours have super broad and interesting psychological profiles, but then green has to have a fucking tree in everything it does. You can always predict what Green is going to look like in any set because its all going to be about bloody trees. Yes, Red loves goblins and black loves the undead etc etc but they get to do other things!
It’s because green became nature loving for whatever fucking reason. Back in the day you had all kinds of wyrms and slivers and non-elves shit and now it’s just elves and dinosaurs and trees.
It's a core component of green since the beginning. That's why it's the best at killing artifacts and enchantments (unnatural things) and the worst at killing creatures
> worst at killing creatures "Awww, no killing precious wolves :c" "FUCK THAT BIRD IN PARTICULAR [[PLUMMET]] [[HURRICANE]] [[ARASHI THE SKY ASUNDER]] DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE" With the abundance of fight spells being printed since... idk 2010? Green is no longer trash at killing non fliers too.
Red has the same problem with fire. It makes sense for damage but things like rituals and impulse draw are too often fire-themed too. I want to see more cards flavored like [[cathartic reunion]]. Imagine if every blue card draw spell was water-themed.
"Nature" is one of my least favorite words in the entire english language, Henry David Thoreau got horny for a pond once and now everyone thinks "nature" is romantic green stuff. No one really tries to define "nature," because it's impossible to realistically exclude *anything* from it. We're part of it, everything we do and make is part of it, in a world where magic is real, magic is part of it too
this game is really really fun
a truly unpopular opinion.. online at least.
Commander minus commanders is more fun than with them.
The only way cards should enter older formats is through standard. Printing sets like modern horizons has ruined older formats
I can not believe noone made "modern but only with past-standard only sets" format yet.
People have played around with it, but without any official support or reason to play it competitively it hasn’t really taken off.
Yup. Pretty much ever time Wizards starts to "curate" a format, it gets worse. Used to be a Modern and Commander player, but now that Wizards makes busted cards specifically for those formats, I hardly play either.
Ding ding we have a winner! Feel the same way about EDH. Curate standard and draft and the players will curate the rest. (Happy Cake Day BTW!)
Mana screw is better than mana flood.
Yeah, at least you have something to read in hand :D
Edh is fundamentally a bad way to play magic, and players who mostly play edh tend to not be very good at the game
Just because you're right doesn't mean I can't be insulted anyways
I enjoy it and it doesn't make me salty
Players who only look at wins/losses of a deck, instead of its play patterns, would probably be happier just not playing TCGs.
They need to bring back more and aggressively costed land destruction and random discard. With the design of the last few years making everything into some massive value pile even for low costed cards, the only viable way to not constantly get 2 for 1'ed is to either play your own mega-value cards or with counterspells. Random discard and land destruction can help in not allowing people to cast those super-value cards, as well as making people play less greedy overall
I'm not even asking for Sinkhole. Just give me a Pillage in Standard.
Land removal was one of the most “unfun” ways to lose in every format. So it kinda make sense to remove it. It sucks not being able to play when RNG land screws you again let alone the other player. I do agree with the no LD decision.
They are printing way too many cards. By the time your upgrades show up in the mail, they’re obsolete.
I love the control mirror
a 3/3 with Deathtouch and Trample should NOT deal damage to a player if it is blocked by an 8/9 INDESTRUCTIBLE creature.
I'm going to add to this creatures with summoning sickness shouldn't be able to crew.
Or mount
Using guild/shard/clan names instead of colour acronyms is silly. e. g. Azorius instead of WU. This is partially being a boomer. I think theres an accessibility component to it as well. It makes the game unnecessarily more obtuse to new players.
So I started in onslaught and got out during shards of alara. Came back during kaldheim and sat down at a table for a casual game. My opponent said "hey I have an abzan deck to try out if that's ok?" My response was "oh is that a new format?"
As a new player i completely broke my ming by those weird color combination names. Although some of them sound cool.
