Commander was fun because it was playing magic in a way it wasn’t intended to be played, and you had to figure out how to make cards work in an environment they weren’t designed for. And then wizards started designing cards for commander.
I think bloomburrow isnt the best example because it was a tribal themed set. Each draft archetype themed around a creature type, each creature type themed around a particular playstyle. They did this in lorwyn nearly twenty years ago with stuff like flash faeries.
Additionally things like Bloomburrow Birds almost necessitated playing non bird blue and white creatures, since so many bird effects revolve around a flier giving an effect to a non flier. While in draft this might translate to "Birds are the weakest archetype" I think it means you'd still be likely to grab them for decks where you have one color of the pair, and similarly, great birds would want to grab good non birds. It seems like less of a problem in Sealed, where you can't necessarily skew entirely to one color or creature pair, and have to make due with what you ripped
i found older videos with minimal elk animation easier to watch with my eyes. i like where the channel is heading so I thought I'd leave my weightless opinion. keep it up :)
Yea I would at least lengthen the time between blinks and keep the hoof out for the whole duration of a thought/point rather than it be tied to the mouth being opened.
The packages you see in limited are part of the design philosophy that creating synergy is more “fun” for drafters than simply picking the most powerful individual cards in a color. It’s a delicate line to walk. If the limited designs went the other way, with only minimal synergy, then drafts would become splashes of goodstuff piles. A great recent example of how to do it right was Thunder Junction. Stuff like “crime” synergy was incredibly varied, with many crossovers from different archetypes working well with the theme. At the same time, you still had a “mounts” package that was strong if you found that open lane. I think the set achieved a fantastic balance of more strict “packages” and open-ended synergy decks just running good cards alongside value like “Intimidation Campaign.”
The analogy to a found object sculpture is something I found really beautiful. It perhaps perfectly encapsulates what is great about mtg. It's always a tad disappointing when deckbuilding is linear, or "pre-solved". Some entire TCGs have this as a systemwide issue.
wotc doesn't even give us the freedom other tcgs with linear deckbuilding tend to have. in games like yugioh or vanguard, cards are indeed mostly printed with one specific deck in mind, but players are given more than enough viable options and enough flexible staple cards that deckbuilding still involves choices. instead of completely leaving you on your own, it often comes down to figuring out what last 5-10 cards work best for you personally, or what variant of a deck you want to play, but in magic you're railroaded so hard that there's really only ever 1 variant of a particular deck. i've been trying to figure out why i have more fun with vanguard deckbuilding when they design in the linear way i hate about modern magic, and i think it's exactly this reason: magic has far less flexibility in their rigid archetypes than other games, and wotc still act like they're giving players the "found object" experience when they just aren't
@@haeilsey Yugioh deck construction is a joke, coming from someone who plays the game. Your biggest choices are "how many of the starters do i run" and "what staple cards kill everybody elses deck". your own combo is never something you have to seriously consider.
@@autinbutin2698 i think he’s right tbh. there are lots of variants, combinations, engines, etc. in yugioh and you can easily build two different versions of the same deck. magic has a much more pronounced issue with “best-in-slot” cards than yugioh, especially in constructed formats.
I think one of my biggest complaints with this kind of design personally is that I don't like how it impacts already existing decks. I have a gruul enchantress deck lead by Ulasht, The Hate Seed, and I always considered the idea of gruul enchantress to be novel and unique. Now we have almost an entire preconstructed deck in those colors where enchantments are part of the main theme. In fact, the deck's alternate commander, Wildsear, is just front to back the correct choice for who I should be running at the head of the deck. It makes what was originally a super fun almost "secret idea" I had now feel far less special. I don't feel like I'm being original anymore. And this is far from the only example of that as of late.
Due to the nature of Magic, this sort of thing was bound to happen eventually. However, the rate this happens and intentionality of it changed the feeling from an “oh cool” response to an “aw man” response. That’s the impression I get anyway.
It felt like back in the day, to do The Thing, you'd pick through for cards that when used together did The Thing. Now you pick cards that each do The Thing. Riku of Two Reflections can copy my spells if I invest a bunch into ramp to feed his blue-mana-hungry butt and pay 5 to cast him, and protection for his fragile 2/2 with no abilities body. Kalamax, the Stormsire is a 4/4 that grows and all I need to do to copy a spell is turn him sideways. You can attack with him and 3 mana open (4 if you want to get wild) and your opponent now has to decide what response won't activate the mother of all combat tricks. The only synergies he needs are a) instants and b) maybe ways to tap him in case attacking won't work.
Personally I’m a little conflicted on the matter. For me a deck being wholly unique is not a big motivating factor to my deck building and honestly I enjoy when the theme I’m working on has some actual support; but it does come to a point where I want to brew a new deck and I find my self not really building a deck but instead choosing what staple I do or do not want to stick in. It’s kinda a catch 22. Either your pet deck stays unique but generally underpowered in comparison to more supported strategies or your deck gets some pre built support which increases its power and reliability but half the decks already built.
This happened to my Kumena deck. Although Merfolks was already a tribe with lots of support from the Lorwyn and original Ixalan blocks I slowly gathered singles and some synergy pieces from LGSs around my area. And slowly but steadily built my first commander deck from scratch. Then Lost Caverns of Ixalan came out and the merfolk precon was like 70% my deck with shinier toys and better merfolk support. It felt like the deck I built from scratch wasn't special anymore. You could enter any LGS and just buy it off the shelf 🙁
@@eildonp your deck wasn’t unique to begin with. merfolk are one of the most popular tribes of all time. i feel like if you’re setting proper expectations this shouldn’t be that disappointing.
Not putting "win the game" on a card helps a lot if you don't want it to win the game :P There's an interesting discussion to be had about how designs can limit/allow combos
@@33elk You are right. The secret mixture is playtest, observe and adapt. Players will always come up with broken or unintended stuff, the job of the designer is to monitor whether they reinforce, or undermine the intended experience.
I think this really hits the nail on the head with recent magic design. This past month or two, I've felt like things have been a little stale and I've been looking around for a new commander to build, but so many seem way too straightforward to build at this point. The amount of "packages" available takes so much of the joy out of the deck *building* process. I'm glad to see that Rosewater has acknowledged this, and hopefully we'll get some more broad synergies that we can experiment and build around, rather than the super-focused ones we've had lately.
this entire issue is the result of wizards consistently defaulting to the “made for commander” approach instead of prioritizing other formats. designing cards for commander is ostensibly lowering the quality of card designs and negatively impacting all formats. draft environments are the only well-designed formats because they’re intentional and self-contained.
I would probably have to disagree with this as a whole. Firstly, the game designers exploring old and un-utilise design space shouldn't be seen as an issue. I understand having a cute pet deck which feels unique become another regular archetype feels bad if you liked it being a pet deck but to me the reason why these decks feel good is utilising the potental of these cards and ideas and showing what they could be, so what's so bad about that being fully realised several years down the line in a set. I'd also say these puzzle pieces aren't as put in place as some people say. Take food, a personal favourate of mine which I often see other creators point to as a pandered archetype. I got into food with Wilds of Eldraine because I loved Greta, Sweet Tooth Sourge as a flexible engine and set up piece and I never felt like I was forced to follow a puzzle when building my deck. Foods are token artefacts which gain life and have an unique tag, there is no restrictive formula here. You can grab all the cards that say food and call it a day, you can use artefact synergy, token synergy, lifegain synergy. You can build midrange, control or even combo with a few infinites food has. The whole reason I made this deck is because I was looking for a new golgari, token based sacrifice commander deck after starting to consider deconstructing my baba lysaga deck because of how it played (lost if the commander was removed and struggling to fix this without changing what I like about the deck) and I feel like this speaks in the new deck. Cards maybe seen as uncoventional for foods such as Old Rutstein or Awaken the Vastwood are callbacks to this old deck with this deck as a whole having a larger focus on sacrificing artefacts with Braids Arisen nightmare and Marionette Master (which has a fun combo with Night of the Sweet's Revenge and Greta's ability which most people I play against being caught off guard by it) than other food decks may. Some archetypes are more puzzle pieces than others, such as lizards in standard, but hasn't this always been the case? Tribal decks have always been slamming in the most efficent engine pieces, usually from the same expansions, such as elves or merfolk with little else. Maybe elves tap into more expansions but that's because we've seen elves how many times, in how many expansions? If we saw lizards in more expansions I'm sure we'd see the same expansion diversity in their deck as we would of with elves. I do like a challenge when building a deck but I feel like the card pool is deep enough in magic, at least with enternal formats, that when a card asks you to do X you have multiple ways to try and do this. For every Lizard archetype there is an Ob Nixilis Captive Kingpin, for every Merfolk archetype a Pharika God of Affliction, and for every Elf archetype there is a Zur the Enchanter. For everycard which could be considered a piece in a puzzle there are 10 different puzzles to put it into and a different card which is the puzzle in and of itself, and I feel like it has been that way for a long time.
indeed i am one of those people who if an archetype i wanna play doesn't have enough support i simply won't build it and will move on to something else. take something like Glissa herald of predation i started working on an incubate deck only to realize there was maybe a handful of good incubate cards in green/black and didn't wanna be super reliant on glissa and took the deck apart. there is a balance to strike where you don't wanna have decks that build themselves but you don't wanna leave people scrambling for good pieces if they wanna build around the new legend ya printed
you pretty much hit the nail on the end. unless you’re building a very niche deck/archetype, your deck can be as unique as you want it to be. there are actually very few parasitic/build-around/etc. mechanics and even things like energy become more and more broad the more support the mechanic receives. and as for constructed formats, this is a complete non-issue. by necessity, constructed decks play the best-in-slot cards regardless of whether they’re built around a niche archetype (lizards, energy) or something completely general (golgari midrange).
I'm inclined to agree. This whole vid could say the same about edhrec for homogenising the format. It's down to players to make interesting decisions. Standard and modern have tons of cut and paste decks and that's fine
found you through the Trinket Mage and I must say- this is a really great video! Super insightful about how set design affects commander and the game as a whole
This pattern reminds me of what the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG has, which has the notion of Archetypes and support for them. Lots of homogeneous decks as a result. Most decks of archetype X feel like all other X type decks.
what does “>” mean here? smaller card pools? but yeah i agree with you. i think commander players only think this is an issue because they don’t play other formats or understand the game holistically. if you play draft or 60-card formats you will quickly understand that printing cards with synergy and added support is mostly a non-issue.
@@eebbaa5560 greater than i.e. greater consideration for how the format plays. Synergies are necessary for limited so removing them for commander, which should be the lowest consideration from a design perspective, would be the wrong choice. I often see creators complain about cards designed for commander but then have takes like this where they want cards designed with commander in mind but ignore the implications that would have on the formats the packs are designed to be played with (draft & sealed).
@@friendo6257 ok i understand now. i agree that the limited format should always be the most important consideration for making a set. and yeah, i completely agree that commander players ignore this key fact. i feel like most commander players are too casual to holistically analyze set design from perspectives other than that of the commander format. i find that the discussion in commander communities is extremely insular and is often riddled with contradictions and logical fallacies. i suppose that just comes with the territory of being the most popular format.
@@eebbaa5560 I think the problem is exacerbated by power creep. It used to be that a graveyard themed set would have a couple of good cards that could slot into most graveyard decks. Nowadays it's closer to what we saw from MKM. 8-10 good cards in a particular archetype that could slot into most decks.
@@friendo6257 is that really power creep though? the floor of the average card has increased, but we’re not seeing as many increases to the ceiling (i.e. cards at the same power level as staples like sol ring) outside of some outliers. i just think that the average power level of sets is higher than it used to be, and there are less bad cards and a few more generically good ones, which isn’t a bad thing in my opinion. the MKM cards discussed in this video are by no means staples, or even must run, best-in-slot cards in the golgari graveyard archetype; they’re just generically decent cards. i don’t think this necessarily constitutes power creep, it just means that decks have more options to choose from.
I have no issues with packages, other than the size of them squeezing out more niche cards being added to a set. The only place it's reasonably an issue is Standard, because of the smaller pool of cards, and it's part of the reason they moved Standard to a 3-year rotation. While packages may seem like a jigsaw to you, I see it as a lego set. Sure, there is an intended design, but that doesn't mean you can't make things your own way or fit pieces from other sets. Packages provide something that was long asked for: more support for new strategies when they arrive. So many times sets would come out and have only a few cards for an interesting strategy and brewers (mostly for Commander from what I've seen) would complain that it's just not enough to work with. I wouldn't say it's commonplace, but Training Grounds is a favorite card of mine, and Zirda now leads my rebels commander deck as a more powerful version of Training Grounds. Flipping the question a little, a secret tech that has become more relevant are the Flagbearers (Standard Bearer and Coalition Honor Guard from Apocalypse). They have an effect that forces opponents to choose at least one Flagbearer if able when selecting targets for spells and abilities. Giving it a Ward cost means opponents will have to pay that Ward on any targeted spells they want to use. Giving it indestructible until end of turn means most targeted removal is nonfunctional for the rest of the turn. Flagbearers are already a pain for Aura and pump spell decks, but they also just provide decent protection against targeted removal for the entire table (except from your removal). Edit: removed an inaccurate description of Standard Bearer being worse than Coalition Honor Guard. I mistakenly thought the Eternal Masters printing of Coalition Honor Guard was the most up to date wording, but that is not the case. Both Flagbearers have the same Oracle text.
When I was designing cubes for my friends I fell into the same trap, having pre-defined archetypes for each pair of colours. Then I would stack 15-25 cards of that archetype in which would be "enough" for that deck to run effectively. But in practice it just meant that if you were playing those colours your just picked the obvious thing. It made the drafting side completely superfluous. It was even worse since I made the cube, I knew what was intended to work with what and what was paid off by what etc etc and that meant I just felt like I was cheating. Eventually I realised what your mate did, that by sitting around in cube cobra for hours I wasn't crafting an experience, I was just building 8-12 decks and throwing them into a pile. I had to learn to let the players discover the combos for themselves, and to do things by inference and whatnot. Sign posting is really, really good at that, so long as you are subtle about it lol. I will say that newer cards also tend to be prebuilt engines in their own right, especially if they're higher rarity. I tend to avoid them for cubes. Older cards have more standalone effects, meaning you can throw them into a pile and someone will find a way to use it and chances are good its not how you expected it would be used, which as the cube designer is an absolute riot.
You just hit on how I feel about recent sets, they feel like cubes that have been too tuned. You get one pack to hash out your direction and see what other players are doing, then just go on autopilot picking the cards which are earmarked for your deck.
@@diogeneticist3585 this is simply not the case for new sets outside of bloomburrow. bloomburrow is a set based on tribal mechanics and synergies; that’s just the nature of the set design. however, the second most recent set, outlaws of thunder junction, was a completely different draft experience. other than mounts, the archetypes were nebulous and you could combine all kinds of strategies to create unique decks. it’s also worth noting that bloomburrow has very little mana-fixing, which also contributes to the “autopilot” feeling that you’re describing since it’s more difficult to splash colors. regardless, there are still unique was to build decks and hidden synergies that you can find while drafting (i.e. the duo cycle and their implications).
I agree, but I think there is a way around this situation. New / low time-investment players are excited by the readily-available powerful synergies in archetype packages across recent sets. New players are the target audience for mtg right now because hasbro is desperate for short-term profit. Players who spend more time on mtg, and want a more unique deck, have the skills and dedication to seek a unique angle and choose a strategy outside those basic archetypes to match their individual playstyle.
