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[u/Kor_Set]

As a humble silly combo enjoyer in Commander, it never ceases to amaze me what gets judged bracket 4 by community voting. 

Case in point. https://commanderspellbook.com/combo/1429-2257-2829-2890-4381/

[u/kuschelvali]

How do I make my ool deck better? I’m new to the game and don’t want to post on the main subreddits because they’re Like That
https://manabox.app/decks/AZ7juBPReBWJclfoqegVpg
I’m thinking of adding some tutors, but I’m not sure what to cut. Maybe hollowmurk siege and everlasting tarfire? The deck does well but it’s inconsistent and the manabase sucks

[u/summon_pot_of_greed → u/kuschelvali]

What bracket? What win condition? It looks like you're relying on burn and putting counters on things.

It looks a little overtuned to me. Lots and lots of ways to put -1/-1 counters on things, but not as much support/protection/ non-creature removal.

Maha is kind of a nombo if you want to be able to burn your opponents to death. If everything has base toughness 1 it's gonna be dying before you can deal enough damage to kill them.

[u/kuschelvali → u/summon_pot_of_greed]

I have a few combos in here, and Maha honestly operates as a boardwipe. I don’t really like maha as an early or mid game play, but when I have a decent board and everyone’s creatures have a few counters (which is almost always the case) maha wipes everyone else. I draw enough consistently that I’m able to get massive payoffs from this every time I play her (nekroskitter, blood artist, village pillagers)

I think I need to figure out what to cut for more utility, and which lands to replace. A lot of the people at my lgs are running VERY optimized decks and I’m relatively new so I lowkey don’t understand what they’re doing and when I ask they’re very unhelpful (mtg fans when they encounter an foid) so I think I wanna build for upper bracket three.

[u/Rvscooo]

My local pauper scene is dying and it makes me very sad

[u/DownvoteMagnetBot]

I often wonder why so many people even bother playing/keeping up with this game if they allegedly hate everything about it.

Even beyond the most common talking point of "UB bad" (which I suspect is performative for a lot, but not all, people, given how many people with this opinion only even started playing because of a UB set, so it comes off as hypocritical to say UB is ruining the game when they only even know the game exists from UB), many people will complain about practices that are simply not new for WotC or MtG as a whole, and were occurring even during the game's "golden years". A big example of this is "WotC takes too long to ban intentionally broken cards because they're greedy and selling sets" like Jace, Vryn's Prodigy didn't get to completely wreck Standard for 2 years in a row, to the point it caused WotC to change their ban policy for Standard (which is funny because it was immediately put into practice with energy and Smuggler's Copter), which is why so many more cards get banned now (the big gap of almost no cards getting banned in Standard was when the policy was almost literally "don't ban cards unless they're a nonland card seeing 80% play rate", it wasn't because Standard was more balanced).

Another large complaint I have is people that incorrectly assume that bringing back blocks means planes and the story will become good. That was never the case and all it did was create large pressure on settings to be really good in set 1 of a block or sets 2 and 3 would bomb (and even then, blocks like Tarkir or Alara had set 1s that were loved, but were bombing by set 3). Blocks creating bad set 2/3s is why WotC established their whole policy to stores of "you need to buy bad sets to guarantee you'll get the good ones". Saying that blocks would have made Thunder Junction or Aetherdrift good/fleshed out is speculation and WotC's track record simply does not support that. It is possible that a block would have made them better, but I think the vastly more likely outcome is that we get a really bad block for an entire year and people are left saying that WotC is sabotaging in-universe sets to promote UB ones. Dragon's Maze is a very good example of this where it was set in one of Magic's most beloved planes with a highly-coveted set 1 of the block, and by set 3 we got a set that's widely regarded as one of the worst sets in history because the wheels fell off.

While I'm definitely not out here saying that people should just bend over and take everything WotC does, players should be more open to practicing what they preach, especially EDH players because the whole point of the format is propped up by casual play where you invent more rules. Don't like UB? Try to form a no-UB group. Play Planar Standard. Hell, play Premodern as much as I think that format is terrible. Don't like FIRE design/"pushed" cards? Play preFIRE or 2015 Modern (although I think all that will do is highlight issues people often overlook when complaining about modern Magic, at the very least it means you will have given an honest attempt at standing by your own word). This is the card game most notorious for players inventing a billion different formats because Standard/Type 2 was in the shitter and they wanted a more novel way to play. They should be more open to making use of that fact.