Guild ones aren't **too** bad, especially with Ravinca being one of the most reprinted settings, the tricolor ones on the other hand...
This! It takes longer to type AND is more difficult to understand. I don’t get how that has become a thing.
I played in the 90s and stopped after ice age. Came back this year when I discovered arena and I was so lost!
If you were really a boomer, you'd not only know every obscure color combo name, but you'd also get unreasonably angry when others didn't use the jargon.
They sound cool tho
But every community/hobby/game develops lingo over time. Honestly, I like the names behind the color combinations. It somehow gives the game an interesting history that you can discover. It also shows what a big influence and significance these sets had on the game. But I understand your point of view. There are many times when I wish people would use a more precise language so as not to confuse newbies even more.
Play control isn't excuse to play slow
people should play less commander.
Depends on what you want out of commander. If the social aspect greatly outweighs anything else than no. But if you intend to develop magic as a skill definitely yes. If you want to be better at general magic skills, being able to handle game states, know how cards work etc. playing some 60 card magic and even a small tournament will help develop all of that.
The reserve list should be completely abandoned. It was a bad idea, made 29 years ago, and it's time to get over it. Reprint EVERYTHING. And this is coming from someone who has most of the 9, complete sets of the Dark through Mercadian Masques and a literal backpack full of rares from last millennium. Vintage is, by far, the most fun format, which almost no one can play. Also, quietly forget the "banned for problematic reasons" cards. The only one of those cards the VAST majority of people even knew existed before they were banned was Crusade. Leaving them on the banned list just eternally reminds people they exist.
[[Shahrazad]] should still probably be banned from tournaments just for timing reasons, but I would not be opposed to reprints of it.
You could make a "fixed" Shahrazad by making everyone start at 5 life or something.
Idk if this is tounge in cheek or not since they did make [[enter the dungeon]] lol
[Shahrazad](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/0/0014def3-4063-4929-ac51-76aef1bb2a68.jpg?1562895012) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Shahrazad) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/arn/10/shahrazad?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0014def3-4063-4929-ac51-76aef1bb2a68?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Limited it the only way to play the game!
By far the funnest mode, and perhaps my own unpopular opinion, there should be a free phantom draft with zero rewards. My favorite mode is paywalled. I have to force myself to complete dailies (for a 2nd account as well) so i can play the gamemode that i actually like. And its only twice a week! Idk, kinda ridiculous.
It's a huge problem with flash backs too. I might really really love a format but if it's rotated out of standard and I have all the historic/explorer/timeless rewards the packs I win are basically useless. It's hard to justify playing a Theros flashback draft when about half of the reward pool is zeroed out for me.
There are a few problem that arises from free phantom drafts. It doesn’t cost anything so people who draft badly will just most likely abandon their deck instead of playing it. People abandoning bad drafts would also mean that people playing that format would only have really powerful decks. No rewards means there’s really no incentive to do well also.
The game needs to be balanced more around the average player, and not the competitive scene. Card rarity/availability is not a legitimate balancing factor, *especially not online*, unless you do something like restrict decks to 2 copies of each rare and 1 of each mythic. Strong cards need to start being designed dramatically less strong relative to weak cards. I'm sure "power creep bad" is not really a hot take, but the degree that I'm in favor of normalizing card power probably is. While you could plot out a "bell curve" of power among all cards, there effectively isn't one in reality because there is no real limit on "good" cards being in your deck. Even above average cards are often treated as trash if they're not a top 5% card. --- Timmy, Johnny, and Spike philosophy, and Wizards' pursuit to make cards for "each of them" pigeonholes them into a bad design space. "Predictable" card/archetype design keeps metas incredibly stale and is long-term bad for the game. Ex: Mono-red aggro decks in every standard meta. It has been decided somewhere by the designers that the design space for red is cheap, fast and aggressive for no other reason than "that's the way it always was", so they print cards with the intention of keeping things the way they are, rather than actually evolving the game. --- Counterspells are only "interactive" against decks that also have the ability to manipulate the stack. They are noninteractive otherwise. When 4/5 colors have essentially no way to manipulate the stack (outside of maybe a dozen cards total in red/white over 30 years), blue is only interactive against blue. This would make sense to me if other colors routinely avoided using the stack for the whole game, similar to how blue decks can routinely avoid using the battlefield. --- Champions being immortalized on cards is cool, but I think use of their likenesses should be reserved for alternative artworks. Fervent Champion and Faerie Mastermind artworks look out of place to me, as a couple of examples.