The problem is that this only really works for casual commander as a "fix". All the other formats are much more competitive and in order to survive you pretty much have to be running the best format-legal version of XYZ effect in that slot. I'm mostly thinking of Modern and Pauper to be specific, but I believe the point stands. If you disagree though, I'm curious to hear other perspectives!
I think the biggest issue I find with this is commander creatures effectively designed to fix the downside of many if the most fun mechanics. Cycle and do this Convoke and do that It takes what should promote decision making, and turn it into a one step value generator. The number of deck themes I've become entirely uninterested in simply because of creatures designed like this is huge and it gets bigger every set.
This is a made up problem that only exists if you pick a mechanic that is relatively new or narrow. Your examples clearly highlight this. The problem is self-correcting if you just wait long enough for enough sets to use a similar mechanic and voila you'll have your variety and unique feel because there are now more options than what fits in your deck. Trying to find a unique, "hipster" theme but expecting a lot of variety in terms of support for it across multiple sets is like wanting to have your cake and eat it too. The one of comment by rosewater is completely unrelated to your point, it's specific to MH3 and more about the lack of unique one-offs, not about the presence of well supported themes. If you're upset when a mechanic you previously claimed as "your unique thing" becomes well supported in a new set, that is a you problem. You can still be plenty unique by digging deeper than the surface and finding old cards that work within the now better supported theme. If you want a collection of random cards from a wide variety of sets, you need to stick to themes that are the opposite of parasitic. Miracle is a flawed example, you're not playing a miracle deck, you're playing a "top of deck matters" deck which is an extremely broad theme. Similarly, creatures leaving your graveyard is a fairly narrow, specific theme. It was chosen as a limited archetype and thus well supported in a set. That is not a flaw, that is good limited design. In short, wizards supporting more niche archetypes and coming up with new design space and then supporting it well within a set IS good design, both for limited and casual. If you want uniqueness, that is for you to find by digging deeper below the surface. You can have your package of 10 cards from a set and still include 1 or 2 cards that will make your deck stand out.
Most of this comes down to opinion, but I do wanna make one thing clear. Wizards creating synergy is fine, I like it. The point of this video is plainly I don't like when MOST of a set is dedicated so heavily to a theme. Hence the mention of the mark rosewater year in review. I'm not upset with new cards either, just not all at once. MKM gave us chalk outline, insidious roots, and amzu all of which make tokens for leave the graveyard effects. The cards feel like similar design space that could've been used for much interesting cards.
Agreed. mostly anyway. this is a case of falsely pointing to an issue. the real issue here being power creep. in the past, you could have a new supported theme, but it would not be a problem because your "hipster" deck, may already have plenty of cards that do stuff just as well and you don't feel like you "need" to put in the new ones. there would be trade offs and choices to be made. in the end, it still feels like a hipster spin on the formula. now though, they make a new supported theme, it is so powerful to convince people you must play it, it just over shadows all the old stuff. instead making it just feel like you are just forcing yourself to play the bad cards if you don't add them to your deck. its not a small amount of power creep either. with how powerful each set seems to be over the last, it will never really self-correct over time as now two or three supporting sets ago for a theme can feel quite out dated and whatever deck you may have made back then has been 50% replaced (or more). they just need to tone down how powerful a new supported theme can be and it should be fine.
@@33elk MKM contains these cards because it contains the collect evidence mechanic and the BG limited archetype was centered around it. By including collect evidence pay-offs that do not specifically mention the collect evidence mechanic, they both provided a good limited environment and allowed for more flexible use in other formats. It's an example of excellent, non-parasitic design in my book. The space they fill is filled with purpose across multiple formats and avoids parasitic design. Do you play limited? Many of your points make me feel that you lack an understanding of why these designs are essential for limited. The design space you seem to want more of is what happens in commander products and things like Beyond Boosters. It's only really possible to do "mechanically unique" cards at a high frequency in products that do not care about the limited environment (or to a lesser degree rotating environments like standard). From a purely commander perspective I'd agree more with your points, but MtG is much much more than just commander. Wacky one-offs and unique effects are hard to fit into sets that feed limited and rotating formats. If you want more of these kinds of designs, you should be in favour of MORE products explicitly made for commander or non rotating formats, like MH sets, commander decks and Beyond Boosters. This is also why Rosewater specifically mentioned MH3, because it would allow for the inclusion of such cards and they did not do a large volume of them (imo with the upside of a better limited format in return).
@@christopherpenn9585 I disagree heavily on the power-creep point. What they are doing a lot of recently is raising the floor, not the ceiling. They purposefully design new mechanics in order to allow them to be played at a similar level than existing mechanics, not to be better than them. There are rare examples of actual power creep (i.e. replacing an already strong card with an even better one), but most of it is just replacing average or below average cards with better ones. It means decks become more consistent, because you are no longer forced to play "weak" cards. It does not mean that cards are becoming stronger and stronger. In my opinion, it makes the game better overall. It might be semantics though, if by power creep you mean raising the floor and an increased density of good cards and you see this as a negative, that is a subjective opinion we can disagree on. If you think they are raising the ceiling, I think you are suffering from confirmation bias and should try to look at it from a different perspective as well.
@@schattenskorpion Firstly, raising the floor is literally the definition of power-creep: "The situation where successive updates or expansions to a game introduce more powerful units or abilities, leaving the older ones underpowered." Making old cards "weak" by new standards is power-creep, not just making strictly better versions of good cards. Secondly, if they weren't also raising the ceiling, then old decks with cards in them that were the best at the time should still be good in every format, as they were the ceiling. Yet most of these decks are now "unplayable" (i.e. have below 40% average win rates), and it's not just one or two decks, in most formats almost all previous top-tier decks have been 'unofficially rotated'. This extends to commander as well, cards that were ubiquitous before are barely even played anymore. Lastly, disagreeing with others is fine, but just state facts, don't presume others cognitive biases lest you display your own.
The biggest issue is that they aren't going to make sets that just don't work together, because that feels bad. And if they have a lot of ideas for cards that work together, they're mostly going to have to put it all in one set, because they won't be using those ideas for other sets for a while. Unless your deck is Prosper. Then every set gets you at least three cards because they can't stop printing Treasures literally everywhere.
As someone who originally just played yugioh and still plays it alongside magic, this sort of design really doesnt bother me as much in deck building. In yugioh mixing archetypes and engines is almost entirety of deckbuilding, and there is an optimal way of building your dekc generally for any given format. However what really matters (usually) is how well you pilot said deck. Most broken format in the history of the game (tear format) where literally every single deck at worlds was exactly the same was one of the most interesting metas to watch high level player play because it was one of the most technical and high skill pilot required formats ever.
i think analyzing magic from the yugioh perspective really helps to contextualize this issue. i don’t think all commander decks should be the same or play the same (which is why i hate cedh), but in constructed formats, it is reasonable to expect players to play the best-in-slot cards for the best packages, even if it means that decks are more homogenous. magic still has defined metas with multiple decks being viable in each constructed format, and with such a limited card pool, there’s only so many different ways and so many different decks you can build, which really doesn’t strike me as an issue for constructed specifically. my only issue with yugioh is that tier 0 decks often persist for much longer than they should, making them the only viable decks in the format, while also costing an exorbitant amount of money due to the high rarity printings of the best cards. this is why i’ve never been able to properly invest in yugioh or play it outside of a casual level, but that’s a different issue entirely.
When looking at my decks I still have to admit that the main cause of my decks having cards from the same set is due to certain tribes only being available in certain sets. My vampire tribal deck, for instance, is mainly composed of cards from Innistrad and Ixalan and will most likely always go for the most recent cards of the set because the newer vampires will most likely be better than the older ones. It's not a problem if the tribe you play is so popular that you'll always have a card supporting it in a set (like is the case with dragons) or if its obscure enough that there'll usually be only one card printed for it once every few blue moons (like with saprolings), but if its in the middle like with eldrazi or the vampire example I just put above I feel like that is when you are mainly jamming in cards from a particular set. I suspect, but I can't prove, that there is something similar going on if your deck is themed around particular mechanics.
that is also the conclusion that i came to while watching this video. the bottom line is that niche archetypes simply have fewer options to select from, meaning that decks will often default to using the best-in-slot cards available for the archetype. i think power creep plays a role here, but i feel like this issue is far less of a problem unless you are playing decks in a specific niche. i understand his argument and i do agree that the issue is important and worth mentioning, but especially in the case of constructed formats, it makes sense that archetypes would be built around the available cards. there are very few lizards outside of bloomburrow, so naturally a lizard deck would need to use cards from a set designed for the archetype. frankly, with the small card pool in standard, i find this to almost be a non-issue; this is just how the meta works in constructed formats for all archetypes. golgari midrange isn’t a niche archetype that requires the use of packages, but everyone is running the same list anyway. the only difference between that deck and lizards is that the lizard cards just happen to come from a single set.
Personally, this bothers me wrt EDH, but for limited I think it's cool and good. In commander, there's nothing more boring than feeling like a theme comes "pre-built" because they released a precon or two with those exact colours and theme. And it makes me want to build that theme less. For limited, yes there are sets with HEAVY typal themes and the occasional parasitic mechanic (looking at you, energy), but outside of that the designers are putting in a noticeable effort in making the draft themes overlap and interact with each other in ways. Thinking back to some of my favourite recent draft formats, LCI and WOE, each colour combination of course had a main theme with signposts, but there were also always cross-synergies to be found and explored. In my experience this is true for the vast majority of recent sets. And I honestly don't mind the occasional set that sticks to more rigid themes, as long as it isn't every set.
I think this is inherently the case with typal synergies the most. "Oh you want zombies? Hope you like Innistrad." It's why I don't have a single typal deck, and the one I did have for a while I took apart. It's just not fun to go find the best 25 squirrels/horrors/crabs/ whatevers and slam em in a deck.
i think there can be interesting subthemes inside some types, demons can be great aristocrats decks and i have a dimir rogues with an on hit effect/triggered abilities theme
@@RACECAR_JONES sure there can be. I think the more common the type the more interesting subthemes will be a available. Things like humans, soldiers, rogues, dragons, are always seeing new stuff in tons of sets. We ain't seeing new Pirates unless it's a pirate set.
I think a big part of the problem is power creep. I remember back when cards like Grand Arbiter Augustin IV were ridiculously expensive because of how strong the effect was in combination with the body. He's still quite good, but there are so many other things that do something similar, and so many ways to get around the effect, and so many more effective removal spells, that he's just not as in demand as he once was. Or cards like Fact or Fiction, or Buried Alive, or any number of other examples I could mention. They were pricey cards that have dropped in value mostly because of power creep. I just heard someone say when talking about Duskmourn previews that a 3/3 for 3 is fine. Mind you, this 3/3 also had a whole text box full of stuff. I remember a time when a vanilla 3/3 for 3 was pretty damn good. Don't get me wrong, I like cards that do interesting things, but it was a pretty big wake up call when Serra Angel got reprinted in tenth edition and was just kind of ok, and when Lightning Bolt got reprinted in M10 and was just finally a "pretty good burn spell". I remember a time when I could have designed custom cards like the modal DFC dual lands and been told they'd never get printed because they have no drawback, and "not having a basic land type isn't enough of a drawback". This sort of intraset/intrablock synergy isn't a new thing. It's been a thing at least as long as I've been playing Magic. It's just that now the new stuff is also so much better than the old stuff that it all feels very playable.
This is why I only recently retired from magic/ edh. After 5-6 years of playing I saw what the game became. Without a huge overhaul like a separate ban list for cedh and casual, with the excessive printings of new synergies that make any color a good color to play a token deck or a control deck. It's a done deal. I believe alot of the cards will become less desirable as more people like me who got pushed away from the game leave.
@@HereToSuffer247 Yeah, I was looking stuff up for a UR commander deck, and found that Lutri was banned. It made sense for him to be banned as a Companion back before they changed the companion rules, but now it's just a mediocre card that doesn't need a ban. Honestly, they should never have made new rules for companions to work as companions in Commander. There is no sideboard in the format. There are already tons of cards that just don't work because of the nature of the format. They made an entirely new zone JUST for companions in Commander, and then banned one of them before it even got released, and haven't bothered revisiting companions since. But they'll let you know which silver bordered cards are fine to play 🙄. The game is getting destroyed from every direction, and it's sad to see.
@HereToSuffer247 but they're built off the same principals, just with cEDH being vastly more accelerated version without the politics, and that seems to be what people like. Last I checked, too, there's generally a lot of pushback when separate cEDH banlists get brought up.
Whats even weirder is that sets are designed with these synergies that seems to work best in a limited environment, but at the same time they got rid of draft boosters. It just doesnt make any sense
I'm gonna preface this wall of text with: Interesting video! It's got me thinking! Off the cuff of my brain, part of me wants to pin this partially on the fact that the design team wants to lean in on narrower mechanics because they aren't really explored and toyed with much, because broader themes get tired over time. How many times can a Standard set get away with "counters matter" and "artifacts matter" and "tokens matter" type stuff before people will notice that it's just a cycle of recycled themes? Obviously the answer is gonna be different for everyone (and even whether or not it's a bad thing). So eventually the themes become a little more narrow in scope - especially as they want to experiment with new keywords or abilities that they think will be interesting or fun to play with. Using Squirrels as an example: Squirrel EDH is probably going to run a *lot* of Bloomburrow and MH2 cards, for sure - but isn't that because Squirrels as a tribe were always just the butt-joke of tokens? That they just NOW got an actual mechanical identity? There wasn't really a way for "Squirrels" to *be* a real prominent deck theme in EDH in terms of feeling unique. The ONLY overarching theme they shared was "being green tokens", which is about as plain oatmeal as it gets. The only "unique" thing about it was... well, that you were making Squirrels instead of Elves or Snakes or whatever. At least now the Squirrel cards can take you in a few directions: you can go real all-in on the go-wide strat (with some Aristocrats for some butter on your white bread), you can focus a little more on Food (which, since its inception in Eldraine, has had quite a lot of different support), or you can even build pretty tall with +1/+1 counters for some Krosan Beast level threats. Not 100% mindblowingly unique, but it gives the little creatures something to build off of in the future. If they decide in the future to print occasional Squirrels that aren't just "here's more creature tokens", they could potentially go in the deck, or not, depending on how your Squirrels deck leans. Over time, the more they introduce new Squirrels or cards that the squirrels care about, the less Bloomburrow and MH2 cards there'll be, and likely the more branched out they'll get as a tribe. Going back a little further, Shrines and Energy are probably two of the areas where it feels *actually* egregious, rather than just "hey, we wanna explore what to do with this". Both Shrines as an enchantment type and Energy as a mechanic are "stuck" - that is, there's not really a natural way for the design team to introduce new things for them in a more organic way, and they know this. While I wouldn't *necessarily* call Shrines themselves "parasitic" (though the fact that all current Shrines caring about all other Shrines is), Energy is a quintessential parasitic mechanic, and that means ANY support for them is going to feel hamfisted and particularly hand-holdy. You're never going to get a "random" Energy card in a Standard set or a random Shrine card either, and so that leads to them building "packs" of support for them when they feel they want to return to it which attempt to direct the mechanic into a direction. Do I think it's *bad*, necessarily? Ehhhhh... depends. If they start making sets feel completely disconnected from one-another full of one-off cards that don't really synergize with ANYTHING then that's not good, obviously, and having pre-built decks right out of the pack isn't great (for Limited and Standard, anyways) for people who like to build decks, either. I like it when they decide to explore some niche mechanic, but if they just give me a pre-built deck and then never give me any interesting toys for 3 years beyond super-generic everyman toys I'd be upset.
this is one of the more well-informed takes i’ve read about the issue in this comments section. i completely agree with you that this is more or less a non-issue since wizards is essentially obligated to keep making support for unique archetypes in order to keep the game fresh. i also agree that simply being niche/unpopular/unsupported is not the same as being inherently unique. the squirrels example is perfect and your analysis of the archetype proves that a lot of the criticism against it is unfounded. even in the case of energy, energy could easily return as a mechanic in future sets (as it did in MH3) and become increasingly general until it’s a full-fledged archetype in its own right. i don’t think there’s anything about energy that inherently makes it a “parasitic” mechanic; it just doesn’t have enough support yet. but there’s no reason why it couldn’t keep returning in future sets, or even a core set like foundations or something.