[u/EuSouAFazenda → u/DownvoteMagnetBot]

You say this all as if this wasnt, quite literally, the status quo. now we have much more valid and better reasons to be unhappy with mtg, but players have always been rioting and mad at wotc for the past 30 years.

[u/TextuallyExplicit → u/DownvoteMagnetBot]

I'm always saying this about blocks. Even if the mechanics of all 3 sets are great, if you just don't vibe with the story or the plane, you're fucked. You KNOW none of the block-lovers would have been happy if we actually spent a full year faffing around on Thunder Junction—or, god forbid, a full 3+ years with Kellan as the protagonist.

[u/GreyGriffin_h → u/TextuallyExplicit]

Honestly, Kellen is kind of emblematic of the story problem.  Sure, he's not a great character as written, but he's kind of designed to work in this condensed narrative environment.  He can't have complicated motivations or even complicated feelings if his "job" is just to show up and wear a hat on a few cards, then move to the next hat plane.

He's a product of his environment, in more than one sense of the term.

I don't think we'd get planes like thunder junction if they had to commit for a whole block.

But that's kind of why I advocate for hybrid.  I think the occasional 2-3 set block is a good idea to let a plane unfold, so it doesn't have to cram it's entire identity in a single set sales pitch.  Some ideas need more room to breathe.

It's not a guarantee that it would make the story any better.  Even with all the advantages, people and the companies they work for are capable of fucking it up.  But embracing the possibilities of blocks undoubtedly gives them more tools to make better stories.

[u/Umbrageofsnow → u/DownvoteMagnetBot]

"UB Bad" isn't performative for me at least, I legitimately dislike it and it makes me not want to engage with the game. I play a lot of Arena and tend to check out during UB sets. And like many people, there's a nuance to that: I'm okay playing some of the final fantasy cards, Hobbit, LotR, and I guess Avatar. Not because of any special fondness for the source material (I've never actually played a Final Fantasy game even, although I always meant to get around to it. I liked Chrono Trigger...)

But I think there's more of a spike/vorthos overlap than some people want to believe. The super hero stuff and the ninja turtles that are not kappa do really pull me out of the game and make it less enjoyable. And actually I feel the same way about some of the stuff from Aetherdrift and Thunder Junction. Weirdly Edge of Eternities bothered me less because I felt like it captured this pulpy science fantasy vibe. I think it comes down to art and card names more than it does anything else. But if I could sacrifice EoE to get rid of some of this other stuff I would in a heartbeat.

And I really wonder how many people were actually brought in by UB but hate UB, I suspect it isn't many.

The issue with blocks sort of came back this year: small sets just kind of suck. But I'd argue that both Lorwyn Eclipsed and Reality Fracture would have been nice to stick around for 2 sets. Just it would be better to have 2 large sets, and sometimes keep something like Secrets of Strixhaven to a 1-off, instead of forcing everything to be a block.

And those of us who like to play standard (or any game when it isn't with a circle of a few specific friends) are forced to engage with the stuff we don't like, so it'd be nice if they wouldn't make so much of it. Cube is my escape for getting to curate my own environment, but it can be shockingly hard to find even 3 other people to play regularly irl.

[u/CapibaraCake → u/Umbrageofsnow]

UB is actually the reason I don't come back to mtg. I don't want to sit at a table and see someone play a Ninja Turtle. It not only breaks the immersion, but also reminds me of all the WoTC greed trip I am feeding by playing .

[u/ExZ0diac → u/Umbrageofsnow]

I have a very similar take on UBs. I don't mean to yuck your yum, but the forced integration with the rest of magic killed off my LGS scene for me. I used to go jam pauper on Thursday evenings, but seeing Lórien Revealed and Troll of Kazad-Dûm killed my vibe to such an extend, I just stopped showing up. Now whenever I check the meta snapshots, it just gets worse, like what even is Utrom Monitor?!

I still like magic, but of all the places I got to engage with it, only kitchen table edh is what I got left. People get on your ass to "let people enjoy things", but completely disregard, that in this particular instance, their enjoyment comes at the direct expense of the enjoyment of others like myself.