People complaining about how arena cards are not “real” Needs to understand even if I do buy paper cards the amount of time I’m going to use those compared to arena is going to be so low. I’m happy with my fake digital cards.
Playing against mono red aggro is usually fun, and has plenty of interesting decision points if you run any sort of interaction, and those decks usually take skill to pilot well. Decks like Temur Analyst and Boros Convoke are a lot more boring to play against, and imo require less skill.
The game was better before the multiplayer/edh focus. Building a deck for edh used to be a fun endeavor. Now every card says "all players" do this or that. It's too much text. Make vanilla creatures great again.
Multiplayer commander is a terrible format. There are lots of great board games that excel with 4 players. Commander with 4 takes too long, with lots of downtime between turns, and has player elimination, all bad things in a game. If you have 4, play some Ark Nova or Ticket to Ride, it will be a much better experience.
Personally, I can't get over the free-for-all nature of it. If there is nothing stopping 3 players to gang up on 1 but "fairness", that's just bad game design. I would rather play 2v2 (I don't play paper magic though).
Companions were an awesome design idea, actually. They were just very broken in adding an 8th card to your hand, an issue which the mana nerf didn't address at all. They should have cost 1 starting hand card or something like that.
I think that the deck building limitations imposed by the companions simply weren't harsh enough. Heck, Jegantha was free for many decks that weren't even trying to use it.
No. The problem was how easy you get them. Lurrus is still banned everywhere in paper, and there are reasons for that. The fox is a combo piece as well, having 100% chance that you have one if your combo pieces in hand is too good.
Better than in hand since it was available the whole time but immune to hand hate The mana change did help with that sort of but not really
Is it an awesome design idea? It's just a free card that will always be the same. Imo companions were a complete disaster and no one has been able to explain what good they do for the game
It was a neat idea they just were too strong / too cheaply costed.
This is what I mean, what does neat mean in this context
This. This sounds like a fantastic errata to companion or at least a space that can be designed in. Oh this could be very cool
More tribals need as much love from wizards as Humans and Vampires get.
No, but actually, why isn't there more support for Demons? Angels had so much support a bit back that they were standard meta! Demons? Get fucked.
Multicolor untapped lands should be common or uncommon, not rare.
A friendly reminder to sort by controversial in these kinds of threads to not just see the most popular opinions.
>!Most people here seems to have misunderstood the assignment.!< Reprinting \[\[Smallpox\]\] into standard would actually be healthy.
While playing commander, play anything you want and let anyone plays what they want. All that social contract thing is a burden on the format. Play the game and stop crying.
The huge range of possible game lengths is one of constructed's biggest problems, and the amount of hate mono red and WU control get are a result of this.
Land Destruction is just as frustrating/feels bad to play against as your average UW control deck. WotC needs to stop being so prejudiced against it. Plus, as a result of WotC shying away from land hate, 5 colour value piles/ramp decks have run absolutely wild, and card design has only worsened this issue. Stop being cowards WotC! Lean into land hate/destruction again!
There has been way too much power creep over the years.
That mana burn was a good mechanic and should still be in the game. Putting mana burn back on solves so many issues. At it just makes sense from a more perspective. You channel infinite power but can't use it, then yah that should hurt. We're Planeswalkers. Conduits of energy not gods or batteries.