@@eebbaa5560 I wouldn't necessarily call it a "non-issue"; I do think that Wizards should be more careful than they were in, say, MH2 and MH3, with creating support that's "too" obvious, especially since those sets are made to both draft AND to fit into Modern (a format that has had a lot of wacky decks that have been adversely affected by the arrival of the Modern Horizons sets). A lot of the energy package, while cool when looking at it from the broader Energy set of cards we have, was definitely VERY obvious, whereas in the prior sets where it was more parasitic (Kaladesh and Aether Revolt) the mechanic was scattered across all colors and did all sorts of things. My point was moreso "I think underutilized or new mechanics or tribes are fair game for this kind of special treatment but Wizards should be careful to not to go overboard with it on sets that aren't very tribal-themed, and if they introduce mechanics they should try to splash it around a little more so that there's more interesting thought put into the experience." Fore example: Food as a theme during its inception in Throne of Eldraine was mostly a G/B thing. Most of its creation and payoff cards were in those colors - *however* there were a good few cards smattered around in blue and white that also created Food, opening up the door during draft for perhaps some Abzan or Sultai food shenanigans if you wanted to lean into that, or to splash some green or black foodstuffs into a White or Blue shell. Perhaps it's not as splashed around as I would like, but it definitely is a good example of how focusing on a new mechanic can be done without making it TOO obvious, I think.
This is exactly what happened for me with a deck I built around the manifest mechanic. Now there are like multiple sets that have packages of cards that just do what my deck did but way better.
This was always on my mind, glad its voiced somewhere finally. Makes me glad I've been cubing more to get opportunities to build those weird combos and less streamlined decks- Limited for life
I see what you’re saying and on one hand I do agree it’s more fun to look through a set like Future Sight and see all these janky or weird oddball cards and find a place for them in a commander deck and feel cool and special when EDHrec has 0% of people running that specific card. And although the new cards in each set in general are meant to be played in limited formats for easy drafting, it does seem like newer cards and even whole set archetypes are just autoincludes that just outright overshadow any of these niche picks for edh in specific. You’re right. All the food stuff now is good and it works unlike the older stuff but can still make the older stuff work as well. So it’s no longer niche, bad or jank. Now food is a legitimate strategy as opposed to a straight up joke. But conversely, this is also nice. That your Pharika deck or any food deck is no longer a meme, joke, or jank deck/archetype. It’s nice to be able to play an archetype and not have to flounder with 3-5 good cards for the archetype/commander and instead have a good mix of good cards and niche ones. But again, almost all of them are now autoincludes, all of them are replacing my niche picks. In all fairness, my decks still feel unique. My Gluntch deck has cards from several different sets. But even there the power creep is apparent such that my old token makers are being replaced by new ones, my old ramp by new ramp, my old interaction by new etc. etc.
This video puts into words what I've been feeling about so many sets lately. I had been wanting to make an assassin deck for a while, and hey, look, the Assassin's Creed set comes out with all sorts of assassin synergy, so now half that deck would probably be from that set. Same thing with suspend in the Doctor Who set. In retrospect, I might be just as upset that the mechanics I want to build keep getting relegated to third party stuff. I got excited at first when I saw suspend pop up again, but it wasn't as a theme that would get sprinkled into new sets that I could pick from, just a "hey, remember this?" tossed into a thematically appropriate promotional stunt, never to be heard from again.
I went through the process with an assassin deck. After Legends Retold, some obscure archetypes (in my case Deserts and Assassins) had been given just enough support to be viable. I had a good time figuring out which odd cards together would make the project work, but I don't enjoy ordering straight upgrades from recent sets because it feels like gentrifying my decks
sounds like you're just starting to see the seems of game design. game designers are the ones that control the experience and players are meant to find them. sure there will always be some crazy combos people will find that get passed the developers but that's just the other aspect of game design since nobody's perfect. sometimes these end up being really fun synergies and other times it's nadu, but in the end, a game can only really use the pieces it has to play it and when you design new cards to synergize with a certain mechanic, you have a choice between them being good enough to survive the niche uses of limited or leave them doomed to be draft chaff forever. for what it's worth some of the cards you showed for golgari were technically for the simic arctype, but part of why it can feel like there are so many cards for a single archetype is probably due to the overlapping cards. like how in bloomburrow, lizards care about life lost, but both otters and bats can easily trigger those synergies as well with some of the cards meant for them. there's even 2 duo cards that show this relationship. maybe we could use some more one-off card design, but all of the elemental beasts as well as a few outliers like the possum mana dork and cruel claw i find to be enough to just kinda through into some other decks for all the things they do.
I came from Yu-Gi-Oh years ago and 100% agree. A huge draw of magic for me was that it wasn't just complete packages of cards handed to you. And lately it feels like magic has been doing it more and more.
Glad someone is talking about this as I am not the biggest fan of Wizards printing cards that are Commanders or build arounds fir certain niche archetypes. I like EDH most when it's a sketchbook and not a coloring book.
I'm glad to see more discourse on this topic, it's something that's left a lot of the recent sets feeling very "hollow" to me. As you pointed out, it feels like each set DOES have lots of cool things I want to incorporate into other decks, but more and more it requires you to bring a bring it's friends and company in tow. I wouldn't call the current design direction "parasitic" but it does have some parallels.
This is definitely a multifaceted problem I noticed when edhrec got bigger. Part of it is the lack of creativity from deck builders, just going off what is most popular cards to put in X commanders deck. Too many cards designed around commander also help push people to add in the newer cards or packages like you said. I really like your analogy of the jigsaw vs the sculpture made with random pieces.
you’re right. the main issue is commander players’ general lack of creativity to begin with, exacerbated by wizards’ inclination to design cards that cater to these players, creating cards and decks which effectively build themselves for the average edhrec addict
I guess, a part of what confuses me with this perspective, is isn't this how it's kinda always been with niche strategies and mechanics? Like when a mechanic you're trying to build around is niche, your card pool already tends to be heavily oriented around a limited number of sets. I can't help but point to energy as well, cause prior to MH3/M3C, ALL energy cards were in either KLD or AER. So if you built an energy deck prior to MH3's release, a large portion of your deck was constrained to those two sets. And yet, basically ANY energy deck was still recognized as a highly niche category to the point that energy was quite novel to encounter in the wild (at least in my limited experience). Yet I kinda like how MH3/M3C (and I suppose PIP) revitalized energy as a niche form of play, to a point that its competitive viability has kinda gained a whole knew life long after Temur Energy's presence in Standard. For me at least, MH3/M3C brought a breath of fresh air into my Saheeli Energy deck, giving me more tools to hone the deck and get rid of some of the less synergistic chaff that the deck HAD to include in order to work due to the limited card pool in energy. But maybe that's just me.
Also, fundamentally only you control the extent to which you build around newer cards that maybe feel a little too cookie cutter for your taste. At its core, Magic is a fully opt-in style of game. And while that's a sentiment that's a little more difficult to uphold in competitive or limited environments, it's most true in casual constructed spaces like commander, where you are the one who controls your decklist and are able to build to your whims.
“magic is a fully opt-in style game” yes, exactly. especially for commander. but somehow, commander players consistently fail to realize this and complain about every new set as if they’re forced to play with every new card that gets printed. you have full creative control in commander, and if you feel that can’t build a unique deck, then you are simply not being creative enough. as for energy specifically, i think the complaints against the mechanic are more or less completely unfounded. energy is a mechanic that could _easily_ continue to receive more support, even outside of kaladesh-related sets, and eventually become a deciduous archetype.
@@eebbaa5560 I do wish you'd word your perspective in a way that was a little kinder, as frustration meeting frustration and anger meeting anger will only lead to more strife and conflict in the Magic community, but I'm glad to hear that you agree! And I also quite liked how MH3 took energy and reflavored it with cards like Guide of Souls or the re-tooled versions of power cards from magic's past, Chthonian Nightmare and Primal Prayers, and I would love to see more of that (though I'm also quite partial to the plane of Kaladesh, so a return to the plane would be really cool also).
@@disbarredg0 fair enough. i just feel like commander is teeming with overly casual players who don’t try to understand the game on a holistic level, so it’s frustrating when wizards ostensibly caters to them with new card designs only to face unwarranted backlash (not that i like wizards either, i don’t). as an aside, i think most of the actual issues with the game are less about design and more about greedy business practices, such as the lack of msrp and by extension, the prevalence of scalping, or the consistently overpriced and undervalued product releases from wizards (i.e. duskmourn nightmare bundle, collector boosters, etc.). anyway, i like commander, but as the most popular format, i feel like it’s prone to echo chambers created by, frankly, unskilled players who complain about things that they genuinely do not understand. the issues with the game exist, but without accurate analysis or criticism, they are unlikely to be properly resolved. regardless, i suppose you’re right that i should be less hostile towards the average player for the sake of objective communication.
@@eebbaa5560 Oh 100% with regard to WotC and Hasbro's business practices, I agree with that full send. I just worry about how one approaches newer or more casual players in these discussions. I love Magic, and I want to share that love of the game with others. And I find the best way to do that is by approaching these conversations, frustrating though they may be, with kindness, as I don't want to prevent newer / casual players from engaging in these discussions. Rather, I want to *help* them engage in a way that is constructive to the community and to the game. But ya, I still largely agree with the sentiment you're expressing (That said, I do say this as someone who largely plays commander only, just as a side note).
*Oh no*. It's really funny you mentioned miracles. You.... made this before the duskmorne edh spoilers were out didn't you. I guess the designers agreed with you that miracles were unexploited design space.
the deck you’re referring to is not really about miracles at all. aminatou gives your cards miracle; she doesn’t care about cards with miracle specifically. the fact that she has “miracle” in her textbox is almost incidental. in fact, the new aminatou is an insanely bad example because she’s actually a commander for a very, very general strategy, that being topdeck manipulation. she’s almost the exact opposite of what this video is about.
@@eebbaa5560Yeah, kinda? The timing here is just more funny than anything. It's not *exactly the same*, it's not like they printed a bunch of new miracles or a new topdeck manipulation package, but now there's a pretty obvious choice of "home" for the miracles in commander. IMO it's a really similar feeling of the deckbuilding being done by the designers, and not by the players. Even if it is coming at it from the other side the equation.
It's funny, because this problem showcases one of my major issues with the homogenization of obscure creature types. My weird viashino deck was grabbing creatures wherever they appeared all across time and trying to make them work, but now, now its just lizards. There's a package for that.
I think my favorite card from the energy archetype is Satya, cause it also encourages you to look into enter the battlefield triggers, attack triggers, and death triggers. Truly one of the most fun precons to re-configure for me
My pet deck that I’ve been gradually updating is the second deck I ever made, when I got started in like 2013. Black/White Vampire, using the orzhov mechanic at the time of Extort. Over some of the past few years, there have been so, so many Black/White/Red vampires, with various sub-mechanics, that I literally broke it apart and have made three separate simultaneous decks, an Orzhov Vampire LifeDrain, a Mardu Vampire anthem deck with Blood tokens, and a Mardu Vampire Aristocrat deck, from all the new cards that I’d originally gotten to supplement the first one. Because all the blood token ones, in hindsight, only really work best with the other blood token ones, so if you don’t build the whole deck using the cards from that set, they ultimately weren’t worth incorporating into the life drain one.
Could not agree more! I haven't played in months for exactly this reason. Every commander deck I make feels only slightly different than the last, or from what a quick google might get me. I miss my decks feeling mine, like I got one over on the game and found some hidden secret known only for me and my friends. I miss the days of finds new cards in glass cases or store binders and rush back to my friends as we ponder all the odd things we could do. Now, we can say one card name and just rattle off the rest of that go with it. I, for one, am here for more found art.
This is why i love my Tom Bombadil deck. It has a surprising amount of directions to build it in and touches so many sets. Im always on the lookout for the odd new card that can do something funky
I definitely feel this when trying to brew newer commanders. For so many of them, the deck is fully constructed from the second they come off the press. Still, there are some diamonds in the rough, too. One of my newest decks is Bruse Tarl, Roving Rancher built as a Boros Flicker/ETB deck that uses white's Ephemerates' and red's Twinflames' to generate value and eventually swing for a win. It's not terribly strong, but it's surprisingly consistent and really fun to play and upgrade since it doesn't have a ton of support, even from OTJ. That said, who knows if the next set will have an archetype or precon that is fully dedicated to Boros Flicker and make my deck simultaneously ubiquitous and worse than other decks now doing the same thing.
you know this is actually a pretty interesting thing. Archetypes as this are pretty much one of the reasons I feel connected to certain color combinations of go "off-meta" with decks that I build. Most of the time I build a deck I feel like it's already been made and hence get the feeling that it's kinda boring... so I look into other ways to build certain deck-tropes that are kinda "rare" or to an extend not really used that much. While I do not have all of these build, I kinda had some one my table brewing them - like... Raggadragga Lands (instead of manadorks as a full on land creature-commander), Brimaz Incubators (well it's technically Phyrexian Tribal but Tokenaggro/control in the way he wants to do it, is not that common in orzhov) or Ygra Fighter.... so I might be suffering from Archetype-fatigue :D
Completely agreed when you said that it's the designers who are having fun. The reason I am not particularly drawn to brew lately is that the decks sort of "build themselves". And the fact that decks like boros / mardu energy have over 60% of cards from a single set should be a massive red flag to everyone.
as a brawl player, i felt this in smaller scale. my main commanders are Teysa Karlov, Isshin, Awaken the Blood Avatar, and Kambal (Profiteering). even tho they are all different in main game plan, i still felt like they feels too alike in tokens production aspect. Ocelot Pride, becoming the key card on all of that decks is similar to what the video said
I had a red , black, green haste lizard deck before bloom burrow , now it's red black homogeneous lizards. However! I then made a blue/green lizard + frog deck, that is now my new original lizard deck.
The bloomburrow design is definitely a good thing for limited. And even in constructed there's valid reasons it happens (tangentially related, in fab very curated constructed decks allow them to focus a lot more on the skill of gameplay). Super important to avoid this in commander especially though, and commander sets are big offender here.