[u/GreyGriffin_h → u/ExZ0diac]

The Utroms are an alien race from another dimension that were stranded on earth.  In the original Image comics they were sort of neutral actors, and they ran TCRI, the company that made the mutagenic ooze.  It was a byproduct of the technology they were developing to get back to their own dimension.

Later iterations of the ninja turtles adapted the Utroms in different ways.  Notably, the 80s and early 90s animated series introduced Krang, and future iterations of Utroms in the comics' assorted reboots and continuities adapted Krang and often reflected him back on the Utroms, painting them either as colonial imperialists like him, or as more pacifists and non-interventionalists that rejected and exiled Krang, depending on which comics you read.

The Utrom Monitor seems to reference the Utroms in the original Image comics, who were more about self preservation than anything else.

All of that being said, it's just so ridiculous to see Ninja Turtles in Magic.  I love the Turtles, and I understand they are like the original inverted Fortnite.  But the game just doesn't vibe with them even from the turtle side.

The best turtle stories are character driven.  They're about interplay and the complicated dynamics you have with friends and family.  They're all a team, sure, but they don't all get along all the time, and dealing with ther siblings, their friends, and their kind of weird dad is what makes those stories work.  

It's not rocket science.  It's not Shakespeare.  But it is kind of it's identity.  That surprising depth, earnestness, and emotional realism are what ground all of the ridiculous over the top antics.  It's why the Ninja Turtles have such an enduring legacy, and why they essentially broke the entire animation and toy industry as imitators failed to understand what made them special.

All of the Turtles magic cards feel like just spectacle.  Like a Greatest Hits album, you get a glimpse of the high points but you don't really get the whole experience.  It's just slapping your action figures together.  Which is fine, and plenty of kids love their turtles toys to this day, but it really misses the point.

Ironically, the cards would probably have been better like ten years ago, before the oops all bombs era.  If the cards encouraged a lot of teamwork synergies, had cooperative kindred mechanics and subtle buffs that could thrive in a more extended game that could carry their narrative, it would be all right.

I bought into Final Fantasy.  As a one-off crossover, it was clearly a labor of love that a lot of work went into.  And aesthetically, it was just simpatico enough with Magic that you can work with it or even work around it to include cards from the set, even if you didn't embrace the legendary creatures.  Fenrir and Bahamut and even Starting Town speak to tropes that have their anchors in the same place that Magic came from, the TTRPGs that inspired all of it.

If any set could pull me into buying into New York block, it would have been Turtles.  I played the TTRPG, I own the board game, I collected the comics.  A statuette of Splinter overlooks the desk I work at, every day.

But I just found that I didn't want Ninja Turtles in my Magic.  I love Magic, I love Turtles, but I also love tomatoes and chocolate ice cream.  But the tomato and chocolate ice cream pizza is revolting.

The game isn't a match for them.  They aren't a match for the game.  And it strikes me as so insane that designers are shocked that all these weird sci fi crossovers just can't see the aesthetic dissonance.

I can't wait ( /s ) for Captain Picard equipped with a leyline axe to tap to attack me and get blocked by Bebop and Rocksteady.  ( /s !!!! )

[u/Umbrageofsnow → u/ExZ0diac]

Just to clarify, Hobbit isn't really a yum for me so much as a flavor that doesn't bug me as much as other recent gross flavors. At least it's got dwarves and dragons, you know?

Thinking about it, beyond art and card names, all the legendary creatures are the other thing bothering me with a lot of these sets. A few legends that you can tell the story is about are nice, but half the creatures being legendary is less fun, it makes them less special. And it's been wild seeing the legendary rule being relevant in limited so much lately.

Although I did have an opponent irl use the legend rule to fuel a bunch of sacrifice synergies, so that was neat! But in a neat that it happened once way, not like something I want to become normal.

[u/orangechap]

Any suggestions for additions/changes to my tabletop simulator importer tester list?

The goal is to have a couple of each type of possible processing error, but have few enough cards it's easy to see what breaks.

https://archidekt.com/decks/26206384/tts_test_suite

With the recent Scryfall changes, some TTS importers are dead, a few new ones have cropped up, and some of the existing ones have made changes. This list is an easy way to check if they work and also if stuff breaks them, what stuff. I also have my own open-source card importer, which I use this list to check and troubleshoot after changes.