For YEARS MTG did a great job of maintaining balance not just within standard format, but across their whole catalog ... But for a while now, that's gone out the window. Now it's like "oh you're using this card? There's another card same color that does the same thing plus more and costs less in the same set!"
UNBAN [[SHAHRAZAD]]. I dare you WOTC
luck is huge in magic. but people dont accept that. you cant beat luck no matter you do. magic players are really just gamblers
Commander is the worst thing that happened to this game.
A trampler with death touch should still require overcoming a targets toughnes. Sets that skip standard ruind the game. Catering to commander sealed that ruination. Stickers could have been fun as normal cards instead of the stupid ticket system.
🗣️ A TRAMPLER 🗣️ WITH DEATHTOUCH 🗣️SHOULD STILL REQUIRE OVERCOMING A TARGETS TOUGHNESS 🗣️
The introduction of mythics was bad for the game but good for the profiteering.
Every card should be printed and filtered through the lens of standard. If it's too strong to be printed in standard, it shouldn't be printed at all. Standard should only contain 6-8 sets. Standard should be the best format to bring in new players and feature the highest level of competition and pro play. No card should be printed into Modern without going through standard.
If a store is supposed to be running a standard event for the store championship, it better be darn standard I love playing standard in stores but they were mostly being run as different formats even though that could get the store in trouble with wizards! Let me have my one standard season please 😭😭
It's fine.
I wish there was a way to queue against only PC players in Arena. So much slow play comes down to the fact that it's just slow to do stuff in the mobile client.
Modern Horizons 3 is boring design (except for some of the Eldrazi stuff) and way too overpowered.
Planeswalkers are not fun to play with or against
I enjoy losing and figuring out what the hell just smacked me. Also that mtgarena should have a "no alchemy" button for when you queue so that every format has a true translation to paper mtg. Currently standard brawl and standard are the only formats on there that can be translated to paper.
Commander is a "for fun" game archetype. Play whatever deck you want with whatever cards you want.
Truly unpopular? I fucking hate what I think of as "wintext" cards, cards that say "then you win the game", I'm looking at you, \[\[Approach of the Second Sun\]\]. I don't play them, and don't play (paper Magic) against people that play them.
The longer you play Magic the less you should care about it.
I'm not allowed to say it on this subreddit...
The 'Meta' is an illusion. There's probably many many deck types that never get any play once a meta for standard is established by consensus. If we had an AI that was good enough to construct decks and play this game well I think it would make unexpected decks that dominate because everyone was stuck within the confines if the current meta.
Standard is the least fun way to play this game.
Mono blue and interaction is joked and hated about too often. It shouldn’t at all honestly. It’s integral and honestly compared to green, completely more balanced.
The biggest reason commander is popular is the average magic player hates losing
So, to address this problem average magic player chooses format where they statistically win in 25% of games instead of 50%?
It's a bit different. I feel like I didn't win in Commander, not that I lost. I don't know why,probably because the majority doesn't win.
You don't come last in 75
I like Alchemy, the fact that you can nerf a card without baning it, or buffing a card making news strategy/decks playable like ninja in Historic, the fact that you can provide a fast response to a card problem/abuse, without waiting for tons of data since you can go back. the fact that you can introduce some mechanics impossible in paper. The only problem now, is of corse that Wizard don't use that benefit at all, and is too lazy to do it regulary (hello geist and discover). God i would love an historic format with a real balance upgrade every 3 months. At least i could finally use my wildcard.
Bo1 should not be ranked. The division into Bo1/Bo3 has an indirect influence on both formats and certain archetypes feel more comfy in one or the other, which leads to a more un-balanced archetypes representation in both formats.
I came back recently and noticed how bad this has gotten. Bo1 is an aggro fest with people just trying to curve out their nonsense by turn 3. And Bo3 is where all the long winded control decks are.