I would be curious to see a followup video of what you feel a potential solution to this current design philosophy would be. I feel that open-ended design has larger risks of things not connecting or connecting too well, I appreciate the 'safe' approach to limited arcytpe construction but understand your points that it takes a lot of fun out of the deckbuilding "game". Mark is fantastic about being transparent with how things happen at WOTC and has stated before that its hard to balance that line. The way they design sets is 100% aimed at new players to create easy to spot arctypes that work well together so that players can have access to standard or commander decks. It's also easier for the super casual player who opens boosters and plays with whatever cards are lying around (this type of player is estimated by WOTC as one of the largest groups playing the game at any given time).
I see where you are coming from. New to commander i got both energy precons (coz i like the idea of a side ressource) and while it started out as a enegry deck with the mentioned "in your face" synergy pieces, it didn't feel good and i rebuild it as Satya etb clone deck with energy sub-theme... but since i buget my deck it doesn't have all the staples and still feels unique (at least for me).
When you talked about the sculpture vs jigsaw and the packages argument i could only think of yugioh and how they handle things. They do packages as "archetypes" that are explicitly meant to work together, but not all archtypes are made equal so some are good enough to be their own deck and some are used as engines in other decks. Personally as someone who brewed all sorts of wacky stuff i kinda like it, its kinda like making a sculpture out of different jigsaw puzzles. You can can line them up and hammer them in place, or you can look for just the right chunks that line up perfectly.
I didn’t see another comment discussing why this might happen from a design perspective. My speculation is that it’s due to the honing of how cards and sets are designed over time. Rosewater has written articles discussing how to design individual sets, and occasionally how an element was new or introduced to the process when it comes up. My guess is thus that they have a very detailed procedure for how they approach designing sets, down to defining different packages and almost what individual cards do. (He has explicitly mentioned the latter in earlier articles about Design Skeletons; I wouldn’t be surprised if the former has cropped up explicitly in the design process in the last few years.) Moreover, when designing for different formats, different considerations enter into light, and they need to track all of them. Synergy of not only cards but themes across sets is something I’m sure they pay attention to for rotating formats, so that cards from different sets can play with each other rather than one invalidating the other or both being completely orthogonal. Even looking at an isolated set, it’s usually preferable by players that all themes are close to each other in power level, both for Limited purposes but also to ensure the new cards are appealing to all subgroups of players. If your favorite color combination got a theme with little, awkward support even in the set it came from, you might feel disappointed you didn’t get any new toys to play with. Even if the old toys are better-players also tend to prefer that the metagame be shaken up by new releases, especially in the contemporary age where it’s easier to netdeck and to find a game to play online. (I recall some WOTC designer talking about how MTG players would play less games and the meta would develop slower 20-25 years ago.) tl;dr: I reckon the prevalence of overly synergistic package designs is a result of specific design methodologies being honed over time. Naturally, the method itself is neither good nor bad, and can have positive or negative results depending on the actual designs themselves and other methodologies.
the issue with commander players is that they often fail to consider the game and its design holistically. commander players only view the game through the lens of commander, failing to consider the impact of development decisions on self-contained limited formats or constructed formats designed to be played with multiple sets as part of a smaller, but synergistic card pool. ironically, many of the issues with wizards’ current design philosophies are exacerbated, or even created by, wizards’ tendency and inclination to design cards FOR the commander format.
i play rakdos lizards in standard and i think that this problem is less of an issue in 60-card formats. yes, the lizard deck is practically built for you, but creativity isn’t really the main draw of 60-card formats. no one is really a brewer for standard, and building your own deck isn’t the main goal of the format, or even viable a majority of the time. rakdos lizards is just a meta deck that happens to have all of its pieces in one set, similar to domain which you mentioned. i think this is just the result of the deck not being built around a generic mechanic that allows for variety, like prowess, convoke, etc. in commander, however, i think this issue is far more pronounced due to how it skews decks from the lens of a singleton format to one more reminiscent of constructed formats, where a desire for consistency makes decks increasingly homogenous. while i do think this issue is worth considering, unless you’re playing a niche deck/archetype that inherently needs certain cards (i.e. a go-shintai deck running every available shrine), i think it’s possible to maintain your uniqueness as a deckbuilder.
4:13 a small, likely useless, counterpoint that also uses Bloomburrow: The mechanics can still work well with others. The mice, despite Valiant being "weaker" than Heroic, can easily be in the same kind of deck as them, or even in Voltron or doing what Nadu did but without the Legend Rule. The lizards fit RNA-Rakdos' Spectacle, and Guildpact-Gruul's Bloodthirst. Plus, the birbs and bnuuys can fit with most any deck that includes their color(s) by being support and go-wide.
the kind of creativity you’re displaying here is what most commander players lack, which then increases the prevalence of commander players complaining about non-issues. it’s not at all a useless counterpoint.
This has been a major problem for me, since I like to play golgari midrange in pioneer. Almost all the golgari gold cards in new sets just care about moving stuff through the graveyard or sacrifice. It feels like there may be one genericly playable card per set that casts for gb, even fewer that are good enough to see play.
This has happened to Hazezon Shaper of Sands. All I wanted were more deserts that may or may have done unique things. Circa Comander Masters, and Thunder junction. Oh brother. . .
My pet deck is Bant blink, and couldn't help but pick up at least three of Bloomburrow's Frogs that synergize with "leave the battlefield without dying" effects.
I came to mtg from yugioh, and despite that being the younger game I think mtg can learn from it's mistakes. This lack of deckbuilding choice is mirrored in ygo, where the archetypes are even more synergistic. The powercreep in mtg is starting to catch up to ygos too, where only new decks that are within the last year or two even stand a chance competitively.
Bro... MTG isn't even close to Yugioh in both 'archetypes' and powercreep. Yugioh's archetypes literally name the specific cards that they work with and have for well over a decade. Magic has very few cards that do this. The 'archetypes' in Magic are very loose. In powercreep Yugioh would print the answer to powerful cards literally in the next set. Traps like dimensional prison used to be useful until they printed monsters that could destroy trap cards. And then Bottomless trap hole could beat those cards so they made monsters that could destroy trap cards when they entered or could not be destroyed. And then they printed Solemn Warning to get around those creatures. They had creatures that couldn't be destroyed so they printed cards that would exile them or 'send then to the graveyard' instead. But those effects targeted so they printed creatures that couldn't be targeted. So next they printed cards that would remove those creatures without saying 'target'. It's an absolute garbage show in Yugioh. Not even comparable to MTG. If you feel like the 'archetypes' in MTG are too restraining, it's probably because you're a bad deckbuilder. Because those archetypes literally only matter in limited. In Standard, Modern, Legacy, Vintage, EDH, Brawl, and literally every other format in Magic, those archetypes mean absolutely nothing. The most competitive decks of these formats do not follow the established archetypes at all. If you follow the archetypes and can't see past them - you're just bad at the game.
@@Vesdus and for the case where your archetype drastically limits the card pool like say lizards or an underrepresented mechanic like incubate or energy of course you're gonna play the most recent cards because those cards tend to be the most powerful
@@jmanwild87 Buddy if the best you can do while deckbuilding is pick a mechanic and then try to play cards with that mechanic, then you are a bad deckbuilder. In eternal formats, Magic has an incredibly large pool of cards, and there are very few mechanics that function outside of the rest of the game's cards (like Energy). If you look at decks as simply 'an incubate deck' or 'a lizard deck' then of course all decks are going to seem predetermined to you lol. You can't even see outside of the cards that were printed in a single set.
@Vesdus sure i could build a deck based around say Glissa Herald of Predation where its a bunch of stuff that benefits me making tokens and putting counters on stuff but that's not going to stop the fact that i'm stuck with a lynchpin commander if i wanna build around fully utilizing it. could also build it as phyrexian tribal but then 2/3s of the text box is pointless. my issue with building say a deck that focuses on utilitizing energy in commander prior to mh3 is that you were stuck with a bunch of mediocre cards meant for standard and this gets even worse with incubate because then you have to build around protecting and maximizing the one good card you have if you're going green black That's the issue with underrepresented mechanics. Some people like making it work. me? i just find it too much effort for not enough reward.
Interesting. When bloomburrow released and I looked at the cards I got a feeling of a yu-gi-oh set. I haven't played much yu-gi-oh but I know they release self-contained sets with cards that work well together and then are never, or very rarely, later revisited. I thought it could have been the new 'care about tribe' cards that didn't exist before (otters, frogs, mice, lizards, rabbits, racoons), as opposed to bats which kinda relate to vampires which has been a thing for a while and rats. Your line of thought makes a lot of sense though, and it vindicates my hunch a little bit.
I've played a Grenzo, Dungeon Warden edh deck for over a decade. I can remember having Reito Lantern and Soldevi Dagger as pretty much the only ways to loop endlessly, otherwise you'd use Canal Dredger to get something back once per turn. In recent years Hoverstone Pilgrim, Tomb Trawler, Reito Sentinel and most recently Barkform Harvester have all been printed, making what was an obscure mechanic rather more common. I still love playing the deck but these newer cards have definitely crept up its power and infinite combo potential.
I noticed this (not for the first time) in MH3. Anytime I'm looking for cards to slot into a deck I would go through recent sets. And everytime I look through MH3, I'm just like "right....there's nothing here unless I'm playing X, Y, or Z"
I totally agree with this take, and also outlining the strengths of set synergy. I think that most (signpost/archetype focused) cards should be doing something very clear, something that defines a strategy. However every card in that strategy shouldn’t directly support it. I think this is the inherent flaw in energy. If something makes or relates to energy, it can’t work in a non-energy deck, which is why it is so parasitic. So synergy for sets and set-spanning synergies are good, but parasitism and extreme synergy is bad.
obvious synergies are fine but they need to be clearly delineated from other synergy packages to prevent everything bleeding together into one big mush, and add some friction to trying to merge together different sets. yugioh operates like this and the fun part of the deckbuilding in that game is finding ways around the constraints each package forces on you, which provides space for creative deckbuilding despite the very tightly knit in-archetype synergies.
i’ve only played yugioh casually, but i also drew the comparison between archetypes in that game and the point that elk is making here. i think the difference between magic and yugioh archetypes, and why elk has an issue with this design philosophy, is the disparity between archetypes in magic. taking the current standard format for example, magic archetypes are either very, very general (i.e. golgari midrange, prowess variants) or highly specific (i.e. rakdos lizards). these archetypes are diametrically opposed from a design perspective, so the fact that such a contradiction exists in magic creates the sort of apprehension that elk is describing. on the other hand, yugioh archetypes are not only extremely numerous, they are also purposefully specific with cards clearly belonging to certain “engines” and only being tangentially synergistic with other archetypes. yugioh also has general toolbox cards, but these cards do not belong to specific archetypes (for the most part) and they don’t place a strain on deckbuilding in the sense that they would constrict you to a certain niche. even when you combine archetypes in yugioh, you only run a few cards as a toolbox, rather than playing two different archetypes in tandem (i.e. gimmick puppet, invoked, etc.). the design philosophy of yugioh is as if every set were bloomburrow, with each archetype being atomically separate from one other.
I agree on being burnt out recently on a lot of the new product. My playgroup and I have recently turned to pauper EDH. as an avenue to expand our deck building abilities.
I hadn't really thought about this, but it makes a lot of sense. There's also a kind of weird problem for it with commander I have found where if you try to lean into one of the Bloomburrow archetypes like Raccoons or Bats, it can be difficult to fill out the deck with good bats and raccoons, so if you want to go the jigsaw puzzle route in commander, you kind of can't, at least not all the way. I wanted to make a raccoon deck that was just tons of raccoons and "creature type" buffing cards, all for raccoons, but there just weren't enough decent raccoons, even including some changelings. It's the same with bats. You can't really lean fully into a bat theme, but there is PLENTY of stuff for the life gain/drain. While I have found this issue of there not being enough jigsaw pieces for some commander decks, I do agree that the deck building experience is better with cards that aren't exactly designed to work together. It's one of the reasons I stopped playing YuGiOh and started playing Magic. YuGiOh not only has every deck limited to a named archetype, every deck will run the same 8 cards regardless of archetype, at least in Master Duel
this is why the best commanders(from a deckbuilder perspective) that have been printed in the last few years are the ones that spin around more base mechanics of the game such as combat, draw, targeting(crimes). I particularly like Goro Goro and Satoru, Minn, Wily Illusionist and the most recent Marchesa. The line is thin between open-ended design and goodstuff tho. The simic goodstuff commander that gets printed every set is always sad to see.
As a Pharika lover (thanks to you!), I felt your pain with all the new pieces from Karlov Manor. 😭 As a Junji Ito lover, I appreciated your reference. 🤣
I believe that building decks around basic themes like Graveyard, Food, or Kindred restricts creativity because there are only so many cards that fit these categories before you're forced to include subpar options. When you explore more unique themes, you open up a diverse card pool that sets your deck apart. However, if you're committed to something like a Golgari graveyard deck, the similarity in deck objectives inevitably leads to a lack of variety. This predictability is a core issue with current set designs, as it feels like the deck is almost pre-built for you. Ultimately, it's up to us as deck builders to innovate and create decks that defy the usual patterns, challenging ourselves to break from the mold and bring new excitement to the game.
A deck tech that I enjoy is with my Niv-Mizzet Parun deck. He does 1 damage to any target on card draw - which makes it incredibly easy and consistent to flip battles over. Of the 9 battles you can run in izzet colors I run 7. The two I don't run are Kaladesh as the deck doesn't have enough artifacts to warrant it and Kaldheim as with the amount of draw the deck has impulse draw is almost entirely a downside. What's funny though is of the cards that are explicitly written with support for interacting with battles I only run Joyful Stormsculptor as the others are ... not great.
So you feel like it's become too easy for other people to build decks similar to your original idea? You just discovered that only certain mechanics get support in certain sets? Why people talk about Pre-EDH? Why people enjoy creating their own formats? Their own cubes? Their own custom cards? I get your point about too much support and MR's statements about homogeneity in MH3, how this all impacts uniqueness and feel, but this has always been the case. There is conflict between people wanting more of what they like and their pride in their independence/resourcefulness. People wanted more cards than what was available, so they made more. Yes, you could see that as them creating an open lane through a rough area you claimed as your own, but your options are still there, and it was a direction they could go to expand the card pool. You don't have to use the new stuff, if you still want to pride yourself on your uniqueness. You can play EDH with only cards up to a certain date, if you want, but the game does keep expanding and circling back when there are gaps they want to fill. It used to be tougher, so many niche cards and mechanics were locked to blocks. You want Miracles? -> Avacyn Restored. Energy -> Kaladesh. Soulshift? -> Champions of Kamigawa. Tribute? -> Born of the Gods. MDFC Lands? -> Zendikdar Rising. Traps? -> Zendikdar. And to an even greater extent, Fetchlands! If you wanted to compete in modern back in the day, you had to go Zendikar. No other option in any other set. Shocklands with Ravnica too. Reprints and adding support for popular, niche mecahnics is a good thing, even if you feel it allows other to more easily build decks similar to your original idea, even if you feel like people are encroaching on your unique territory. Don't get me wrong, power creep and homogeneity are big issues, but they come with the nature of making an ever-growing card game like this, so I don't see it as horrible when a niche, janky strategy (like cards leaving GY effects) gets supported with more options that fit a new set's theme really well (Chalk Outline is a good example). It's still the same deckbuilding process: consider your options and choose what you want to play. You don't have to pick the shiny, new, powerful stuff, and interest in them will likely die down as time passes.
It felt like back in the day, to do The Thing, you'd pick through for cards that when used together did The Thing. Now you pick cards that each do The Thing. Riku of Two Reflections can copy my spells if I invest a bunch into ramp to feed his blue-mana-hungry butt and pay 5 to cast him, and protection for his fragile 2/2 with no abilities body. Kalamax, the Stormsire is a 4/4 that grows and all I need to do to copy a spell is turn him sideways. You can attack with him and 3 mana open (4 if you want to get wild) and your opponent now has to decide what response won't activate the mother of all combat tricks. The only synergies he needs are a) instants and b) maybe ways to tap him in case attacking won't work.
There is, at least in my opinion, also an upside to this recent phenomenon: with more obviously and directly synergistic pieces, threat assessment becomes a lot more manageable for those who do not play too much Magic, or those who are just on the slow side (me).
I completely agree with your take, the same thing kinda happened to my cayth token copying deck, the precon from bloomburow just gave me like 6 new cards that do exactly what I want, and I feel this video sums it up well
I get your point and I don't even necessarily disagree with it, but at the same time tbh I prefer this to the more random set design philosophy that they had before. I'll never forget being really excited for the Party Time commander deck and the DND set that was tied to it, only for there to be next to no cards in the set that helped the deck out.
This exact issue plagued legends of runeterra the longer that game got developed, it originally started out with a lot of unique cards that people could creatively throw together and didnt have any forced synergy but as time went on and more sets got developed they started printing decks that were effectively premade while also being the best thing you could play, there was no longer any fun or creativity in the deck building process. This killed the game for me as each new set just added in some new meta deck while old decks got almost no new updates or interesting tech to include.
I had a lovely, janky, Golos shrines deck when the funny robot guy was still wandering around. It wasn't amazing, didn't have the vamp/enlightened/etc, but i could use overplayed budget cards as truly synergistic value pieces (ephamarate, brain storm, literally all of the scry temples). The goal was to stick an Alhammeret's Archive with a bunch of shrines and draw your deck with a lab-man effect. I loved that deck dearly. Then, unbeknownst to me while I took a break from magic, they banned Golos. I sat down at the LGS near my uni and pulled out my Golos deck. One dude immediately got miffed and told me I couldn't play it. So, I just swapped the commander with the only 5-color legendary creature in my trade binder: Sisay. The deck, with sisay as the commander, is now incredibly streamlined. I don't get to spin the Golos wheel anymore and even worse, with the addition of the new Kamigawa set while I was away, shrines became the number one theme on EDHREC for Sisay. It's still a fun and interesting deck (acting more like an enchantress storm list than your typical sisay shrines deck) and still has all 10 temples like the old version, but I'd still love to have my old jank back.
Im split on this because on one hand i love it when cards are designed to work together, especially when those packages mix well with one another, but on the other hand i love my sidisi deck which as a self mill strategy has a variety of options at its disposal while retaining that feeling of synergy. Maybe the main issue with these synergistic design packages is how narrow and parasitic they are with one another rather than that they spell out a game plan for you 🤔
Really excellent video, and something that resonates with me a lot. I am also probably more a brewer than player for EDH, and it feels increasingly more difficult to find deck ideas where the deck isn't just already full of purposefully designed cards that work exactly together. Also an excellent point linking it to the prevalence of strict synergy packages in modern sets for limited. One counterpoint to that for me was Kamigawa Neon Dynasty - that set's limited environment was so much more open, with a lot of very small synergies that you had to piece together in an overall deck, and some cards that could synergise with many other cards, but in different ways. I hope we move to an era of these 'small synergies', rather than the overhanded way they are being handled right now.
limited environments are by and large still dominated by small synergies. bloomburrow is an exception, not the rule. it is overtly designed to be a tribal-based set with clearly defined archetypes and synergies, simply due to the nature of the set. in my opinion, this isn’t an issue at all, but regardless, bloomburrow is not the standard for the current design of limited formats (see OTJ which was an extremely open and creative format).
I love how you can apply this whole video to heartstone. I recently stopped playing it cuz it was anoying how blizzard just buffs some tribals or makes up new things and if you don't play them you get destroyed by anything that is meta. There are some interesting decks that you can build but only in wild which they completely don't care about, so most of the times you either run into some really optimal aggro or get otk comboed by a deck that has so much sustain you couldn't possibly beat.
I play a mutate deck. One of my primary issues with it is simply that all of the mutate cards come from one set, and causes mutate inclusions that I feel are mediocre because mutate only got to exist for one set and wasn’t explored meaningfully outside of one environment. Back in the 3 set block environment things like mutate and other unique mechanics like energy would have time to make their own space for themselves and their the designers would begin to get clever with how the mechanic works, now with many of the new mechanics if you want to build with them you are locked into the one and only set they were printed in. The same is true for cases, and battles, rooms, and probably a few other ones I’m not remembering at the moment
Yup, totally. I had a Fain, the Broker mono black deck and it was blood tokens/treasures artifact token aristrocrat, full of Vampires too as a subtheme. It took me 2 years to tune that deck to make it work smoothly, and then this year we got Shilgengar xD! I just slapped him in the command zone, even if the deck is still almost MonoBlack and I dismissed the Angel theme besided the card Divine Visitation
I feel like the shift away from Block structure releases has exasperated the issue, as now whole packages need to be contained within a single set and cannot slowly emerge over the course of a year. Furthermore, those single sets now seems to have less connecting points than even back when the single set structure began, as around Zendikar Rising, Kaldheim and Neon Dynasty you had at least the connecting theme of dual faced cards, for whatever that is worth. I'm interested how Foundations will shift this and wether drafts with like one foundation pack and two of the current set will work in limited at all.
I think this is why I build decks with building restrictions to my themes. It stops my decks from having this issue. My Radha Heir to Keld deck for example is a voltron favorite of mine. Its also a deck that only plays at intant speed. I have no creatures in the library because the deck prefers to run cheap protection spells instead. Farewell is a wipe, but Radha can kill potentially on t4, so I rarely deal with wipes like that.
This is pretty much how yugioh has worked for many years. Archetypes are designed to work within themselves and decks made of cards that weren't MADE together but work together has become a rarity. (Save for something like stun pile)
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![[EDH] What you NEED to make a Commander deck](/img/tr.png)
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Commander used to be more junkyard wars and less ikea furniture
Commander was fun because it was playing magic in a way it wasn’t intended to be played, and you had to figure out how to make cards work in an environment they weren’t designed for. And then wizards started designing cards for commander.
@@AnonymousHuman-ku5whwell said!
Great analogy!
I think bloomburrow isnt the best example because it was a tribal themed set. Each draft archetype themed around a creature type, each creature type themed around a particular playstyle. They did this in lorwyn nearly twenty years ago with stuff like flash faeries.
Additionally things like Bloomburrow Birds almost necessitated playing non bird blue and white creatures, since so many bird effects revolve around a flier giving an effect to a non flier.
While in draft this might translate to "Birds are the weakest archetype" I think it means you'd still be likely to grab them for decks where you have one color of the pair, and similarly, great birds would want to grab good non birds.
It seems like less of a problem in Sealed, where you can't necessarily skew entirely to one color or creature pair, and have to make due with what you ripped
i found older videos with minimal elk animation easier to watch with my eyes. i like where the channel is heading so I thought I'd leave my weightless opinion. keep it up :)
seconding this :)
First vid so I can't speak to old videos, but the constant 2 frame lip lapping/wrist flicking was super distracting.
Yea I would at least lengthen the time between blinks and keep the hoof out for the whole duration of a thought/point rather than it be tied to the mouth being opened.
Yeah the bouncy effect helps add a little life for a stream pngtuber or something, but for a chill youtube video I prefer the held frames.
Try watching with your ears. Easier to focus.
The packages you see in limited are part of the design philosophy that creating synergy is more “fun” for drafters than simply picking the most powerful individual cards in a color.
It’s a delicate line to walk. If the limited designs went the other way, with only minimal synergy, then drafts would become splashes of goodstuff piles.
A great recent example of how to do it right was Thunder Junction. Stuff like “crime” synergy was incredibly varied, with many crossovers from different archetypes working well with the theme. At the same time, you still had a “mounts” package that was strong if you found that open lane. I think the set achieved a fantastic balance of more strict “packages” and open-ended synergy decks just running good cards alongside value like “Intimidation Campaign.”
The analogy to a found object sculpture is something I found really beautiful. It perhaps perfectly encapsulates what is great about mtg. It's always a tad disappointing when deckbuilding is linear, or "pre-solved". Some entire TCGs have this as a systemwide issue.
wotc doesn't even give us the freedom other tcgs with linear deckbuilding tend to have. in games like yugioh or vanguard, cards are indeed mostly printed with one specific deck in mind, but players are given more than enough viable options and enough flexible staple cards that deckbuilding still involves choices. instead of completely leaving you on your own, it often comes down to figuring out what last 5-10 cards work best for you personally, or what variant of a deck you want to play, but in magic you're railroaded so hard that there's really only ever 1 variant of a particular deck. i've been trying to figure out why i have more fun with vanguard deckbuilding when they design in the linear way i hate about modern magic, and i think it's exactly this reason: magic has far less flexibility in their rigid archetypes than other games, and wotc still act like they're giving players the "found object" experience when they just aren't
@haeilsey I should give Vanguard a try. But I still have absolutely no idea how it's played, lol.
@@haeilsey Yugioh deck construction is a joke, coming from someone who plays the game. Your biggest choices are "how many of the starters do i run" and "what staple cards kill everybody elses deck". your own combo is never something you have to seriously consider.
@@haeilsey magic is far and away the most flexible deck building experience in the genre. Comparing it to Yu gi oh is a joke
@@autinbutin2698 i think he’s right tbh. there are lots of variants, combinations, engines, etc. in yugioh and you can easily build two different versions of the same deck. magic has a much more pronounced issue with “best-in-slot” cards than yugioh, especially in constructed formats.
I think one of my biggest complaints with this kind of design personally is that I don't like how it impacts already existing decks. I have a gruul enchantress deck lead by Ulasht, The Hate Seed, and I always considered the idea of gruul enchantress to be novel and unique. Now we have almost an entire preconstructed deck in those colors where enchantments are part of the main theme. In fact, the deck's alternate commander, Wildsear, is just front to back the correct choice for who I should be running at the head of the deck. It makes what was originally a super fun almost "secret idea" I had now feel far less special. I don't feel like I'm being original anymore. And this is far from the only example of that as of late.
When you really like an obscure band and it suddenly becomes attached to a meme, goes viral and becomes mainstream
Sorry mate, you never were
Due to the nature of Magic, this sort of thing was bound to happen eventually. However, the rate this happens and intentionality of it changed the feeling from an “oh cool” response to an “aw man” response. That’s the impression I get anyway.
It felt like back in the day, to do The Thing, you'd pick through for cards that when used together did The Thing. Now you pick cards that each do The Thing.
Riku of Two Reflections can copy my spells if I invest a bunch into ramp to feed his blue-mana-hungry butt and pay 5 to cast him, and protection for his fragile 2/2 with no abilities body.
Kalamax, the Stormsire is a 4/4 that grows and all I need to do to copy a spell is turn him sideways. You can attack with him and 3 mana open (4 if you want to get wild) and your opponent now has to decide what response won't activate the mother of all combat tricks. The only synergies he needs are a) instants and b) maybe ways to tap him in case attacking won't work.
I wouldn't call gruul enchantments really that much of unique archetype. Rakdos or Izzet enchantress sounds much more unorthodox.
Personally I’m a little conflicted on the matter. For me a deck being wholly unique is not a big motivating factor to my deck building and honestly I enjoy when the theme I’m working on has some actual support; but it does come to a point where I want to brew a new deck and I find my self not really building a deck but instead choosing what staple I do or do not want to stick in. It’s kinda a catch 22. Either your pet deck stays unique but generally underpowered in comparison to more supported strategies or your deck gets some pre built support which increases its power and reliability but half the decks already built.
This happened to my Kumena deck.
Although Merfolks was already a tribe with lots of support from the Lorwyn and original Ixalan blocks I slowly gathered singles and some synergy pieces from LGSs around my area. And slowly but steadily built my first commander deck from scratch.
Then Lost Caverns of Ixalan came out and the merfolk precon was like 70% my deck with shinier toys and better merfolk support.
It felt like the deck I built from scratch wasn't special anymore. You could enter any LGS and just buy it off the shelf 🙁
@@eildonp your deck wasn’t unique to begin with. merfolk are one of the most popular tribes of all time. i feel like if you’re setting proper expectations this shouldn’t be that disappointing.
As a game designer myself, I would say "found object" design would just make more Nadus & Thoracles than skeleton crew.
for sure you gotta be wary of "good stuff" but there's a good balance out there somewhere in the terminuses of the world and such
Not putting "win the game" on a card helps a lot if you don't want it to win the game :P There's an interesting discussion to be had about how designs can limit/allow combos
@@33elk You are right. The secret mixture is playtest, observe and adapt. Players will always come up with broken or unintended stuff, the job of the designer is to monitor whether they reinforce, or undermine the intended experience.
I think this really hits the nail on the head with recent magic design. This past month or two, I've felt like things have been a little stale and I've been looking around for a new commander to build, but so many seem way too straightforward to build at this point. The amount of "packages" available takes so much of the joy out of the deck *building* process. I'm glad to see that Rosewater has acknowledged this, and hopefully we'll get some more broad synergies that we can experiment and build around, rather than the super-focused ones we've had lately.
this entire issue is the result of wizards consistently defaulting to the “made for commander” approach instead of prioritizing other formats. designing cards for commander is ostensibly lowering the quality of card designs and negatively impacting all formats. draft environments are the only well-designed formats because they’re intentional and self-contained.
Triggered abilities without costs lead to a critical mass of combo density.
Huge driver of complexity creep right here. Nadu can be the mascot
I would probably have to disagree with this as a whole. Firstly, the game designers exploring old and un-utilise design space shouldn't be seen as an issue. I understand having a cute pet deck which feels unique become another regular archetype feels bad if you liked it being a pet deck but to me the reason why these decks feel good is utilising the potental of these cards and ideas and showing what they could be, so what's so bad about that being fully realised several years down the line in a set.
I'd also say these puzzle pieces aren't as put in place as some people say. Take food, a personal favourate of mine which I often see other creators point to as a pandered archetype. I got into food with Wilds of Eldraine because I loved Greta, Sweet Tooth Sourge as a flexible engine and set up piece and I never felt like I was forced to follow a puzzle when building my deck. Foods are token artefacts which gain life and have an unique tag, there is no restrictive formula here. You can grab all the cards that say food and call it a day, you can use artefact synergy, token synergy, lifegain synergy. You can build midrange, control or even combo with a few infinites food has. The whole reason I made this deck is because I was looking for a new golgari, token based sacrifice commander deck after starting to consider deconstructing my baba lysaga deck because of how it played (lost if the commander was removed and struggling to fix this without changing what I like about the deck) and I feel like this speaks in the new deck. Cards maybe seen as uncoventional for foods such as Old Rutstein or Awaken the Vastwood are callbacks to this old deck with this deck as a whole having a larger focus on sacrificing artefacts with Braids Arisen nightmare and Marionette Master (which has a fun combo with Night of the Sweet's Revenge and Greta's ability which most people I play against being caught off guard by it) than other food decks may.