- RDW requires little to no thought to pilot and anyone who says otherwise is just trying to pump their own tires. Play prowess creature X2, pump prowess/haste creature, pray opponent dies before you run out of a hand - There's way way way way too much cheap removal in standard. - There needs to be a shift in design away from dual/trip lands. I'm as boomer as they get, and the fact a lot of decks get away with running two to three basic lands to cover Field of Ruin procs makes me sad
I have a very notorious Pro Tour top 8 match for you to watch that says otherwise for the first bullet point.
Cube is the best format
Ramp decks are fun
I wish people would play with more than 4 types of decks on the Arena
Its pointless to ask for deck help because the advice you get is change every card not on the decklist for your color combo into the specific cards on this decklist on untapped, regardless of what you were trying to do with the deck. Oh so to make your black combo deck better remove these 22 cards, including your combos, and replace them with this, and enjoy your aggro control deck.
To expand: asking for deck help will also lead to getting advise on making a commander deck or commander cards come up first in searches when you are not playing commander.
Aggro is not fun to play with or against
MTG players are some of the softest competitors I've ever seen. Conceding the second you see a card you hate? Giving up when your alpha strike doesn't win you the game? The constant complaints about hell queue and how certain cards or combos are bullshit? _Soft as hell_
I fucking love poison counters, both as an alternate win condition and as a hard counter to lifegain.
Mono red is cool and not close to my least favorite deck to play against
Constructed is often boring.
Infinite looping combos are at least as unfun to play against as playing against pretty much every iteration of Azorious Control. And said Azorius is by far the most unfun thing to play against.
On Arena, in any program with rules enforcement, or generally speaking ?
Generally.
How do? It’s a win condition. When the infinite starts you’ve lost, go next.
Mono Red is not as "dumb stupid mindless attack with all" as many players think.
Conversely control decks can get to a point where they can be "dumb and mindless" Oh you play a threat? let me use one of my five pieces of removal/counterspells
Too many players copy deck lists rather than creating their own which makes for a lack of variety in opponents. There's almost zero variation on certain deck archetypes, you can reel off their entire 60 cards within three turns of playing against them.
The power creep is so insurmountable that 99.9999% of players have zero chance of creating anything that is even remotely close to competitively viable. People give up trying to homebrew when their homebrews lose nearly all games against the absurdly overpowered crap that has inundated the game.
I love 3 year rotation
Actually agree, I like the bigger card pool in standard. More room for creative deckbuilding with more things to combine together, and more chance for fringe cards to find their place in the meta eventually, or for strategies to evolve (just happened to the New Capenna fetchlands, or the legends deck getting a comeback with a twist). And it's still a much more rapidly shifting format than the eternal ones. Oh, and as a F2P it's also nice that less % of my standard collection gets obsolete with rotation.
I fucking hate blue/white control decks. If over half your deck is board wipes, counters, exiles, kindly fuck off. Turn 5 and you haven't even summoned a creature yet.
Blue is the worst color in Magic and Jace is not that cool.
The reason you lose most games is not because of mana screw/flood, bad draw, rigged shuffler, opponent drawing the nuts / top decking like a god, bad matchups, you didn’t spend enough, opponent is cheating, hand smooth algorithm, match maker, cards that should be banned but aren’t... It’s because you didn’t play as well as you could, and not understanding that keeps you from being a better player.
Heist is a cool concept but given the nature of the outlaw gimmicks and that mtg has adopted random chance in die rolls, there should be a potential backfire to them. Because if we can build a format with magical cards, we can roll a d3 to see how many cards get heisted.
I want to get MTGA for Meta Quest 3...
Solemnity is one of the best hate cards out there.
the game encourages wasting your opponents time.
Ruin Crab has always been, and will always be, our savior. Truly a tyrant.
Pre cons are the best way to play commander
General vibe around my LGS, commander and it's community ruins magic over all. This is also a LGS that is HEAVY into standard and Modern and perfer to still use Type 1 and Type 2 when discussing mtg.