Some archetypes are more puzzle pieces than others, such as lizards in standard, but hasn't this always been the case? Tribal decks have always been slamming in the most efficent engine pieces, usually from the same expansions, such as elves or merfolk with little else. Maybe elves tap into more expansions but that's because we've seen elves how many times, in how many expansions? If we saw lizards in more expansions I'm sure we'd see the same expansion diversity in their deck as we would of with elves. I do like a challenge when building a deck but I feel like the card pool is deep enough in magic, at least with enternal formats, that when a card asks you to do X you have multiple ways to try and do this. For every Lizard archetype there is an Ob Nixilis Captive Kingpin, for every Merfolk archetype a Pharika God of Affliction, and for every Elf archetype there is a Zur the Enchanter. For everycard which could be considered a piece in a puzzle there are 10 different puzzles to put it into and a different card which is the puzzle in and of itself, and I feel like it has been that way for a long time.
indeed i am one of those people who if an archetype i wanna play doesn't have enough support i simply won't build it and will move on to something else. take something like Glissa herald of predation i started working on an incubate deck only to realize there was maybe a handful of good incubate cards in green/black and didn't wanna be super reliant on glissa and took the deck apart. there is a balance to strike where you don't wanna have decks that build themselves but you don't wanna leave people scrambling for good pieces if they wanna build around the new legend ya printed
you pretty much hit the nail on the end. unless you’re building a very niche deck/archetype, your deck can be as unique as you want it to be. there are actually very few parasitic/build-around/etc. mechanics and even things like energy become more and more broad the more support the mechanic receives. and as for constructed formats, this is a complete non-issue. by necessity, constructed decks play the best-in-slot cards regardless of whether they’re built around a niche archetype (lizards, energy) or something completely general (golgari midrange).
@@jmanwild87interested in my Glissa artifact Phyrexian list?
I'm inclined to agree. This whole vid could say the same about edhrec for homogenising the format. It's down to players to make interesting decisions. Standard and modern have tons of cut and paste decks and that's fine
found you through the Trinket Mage and I must say- this is a really great video! Super insightful about how set design affects commander and the game as a whole
This pattern reminds me of what the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG has, which has the notion of Archetypes and support for them. Lots of homogeneous decks as a result. Most decks of archetype X feel like all other X type decks.
4:21 I just realized, is magic boxing itself into Yugiohs Archetype designs where the decks build themselves?
If magic design wasn't, edhrec certainly was
This isn’t a problem. Draft > 60 card constructed > commander.
“Sets have synergies” isn’t a problem.
what does “>” mean here? smaller card pools? but yeah i agree with you. i think commander players only think this is an issue because they don’t play other formats or understand the game holistically. if you play draft or 60-card formats you will quickly understand that printing cards with synergy and added support is mostly a non-issue.
@@eebbaa5560 greater than i.e. greater consideration for how the format plays. Synergies are necessary for limited so removing them for commander, which should be the lowest consideration from a design perspective, would be the wrong choice. I often see creators complain about cards designed for commander but then have takes like this where they want cards designed with commander in mind but ignore the implications that would have on the formats the packs are designed to be played with (draft & sealed).
@@friendo6257 ok i understand now. i agree that the limited format should always be the most important consideration for making a set. and yeah, i completely agree that commander players ignore this key fact. i feel like most commander players are too casual to holistically analyze set design from perspectives other than that of the commander format. i find that the discussion in commander communities is extremely insular and is often riddled with contradictions and logical fallacies. i suppose that just comes with the territory of being the most popular format.
@@eebbaa5560 I think the problem is exacerbated by power creep. It used to be that a graveyard themed set would have a couple of good cards that could slot into most graveyard decks. Nowadays it's closer to what we saw from MKM. 8-10 good cards in a particular archetype that could slot into most decks.
@@friendo6257 is that really power creep though? the floor of the average card has increased, but we’re not seeing as many increases to the ceiling (i.e. cards at the same power level as staples like sol ring) outside of some outliers. i just think that the average power level of sets is higher than it used to be, and there are less bad cards and a few more generically good ones, which isn’t a bad thing in my opinion. the MKM cards discussed in this video are by no means staples, or even must run, best-in-slot cards in the golgari graveyard archetype; they’re just generically decent cards. i don’t think this necessarily constitutes power creep, it just means that decks have more options to choose from.
THE ELK HAS SPOKEN. ALL PRAISE THE ELK.
I have no issues with packages, other than the size of them squeezing out more niche cards being added to a set. The only place it's reasonably an issue is Standard, because of the smaller pool of cards, and it's part of the reason they moved Standard to a 3-year rotation.
While packages may seem like a jigsaw to you, I see it as a lego set. Sure, there is an intended design, but that doesn't mean you can't make things your own way or fit pieces from other sets.
Packages provide something that was long asked for: more support for new strategies when they arrive. So many times sets would come out and have only a few cards for an interesting strategy and brewers (mostly for Commander from what I've seen) would complain that it's just not enough to work with.
I wouldn't say it's commonplace, but Training Grounds is a favorite card of mine, and Zirda now leads my rebels commander deck as a more powerful version of Training Grounds.
Flipping the question a little, a secret tech that has become more relevant are the Flagbearers (Standard Bearer and Coalition Honor Guard from Apocalypse). They have an effect that forces opponents to choose at least one Flagbearer if able when selecting targets for spells and abilities. Giving it a Ward cost means opponents will have to pay that Ward on any targeted spells they want to use. Giving it indestructible until end of turn means most targeted removal is nonfunctional for the rest of the turn. Flagbearers are already a pain for Aura and pump spell decks, but they also just provide decent protection against targeted removal for the entire table (except from your removal).
Edit: removed an inaccurate description of Standard Bearer being worse than Coalition Honor Guard. I mistakenly thought the Eternal Masters printing of Coalition Honor Guard was the most up to date wording, but that is not the case. Both Flagbearers have the same Oracle text.
When I was designing cubes for my friends I fell into the same trap, having pre-defined archetypes for each pair of colours. Then I would stack 15-25 cards of that archetype in which would be "enough" for that deck to run effectively. But in practice it just meant that if you were playing those colours your just picked the obvious thing. It made the drafting side completely superfluous. It was even worse since I made the cube, I knew what was intended to work with what and what was paid off by what etc etc and that meant I just felt like I was cheating. Eventually I realised what your mate did, that by sitting around in cube cobra for hours I wasn't crafting an experience, I was just building 8-12 decks and throwing them into a pile. I had to learn to let the players discover the combos for themselves, and to do things by inference and whatnot. Sign posting is really, really good at that, so long as you are subtle about it lol.
I will say that newer cards also tend to be prebuilt engines in their own right, especially if they're higher rarity. I tend to avoid them for cubes. Older cards have more standalone effects, meaning you can throw them into a pile and someone will find a way to use it and chances are good its not how you expected it would be used, which as the cube designer is an absolute riot.
You just hit on how I feel about recent sets, they feel like cubes that have been too tuned. You get one pack to hash out your direction and see what other players are doing, then just go on autopilot picking the cards which are earmarked for your deck.
@@diogeneticist3585 this is simply not the case for new sets outside of bloomburrow. bloomburrow is a set based on tribal mechanics and synergies; that’s just the nature of the set design. however, the second most recent set, outlaws of thunder junction, was a completely different draft experience. other than mounts, the archetypes were nebulous and you could combine all kinds of strategies to create unique decks. it’s also worth noting that bloomburrow has very little mana-fixing, which also contributes to the “autopilot” feeling that you’re describing since it’s more difficult to splash colors. regardless, there are still unique was to build decks and hidden synergies that you can find while drafting (i.e. the duo cycle and their implications).
I agree, but I think there is a way around this situation. New / low time-investment players are excited by the readily-available powerful synergies in archetype packages across recent sets. New players are the target audience for mtg right now because hasbro is desperate for short-term profit. Players who spend more time on mtg, and want a more unique deck, have the skills and dedication to seek a unique angle and choose a strategy outside those basic archetypes to match their individual playstyle.
Problem is, those powerfull synergies still warp other formats
The problem is that this only really works for casual commander as a "fix". All the other formats are much more competitive and in order to survive you pretty much have to be running the best format-legal version of XYZ effect in that slot. I'm mostly thinking of Modern and Pauper to be specific, but I believe the point stands. If you disagree though, I'm curious to hear other perspectives!
I think the biggest issue I find with this is commander creatures effectively designed to fix the downside of many if the most fun mechanics.
Cycle and do this
Convoke and do that
It takes what should promote decision making, and turn it into a one step value generator. The number of deck themes I've become entirely uninterested in simply because of creatures designed like this is huge and it gets bigger every set.
This is a made up problem that only exists if you pick a mechanic that is relatively new or narrow. Your examples clearly highlight this. The problem is self-correcting if you just wait long enough for enough sets to use a similar mechanic and voila you'll have your variety and unique feel because there are now more options than what fits in your deck.
Trying to find a unique, "hipster" theme but expecting a lot of variety in terms of support for it across multiple sets is like wanting to have your cake and eat it too. The one of comment by rosewater is completely unrelated to your point, it's specific to MH3 and more about the lack of unique one-offs, not about the presence of well supported themes.
If you're upset when a mechanic you previously claimed as "your unique thing" becomes well supported in a new set, that is a you problem. You can still be plenty unique by digging deeper than the surface and finding old cards that work within the now better supported theme. If you want a collection of random cards from a wide variety of sets, you need to stick to themes that are the opposite of parasitic. Miracle is a flawed example, you're not playing a miracle deck, you're playing a "top of deck matters" deck which is an extremely broad theme. Similarly, creatures leaving your graveyard is a fairly narrow, specific theme. It was chosen as a limited archetype and thus well supported in a set. That is not a flaw, that is good limited design.
In short, wizards supporting more niche archetypes and coming up with new design space and then supporting it well within a set IS good design, both for limited and casual. If you want uniqueness, that is for you to find by digging deeper below the surface. You can have your package of 10 cards from a set and still include 1 or 2 cards that will make your deck stand out.
Most of this comes down to opinion, but I do wanna make one thing clear. Wizards creating synergy is fine, I like it. The point of this video is plainly I don't like when MOST of a set is dedicated so heavily to a theme. Hence the mention of the mark rosewater year in review. I'm not upset with new cards either, just not all at once.
MKM gave us chalk outline, insidious roots, and amzu all of which make tokens for leave the graveyard effects. The cards feel like similar design space that could've been used for much interesting cards.
Agreed. mostly anyway. this is a case of falsely pointing to an issue. the real issue here being power creep. in the past, you could have a new supported theme, but it would not be a problem because your "hipster" deck, may already have plenty of cards that do stuff just as well and you don't feel like you "need" to put in the new ones. there would be trade offs and choices to be made. in the end, it still feels like a hipster spin on the formula. now though, they make a new supported theme, it is so powerful to convince people you must play it, it just over shadows all the old stuff. instead making it just feel like you are just forcing yourself to play the bad cards if you don't add them to your deck. its not a small amount of power creep either. with how powerful each set seems to be over the last, it will never really self-correct over time as now two or three supporting sets ago for a theme can feel quite out dated and whatever deck you may have made back then has been 50% replaced (or more). they just need to tone down how powerful a new supported theme can be and it should be fine.
@@33elk MKM contains these cards because it contains the collect evidence mechanic and the BG limited archetype was centered around it. By including collect evidence pay-offs that do not specifically mention the collect evidence mechanic, they both provided a good limited environment and allowed for more flexible use in other formats. It's an example of excellent, non-parasitic design in my book. The space they fill is filled with purpose across multiple formats and avoids parasitic design.
Do you play limited? Many of your points make me feel that you lack an understanding of why these designs are essential for limited. The design space you seem to want more of is what happens in commander products and things like Beyond Boosters. It's only really possible to do "mechanically unique" cards at a high frequency in products that do not care about the limited environment (or to a lesser degree rotating environments like standard).
From a purely commander perspective I'd agree more with your points, but MtG is much much more than just commander. Wacky one-offs and unique effects are hard to fit into sets that feed limited and rotating formats. If you want more of these kinds of designs, you should be in favour of MORE products explicitly made for commander or non rotating formats, like MH sets, commander decks and Beyond Boosters. This is also why Rosewater specifically mentioned MH3, because it would allow for the inclusion of such cards and they did not do a large volume of them (imo with the upside of a better limited format in return).
@@christopherpenn9585 I disagree heavily on the power-creep point. What they are doing a lot of recently is raising the floor, not the ceiling. They purposefully design new mechanics in order to allow them to be played at a similar level than existing mechanics, not to be better than them. There are rare examples of actual power creep (i.e. replacing an already strong card with an even better one), but most of it is just replacing average or below average cards with better ones. It means decks become more consistent, because you are no longer forced to play "weak" cards. It does not mean that cards are becoming stronger and stronger. In my opinion, it makes the game better overall.
It might be semantics though, if by power creep you mean raising the floor and an increased density of good cards and you see this as a negative, that is a subjective opinion we can disagree on. If you think they are raising the ceiling, I think you are suffering from confirmation bias and should try to look at it from a different perspective as well.
@@schattenskorpion Firstly, raising the floor is literally the definition of power-creep: "The situation where successive updates or expansions to a game introduce more powerful units or abilities, leaving the older ones underpowered." Making old cards "weak" by new standards is power-creep, not just making strictly better versions of good cards.
Secondly, if they weren't also raising the ceiling, then old decks with cards in them that were the best at the time should still be good in every format, as they were the ceiling. Yet most of these decks are now "unplayable" (i.e. have below 40% average win rates), and it's not just one or two decks, in most formats almost all previous top-tier decks have been 'unofficially rotated'. This extends to commander as well, cards that were ubiquitous before are barely even played anymore.
Lastly, disagreeing with others is fine, but just state facts, don't presume others cognitive biases lest you display your own.
The biggest issue is that they aren't going to make sets that just don't work together, because that feels bad. And if they have a lot of ideas for cards that work together, they're mostly going to have to put it all in one set, because they won't be using those ideas for other sets for a while.
Unless your deck is Prosper. Then every set gets you at least three cards because they can't stop printing Treasures literally everywhere.
As someone who originally just played yugioh and still plays it alongside magic, this sort of design really doesnt bother me as much in deck building.
In yugioh mixing archetypes and engines is almost entirety of deckbuilding, and there is an optimal way of building your dekc generally for any given format. However what really matters (usually) is how well you pilot said deck. Most broken format in the history of the game (tear format) where literally every single deck at worlds was exactly the same was one of the most interesting metas to watch high level player play because it was one of the most technical and high skill pilot required formats ever.
i think analyzing magic from the yugioh perspective really helps to contextualize this issue. i don’t think all commander decks should be the same or play the same (which is why i hate cedh), but in constructed formats, it is reasonable to expect players to play the best-in-slot cards for the best packages, even if it means that decks are more homogenous.
magic still has defined metas with multiple decks being viable in each constructed format, and with such a limited card pool, there’s only so many different ways and so many different decks you can build, which really doesn’t strike me as an issue for constructed specifically.
my only issue with yugioh is that tier 0 decks often persist for much longer than they should, making them the only viable decks in the format, while also costing an exorbitant amount of money due to the high rarity printings of the best cards. this is why i’ve never been able to properly invest in yugioh or play it outside of a casual level, but that’s a different issue entirely.
When looking at my decks I still have to admit that the main cause of my decks having cards from the same set is due to certain tribes only being available in certain sets. My vampire tribal deck, for instance, is mainly composed of cards from Innistrad and Ixalan and will most likely always go for the most recent cards of the set because the newer vampires will most likely be better than the older ones. It's not a problem if the tribe you play is so popular that you'll always have a card supporting it in a set (like is the case with dragons) or if its obscure enough that there'll usually be only one card printed for it once every few blue moons (like with saprolings), but if its in the middle like with eldrazi or the vampire example I just put above I feel like that is when you are mainly jamming in cards from a particular set.
I suspect, but I can't prove, that there is something similar going on if your deck is themed around particular mechanics.
that is also the conclusion that i came to while watching this video. the bottom line is that niche archetypes simply have fewer options to select from, meaning that decks will often default to using the best-in-slot cards available for the archetype. i think power creep plays a role here, but i feel like this issue is far less of a problem unless you are playing decks in a specific niche.
i understand his argument and i do agree that the issue is important and worth mentioning, but especially in the case of constructed formats, it makes sense that archetypes would be built around the available cards.
there are very few lizards outside of bloomburrow, so naturally a lizard deck would need to use cards from a set designed for the archetype. frankly, with the small card pool in standard, i find this to almost be a non-issue; this is just how the meta works in constructed formats for all archetypes. golgari midrange isn’t a niche archetype that requires the use of packages, but everyone is running the same list anyway. the only difference between that deck and lizards is that the lizard cards just happen to come from a single set.
It's just MTG realizing that it's transforming into YuGiOh, but with extra steps.
Personally, this bothers me wrt EDH, but for limited I think it's cool and good.
In commander, there's nothing more boring than feeling like a theme comes "pre-built" because they released a precon or two with those exact colours and theme. And it makes me want to build that theme less.
For limited, yes there are sets with HEAVY typal themes and the occasional parasitic mechanic (looking at you, energy), but outside of that the designers are putting in a noticeable effort in making the draft themes overlap and interact with each other in ways. Thinking back to some of my favourite recent draft formats, LCI and WOE, each colour combination of course had a main theme with signposts, but there were also always cross-synergies to be found and explored. In my experience this is true for the vast majority of recent sets. And I honestly don't mind the occasional set that sticks to more rigid themes, as long as it isn't every set.
I think this is inherently the case with typal synergies the most. "Oh you want zombies? Hope you like Innistrad." It's why I don't have a single typal deck, and the one I did have for a while I took apart. It's just not fun to go find the best 25 squirrels/horrors/crabs/ whatevers and slam em in a deck.
i think there can be interesting subthemes inside some types, demons can be great aristocrats decks and i have a dimir rogues with an on hit effect/triggered abilities theme
@@RACECAR_JONES sure there can be. I think the more common the type the more interesting subthemes will be a available. Things like humans, soldiers, rogues, dragons, are always seeing new stuff in tons of sets. We ain't seeing new Pirates unless it's a pirate set.
tribal
@@TheMinskyTerrorist don't police how people speak
zombie tribal is a pretty bad example tbh. there are literally hordes of zombie cards in various sets.
I think a big part of the problem is power creep. I remember back when cards like Grand Arbiter Augustin IV were ridiculously expensive because of how strong the effect was in combination with the body. He's still quite good, but there are so many other things that do something similar, and so many ways to get around the effect, and so many more effective removal spells, that he's just not as in demand as he once was. Or cards like Fact or Fiction, or Buried Alive, or any number of other examples I could mention. They were pricey cards that have dropped in value mostly because of power creep. I just heard someone say when talking about Duskmourn previews that a 3/3 for 3 is fine. Mind you, this 3/3 also had a whole text box full of stuff. I remember a time when a vanilla 3/3 for 3 was pretty damn good. Don't get me wrong, I like cards that do interesting things, but it was a pretty big wake up call when Serra Angel got reprinted in tenth edition and was just kind of ok, and when Lightning Bolt got reprinted in M10 and was just finally a "pretty good burn spell". I remember a time when I could have designed custom cards like the modal DFC dual lands and been told they'd never get printed because they have no drawback, and "not having a basic land type isn't enough of a drawback". This sort of intraset/intrablock synergy isn't a new thing. It's been a thing at least as long as I've been playing Magic. It's just that now the new stuff is also so much better than the old stuff that it all feels very playable.
This is why I only recently retired from magic/ edh. After 5-6 years of playing I saw what the game became. Without a huge overhaul like a separate ban list for cedh and casual, with the excessive printings of new synergies that make any color a good color to play a token deck or a control deck. It's a done deal. I believe alot of the cards will become less desirable as more people like me who got pushed away from the game leave.
@@HereToSuffer247 Yeah, I was looking stuff up for a UR commander deck, and found that Lutri was banned. It made sense for him to be banned as a Companion back before they changed the companion rules, but now it's just a mediocre card that doesn't need a ban. Honestly, they should never have made new rules for companions to work as companions in Commander. There is no sideboard in the format. There are already tons of cards that just don't work because of the nature of the format. They made an entirely new zone JUST for companions in Commander, and then banned one of them before it even got released, and haven't bothered revisiting companions since. But they'll let you know which silver bordered cards are fine to play 🙄. The game is getting destroyed from every direction, and it's sad to see.
@HereToSuffer247 wait, why does cedh need a separate banlist?
@PhoenicopterusR why shouldn't it? They share the same ban list even though they play like separate formats
@HereToSuffer247 but they're built off the same principals, just with cEDH being vastly more accelerated version without the politics, and that seems to be what people like. Last I checked, too, there's generally a lot of pushback when separate cEDH banlists get brought up.
Whats even weirder is that sets are designed with these synergies that seems to work best in a limited environment, but at the same time they got rid of draft boosters. It just doesnt make any sense
I'm gonna preface this wall of text with: Interesting video! It's got me thinking!
Off the cuff of my brain, part of me wants to pin this partially on the fact that the design team wants to lean in on narrower mechanics because they aren't really explored and toyed with much, because broader themes get tired over time. How many times can a Standard set get away with "counters matter" and "artifacts matter" and "tokens matter" type stuff before people will notice that it's just a cycle of recycled themes? Obviously the answer is gonna be different for everyone (and even whether or not it's a bad thing). So eventually the themes become a little more narrow in scope - especially as they want to experiment with new keywords or abilities that they think will be interesting or fun to play with.
Using Squirrels as an example: Squirrel EDH is probably going to run a *lot* of Bloomburrow and MH2 cards, for sure - but isn't that because Squirrels as a tribe were always just the butt-joke of tokens? That they just NOW got an actual mechanical identity?
There wasn't really a way for "Squirrels" to *be* a real prominent deck theme in EDH in terms of feeling unique. The ONLY overarching theme they shared was "being green tokens", which is about as plain oatmeal as it gets. The only "unique" thing about it was... well, that you were making Squirrels instead of Elves or Snakes or whatever.
At least now the Squirrel cards can take you in a few directions: you can go real all-in on the go-wide strat (with some Aristocrats for some butter on your white bread), you can focus a little more on Food (which, since its inception in Eldraine, has had quite a lot of different support), or you can even build pretty tall with +1/+1 counters for some Krosan Beast level threats. Not 100% mindblowingly unique, but it gives the little creatures something to build off of in the future. If they decide in the future to print occasional Squirrels that aren't just "here's more creature tokens", they could potentially go in the deck, or not, depending on how your Squirrels deck leans. Over time, the more they introduce new Squirrels or cards that the squirrels care about, the less Bloomburrow and MH2 cards there'll be, and likely the more branched out they'll get as a tribe.
Going back a little further, Shrines and Energy are probably two of the areas where it feels *actually* egregious, rather than just "hey, we wanna explore what to do with this". Both Shrines as an enchantment type and Energy as a mechanic are "stuck" - that is, there's not really a natural way for the design team to introduce new things for them in a more organic way, and they know this. While I wouldn't *necessarily* call Shrines themselves "parasitic" (though the fact that all current Shrines caring about all other Shrines is), Energy is a quintessential parasitic mechanic, and that means ANY support for them is going to feel hamfisted and particularly hand-holdy. You're never going to get a "random" Energy card in a Standard set or a random Shrine card either, and so that leads to them building "packs" of support for them when they feel they want to return to it which attempt to direct the mechanic into a direction.
Do I think it's *bad*, necessarily? Ehhhhh... depends. If they start making sets feel completely disconnected from one-another full of one-off cards that don't really synergize with ANYTHING then that's not good, obviously, and having pre-built decks right out of the pack isn't great (for Limited and Standard, anyways) for people who like to build decks, either. I like it when they decide to explore some niche mechanic, but if they just give me a pre-built deck and then never give me any interesting toys for 3 years beyond super-generic everyman toys I'd be upset.
this is one of the more well-informed takes i’ve read about the issue in this comments section. i completely agree with you that this is more or less a non-issue since wizards is essentially obligated to keep making support for unique archetypes in order to keep the game fresh. i also agree that simply being niche/unpopular/unsupported is not the same as being inherently unique. the squirrels example is perfect and your analysis of the archetype proves that a lot of the criticism against it is unfounded.
even in the case of energy, energy could easily return as a mechanic in future sets (as it did in MH3) and become increasingly general until it’s a full-fledged archetype in its own right. i don’t think there’s anything about energy that inherently makes it a “parasitic” mechanic; it just doesn’t have enough support yet. but there’s no reason why it couldn’t keep returning in future sets, or even a core set like foundations or something.
@@eebbaa5560 I wouldn't necessarily call it a "non-issue"; I do think that Wizards should be more careful than they were in, say, MH2 and MH3, with creating support that's "too" obvious, especially since those sets are made to both draft AND to fit into Modern (a format that has had a lot of wacky decks that have been adversely affected by the arrival of the Modern Horizons sets). A lot of the energy package, while cool when looking at it from the broader Energy set of cards we have, was definitely VERY obvious, whereas in the prior sets where it was more parasitic (Kaladesh and Aether Revolt) the mechanic was scattered across all colors and did all sorts of things.
My point was moreso "I think underutilized or new mechanics or tribes are fair game for this kind of special treatment but Wizards should be careful to not to go overboard with it on sets that aren't very tribal-themed, and if they introduce mechanics they should try to splash it around a little more so that there's more interesting thought put into the experience."
Fore example: Food as a theme during its inception in Throne of Eldraine was mostly a G/B thing. Most of its creation and payoff cards were in those colors - *however* there were a good few cards smattered around in blue and white that also created Food, opening up the door during draft for perhaps some Abzan or Sultai food shenanigans if you wanted to lean into that, or to splash some green or black foodstuffs into a White or Blue shell. Perhaps it's not as splashed around as I would like, but it definitely is a good example of how focusing on a new mechanic can be done without making it TOO obvious, I think.
This is exactly what happened for me with a deck I built around the manifest mechanic. Now there are like multiple sets that have packages of cards that just do what my deck did but way better.
This was always on my mind, glad its voiced somewhere finally.
Makes me glad I've been cubing more to get opportunities to build those weird combos and less streamlined decks- Limited for life
I first noticed this when temur adventures and rumor rogues were tier standard decks and it really bothered me. I hope it changes soon.
I see what you’re saying and on one hand I do agree it’s more fun to look through a set like Future Sight and see all these janky or weird oddball cards and find a place for them in a commander deck and feel cool and special when EDHrec has 0% of people running that specific card. And although the new cards in each set in general are meant to be played in limited formats for easy drafting, it does seem like newer cards and even whole set archetypes are just autoincludes that just outright overshadow any of these niche picks for edh in specific. You’re right. All the food stuff now is good and it works unlike the older stuff but can still make the older stuff work as well. So it’s no longer niche, bad or jank. Now food is a legitimate strategy as opposed to a straight up joke. But conversely, this is also nice. That your Pharika deck or any food deck is no longer a meme, joke, or jank deck/archetype. It’s nice to be able to play an archetype and not have to flounder with 3-5 good cards for the archetype/commander and instead have a good mix of good cards and niche ones. But again, almost all of them are now autoincludes, all of them are replacing my niche picks. In all fairness, my decks still feel unique. My Gluntch deck has cards from several different sets. But even there the power creep is apparent such that my old token makers are being replaced by new ones, my old ramp by new ramp, my old interaction by new etc. etc.
This video puts into words what I've been feeling about so many sets lately. I had been wanting to make an assassin deck for a while, and hey, look, the Assassin's Creed set comes out with all sorts of assassin synergy, so now half that deck would probably be from that set. Same thing with suspend in the Doctor Who set.
In retrospect, I might be just as upset that the mechanics I want to build keep getting relegated to third party stuff. I got excited at first when I saw suspend pop up again, but it wasn't as a theme that would get sprinkled into new sets that I could pick from, just a "hey, remember this?" tossed into a thematically appropriate promotional stunt, never to be heard from again.
I went through the process with an assassin deck. After Legends Retold, some obscure archetypes (in my case Deserts and Assassins) had been given just enough support to be viable. I had a good time figuring out which odd cards together would make the project work, but I don't enjoy ordering straight upgrades from recent sets because it feels like gentrifying my decks
sounds like you're just starting to see the seems of game design. game designers are the ones that control the experience and players are meant to find them. sure there will always be some crazy combos people will find that get passed the developers but that's just the other aspect of game design since nobody's perfect. sometimes these end up being really fun synergies and other times it's nadu, but in the end, a game can only really use the pieces it has to play it and when you design new cards to synergize with a certain mechanic, you have a choice between them being good enough to survive the niche uses of limited or leave them doomed to be draft chaff forever.
for what it's worth some of the cards you showed for golgari were technically for the simic arctype, but part of why it can feel like there are so many cards for a single archetype is probably due to the overlapping cards. like how in bloomburrow, lizards care about life lost, but both otters and bats can easily trigger those synergies as well with some of the cards meant for them. there's even 2 duo cards that show this relationship.
maybe we could use some more one-off card design, but all of the elemental beasts as well as a few outliers like the possum mana dork and cruel claw i find to be enough to just kinda through into some other decks for all the things they do.
I came from Yu-Gi-Oh years ago and 100% agree. A huge draw of magic for me was that it wasn't just complete packages of cards handed to you. And lately it feels like magic has been doing it more and more.
Glad someone is talking about this as I am not the biggest fan of Wizards printing cards that are Commanders or build arounds fir certain niche archetypes. I like EDH most when it's a sketchbook and not a coloring book.
I'm glad to see more discourse on this topic, it's something that's left a lot of the recent sets feeling very "hollow" to me. As you pointed out, it feels like each set DOES have lots of cool things I want to incorporate into other decks, but more and more it requires you to bring a bring it's friends and company in tow. I wouldn't call the current design direction "parasitic" but it does have some parallels.
Totally agree, it seems like they are designing for the commander arms race and this leads to 5 minute turns since everything has so much sinergy.
This is definitely a multifaceted problem I noticed when edhrec got bigger. Part of it is the lack of creativity from deck builders, just going off what is most popular cards to put in X commanders deck. Too many cards designed around commander also help push people to add in the newer cards or packages like you said. I really like your analogy of the jigsaw vs the sculpture made with random pieces.
you’re right. the main issue is commander players’ general lack of creativity to begin with, exacerbated by wizards’ inclination to design cards that cater to these players, creating cards and decks which effectively build themselves for the average edhrec addict
I guess, a part of what confuses me with this perspective, is isn't this how it's kinda always been with niche strategies and mechanics? Like when a mechanic you're trying to build around is niche, your card pool already tends to be heavily oriented around a limited number of sets. I can't help but point to energy as well, cause prior to MH3/M3C, ALL energy cards were in either KLD or AER. So if you built an energy deck prior to MH3's release, a large portion of your deck was constrained to those two sets. And yet, basically ANY energy deck was still recognized as a highly niche category to the point that energy was quite novel to encounter in the wild (at least in my limited experience).
Yet I kinda like how MH3/M3C (and I suppose PIP) revitalized energy as a niche form of play, to a point that its competitive viability has kinda gained a whole knew life long after Temur Energy's presence in Standard. For me at least, MH3/M3C brought a breath of fresh air into my Saheeli Energy deck, giving me more tools to hone the deck and get rid of some of the less synergistic chaff that the deck HAD to include in order to work due to the limited card pool in energy. But maybe that's just me.
Also, fundamentally only you control the extent to which you build around newer cards that maybe feel a little too cookie cutter for your taste. At its core, Magic is a fully opt-in style of game. And while that's a sentiment that's a little more difficult to uphold in competitive or limited environments, it's most true in casual constructed spaces like commander, where you are the one who controls your decklist and are able to build to your whims.
“magic is a fully opt-in style game” yes, exactly. especially for commander. but somehow, commander players consistently fail to realize this and complain about every new set as if they’re forced to play with every new card that gets printed. you have full creative control in commander, and if you feel that can’t build a unique deck, then you are simply not being creative enough. as for energy specifically, i think the complaints against the mechanic are more or less completely unfounded. energy is a mechanic that could _easily_ continue to receive more support, even outside of kaladesh-related sets, and eventually become a deciduous archetype.
@@eebbaa5560 I do wish you'd word your perspective in a way that was a little kinder, as frustration meeting frustration and anger meeting anger will only lead to more strife and conflict in the Magic community, but I'm glad to hear that you agree! And I also quite liked how MH3 took energy and reflavored it with cards like Guide of Souls or the re-tooled versions of power cards from magic's past, Chthonian Nightmare and Primal Prayers, and I would love to see more of that (though I'm also quite partial to the plane of Kaladesh, so a return to the plane would be really cool also).
@@disbarredg0 fair enough. i just feel like commander is teeming with overly casual players who don’t try to understand the game on a holistic level, so it’s frustrating when wizards ostensibly caters to them with new card designs only to face unwarranted backlash (not that i like wizards either, i don’t).
as an aside, i think most of the actual issues with the game are less about design and more about greedy business practices, such as the lack of msrp and by extension, the prevalence of scalping, or the consistently overpriced and undervalued product releases from wizards (i.e. duskmourn nightmare bundle, collector boosters, etc.).
anyway, i like commander, but as the most popular format, i feel like it’s prone to echo chambers created by, frankly, unskilled players who complain about things that they genuinely do not understand. the issues with the game exist, but without accurate analysis or criticism, they are unlikely to be properly resolved. regardless, i suppose you’re right that i should be less hostile towards the average player for the sake of objective communication.
@@eebbaa5560 Oh 100% with regard to WotC and Hasbro's business practices, I agree with that full send. I just worry about how one approaches newer or more casual players in these discussions. I love Magic, and I want to share that love of the game with others. And I find the best way to do that is by approaching these conversations, frustrating though they may be, with kindness, as I don't want to prevent newer / casual players from engaging in these discussions. Rather, I want to *help* them engage in a way that is constructive to the community and to the game. But ya, I still largely agree with the sentiment you're expressing (That said, I do say this as someone who largely plays commander only, just as a side note).
*Oh no*. It's really funny you mentioned miracles.
You.... made this before the duskmorne edh spoilers were out didn't you. I guess the designers agreed with you that miracles were unexploited design space.
the deck you’re referring to is not really about miracles at all. aminatou gives your cards miracle; she doesn’t care about cards with miracle specifically. the fact that she has “miracle” in her textbox is almost incidental. in fact, the new aminatou is an insanely bad example because she’s actually a commander for a very, very general strategy, that being topdeck manipulation. she’s almost the exact opposite of what this video is about.
@@eebbaa5560Yeah, kinda? The timing here is just more funny than anything.
It's not *exactly the same*, it's not like they printed a bunch of new miracles or a new topdeck manipulation package, but now there's a pretty obvious choice of "home" for the miracles in commander. IMO it's a really similar feeling of the deckbuilding being done by the designers, and not by the players. Even if it is coming at it from the other side the equation.
It's funny, because this problem showcases one of my major issues with the homogenization of obscure creature types. My weird viashino deck was grabbing creatures wherever they appeared all across time and trying to make them work, but now, now its just lizards. There's a package for that.
I think my favorite card from the energy archetype is Satya, cause it also encourages you to look into enter the battlefield triggers, attack triggers, and death triggers. Truly one of the most fun precons to re-configure for me
Psst you wouldn’t get attack triggers from creatures that enter the battlefield attacking.
My pet deck that I’ve been gradually updating is the second deck I ever made, when I got started in like 2013. Black/White Vampire, using the orzhov mechanic at the time of Extort.
Over some of the past few years, there have been so, so many Black/White/Red vampires, with various sub-mechanics, that I literally broke it apart and have made three separate simultaneous decks, an Orzhov Vampire LifeDrain, a Mardu Vampire anthem deck with Blood tokens, and a Mardu Vampire Aristocrat deck, from all the new cards that I’d originally gotten to supplement the first one. Because all the blood token ones, in hindsight, only really work best with the other blood token ones, so if you don’t build the whole deck using the cards from that set, they ultimately weren’t worth incorporating into the life drain one.
Could not agree more! I haven't played in months for exactly this reason. Every commander deck I make feels only slightly different than the last, or from what a quick google might get me. I miss my decks feeling mine, like I got one over on the game and found some hidden secret known only for me and my friends. I miss the days of finds new cards in glass cases or store binders and rush back to my friends as we ponder all the odd things we could do. Now, we can say one card name and just rattle off the rest of that go with it. I, for one, am here for more found art.
This is why i love my Tom Bombadil deck. It has a surprising amount of directions to build it in and touches so many sets. Im always on the lookout for the odd new card that can do something funky
I definitely feel this when trying to brew newer commanders. For so many of them, the deck is fully constructed from the second they come off the press. Still, there are some diamonds in the rough, too. One of my newest decks is Bruse Tarl, Roving Rancher built as a Boros Flicker/ETB deck that uses white's Ephemerates' and red's Twinflames' to generate value and eventually swing for a win.
It's not terribly strong, but it's surprisingly consistent and really fun to play and upgrade since it doesn't have a ton of support, even from OTJ. That said, who knows if the next set will have an archetype or precon that is fully dedicated to Boros Flicker and make my deck simultaneously ubiquitous and worse than other decks now doing the same thing.
you know this is actually a pretty interesting thing. Archetypes as this are pretty much one of the reasons I feel connected to certain color combinations of go "off-meta" with decks that I build.
Most of the time I build a deck I feel like it's already been made and hence get the feeling that it's kinda boring... so I look into other ways to build certain deck-tropes that are kinda "rare" or to an extend not really used that much. While I do not have all of these build, I kinda had some one my table brewing them - like... Raggadragga Lands (instead of manadorks as a full on land creature-commander), Brimaz Incubators (well it's technically Phyrexian Tribal but Tokenaggro/control in the way he wants to do it, is not that common in orzhov) or Ygra Fighter.... so I might be suffering from Archetype-fatigue :D
Ygra fights and Raggadragga manlands seem pretty original. That's the type of decks I like playing against.
Completely agreed when you said that it's the designers who are having fun. The reason I am not particularly drawn to brew lately is that the decks sort of "build themselves". And the fact that decks like boros / mardu energy have over 60% of cards from a single set should be a massive red flag to everyone.
as a brawl player, i felt this in smaller scale.
my main commanders are Teysa Karlov, Isshin, Awaken the Blood Avatar, and Kambal (Profiteering).
even tho they are all different in main game plan, i still felt like they feels too alike in tokens production aspect.
Ocelot Pride, becoming the key card on all of that decks is similar to what the video said
they gentrified my theme deck!!
I had a red , black, green haste lizard deck before bloom burrow , now it's red black homogeneous lizards. However! I then made a blue/green lizard + frog deck, that is now my new original lizard deck.
The bloomburrow design is definitely a good thing for limited. And even in constructed there's valid reasons it happens (tangentially related, in fab very curated constructed decks allow them to focus a lot more on the skill of gameplay). Super important to avoid this in commander especially though, and commander sets are big offender here.
I would be curious to see a followup video of what you feel a potential solution to this current design philosophy would be. I feel that open-ended design has larger risks of things not connecting or connecting too well, I appreciate the 'safe' approach to limited arcytpe construction but understand your points that it takes a lot of fun out of the deckbuilding "game".
Mark is fantastic about being transparent with how things happen at WOTC and has stated before that its hard to balance that line. The way they design sets is 100% aimed at new players to create easy to spot arctypes that work well together so that players can have access to standard or commander decks. It's also easier for the super casual player who opens boosters and plays with whatever cards are lying around (this type of player is estimated by WOTC as one of the largest groups playing the game at any given time).
I see where you are coming from. New to commander i got both energy precons (coz i like the idea of a side ressource) and while it started out as a enegry deck with the mentioned "in your face" synergy pieces, it didn't feel good and i rebuild it as Satya etb clone deck with energy sub-theme... but since i buget my deck it doesn't have all the staples and still feels unique (at least for me).
When you talked about the sculpture vs jigsaw and the packages argument i could only think of yugioh and how they handle things. They do packages as "archetypes" that are explicitly meant to work together, but not all archtypes are made equal so some are good enough to be their own deck and some are used as engines in other decks. Personally as someone who brewed all sorts of wacky stuff i kinda like it, its kinda like making a sculpture out of different jigsaw puzzles. You can can line them up and hammer them in place, or you can look for just the right chunks that line up perfectly.
I didn’t see another comment discussing why this might happen from a design perspective. My speculation is that it’s due to the honing of how cards and sets are designed over time.
Rosewater has written articles discussing how to design individual sets, and occasionally how an element was new or introduced to the process when it comes up. My guess is thus that they have a very detailed procedure for how they approach designing sets, down to defining different packages and almost what individual cards do. (He has explicitly mentioned the latter in earlier articles about Design Skeletons; I wouldn’t be surprised if the former has cropped up explicitly in the design process in the last few years.)
Moreover, when designing for different formats, different considerations enter into light, and they need to track all of them. Synergy of not only cards but themes across sets is something I’m sure they pay attention to for rotating formats, so that cards from different sets can play with each other rather than one invalidating the other or both being completely orthogonal.
Even looking at an isolated set, it’s usually preferable by players that all themes are close to each other in power level, both for Limited purposes but also to ensure the new cards are appealing to all subgroups of players. If your favorite color combination got a theme with little, awkward support even in the set it came from, you might feel disappointed you didn’t get any new toys to play with. Even if the old toys are better-players also tend to prefer that the metagame be shaken up by new releases, especially in the contemporary age where it’s easier to netdeck and to find a game to play online. (I recall some WOTC designer talking about how MTG players would play less games and the meta would develop slower 20-25 years ago.)
tl;dr: I reckon the prevalence of overly synergistic package designs is a result of specific design methodologies being honed over time. Naturally, the method itself is neither good nor bad, and can have positive or negative results depending on the actual designs themselves and other methodologies.
the issue with commander players is that they often fail to consider the game and its design holistically. commander players only view the game through the lens of commander, failing to consider the impact of development decisions on self-contained limited formats or constructed formats designed to be played with multiple sets as part of a smaller, but synergistic card pool. ironically, many of the issues with wizards’ current design philosophies are exacerbated, or even created by, wizards’ tendency and inclination to design cards FOR the commander format.
This brings up my favorite way to build decks, just use the cards I have.
It's one of the reasons I like draft.
I've been craving doing more brewing with older cards lately. I hadn't realized it, but this is definitely why!
i play rakdos lizards in standard and i think that this problem is less of an issue in 60-card formats. yes, the lizard deck is practically built for you, but creativity isn’t really the main draw of 60-card formats. no one is really a brewer for standard, and building your own deck isn’t the main goal of the format, or even viable a majority of the time.
rakdos lizards is just a meta deck that happens to have all of its pieces in one set, similar to domain which you mentioned. i think this is just the result of the deck not being built around a generic mechanic that allows for variety, like prowess, convoke, etc.
in commander, however, i think this issue is far more pronounced due to how it skews decks from the lens of a singleton format to one more reminiscent of constructed formats, where a desire for consistency makes decks increasingly homogenous.
while i do think this issue is worth considering, unless you’re playing a niche deck/archetype that inherently needs certain cards (i.e. a go-shintai deck running every available shrine), i think it’s possible to maintain your uniqueness as a deckbuilder.
4:13 a small, likely useless, counterpoint that also uses Bloomburrow:
The mechanics can still work well with others. The mice, despite Valiant being "weaker" than Heroic, can easily be in the same kind of deck as them, or even in Voltron or doing what Nadu did but without the Legend Rule. The lizards fit RNA-Rakdos' Spectacle, and Guildpact-Gruul's Bloodthirst. Plus, the birbs and bnuuys can fit with most any deck that includes their color(s) by being support and go-wide.
the kind of creativity you’re displaying here is what most commander players lack, which then increases the prevalence of commander players complaining about non-issues. it’s not at all a useless counterpoint.
This has been a major problem for me, since I like to play golgari midrange in pioneer. Almost all the golgari gold cards in new sets just care about moving stuff through the graveyard or sacrifice. It feels like there may be one genericly playable card per set that casts for gb, even fewer that are good enough to see play.
This has happened to Hazezon Shaper of Sands. All I wanted were more deserts that may or may have done unique things. Circa Comander Masters, and Thunder junction. Oh brother. . .
My pet deck is Bant blink, and couldn't help but pick up at least three of Bloomburrow's Frogs that synergize with "leave the battlefield without dying" effects.
I came to mtg from yugioh, and despite that being the younger game I think mtg can learn from it's mistakes. This lack of deckbuilding choice is mirrored in ygo, where the archetypes are even more synergistic. The powercreep in mtg is starting to catch up to ygos too, where only new decks that are within the last year or two even stand a chance competitively.
Bro... MTG isn't even close to Yugioh in both 'archetypes' and powercreep.
Yugioh's archetypes literally name the specific cards that they work with and have for well over a decade.
Magic has very few cards that do this. The 'archetypes' in Magic are very loose.
In powercreep Yugioh would print the answer to powerful cards literally in the next set. Traps like dimensional prison used to be useful until they printed monsters that could destroy trap cards. And then Bottomless trap hole could beat those cards so they made monsters that could destroy trap cards when they entered or could not be destroyed. And then they printed Solemn Warning to get around those creatures.
They had creatures that couldn't be destroyed so they printed cards that would exile them or 'send then to the graveyard' instead. But those effects targeted so they printed creatures that couldn't be targeted. So next they printed cards that would remove those creatures without saying 'target'.
It's an absolute garbage show in Yugioh. Not even comparable to MTG.
If you feel like the 'archetypes' in MTG are too restraining, it's probably because you're a bad deckbuilder. Because those archetypes literally only matter in limited. In Standard, Modern, Legacy, Vintage, EDH, Brawl, and literally every other format in Magic, those archetypes mean absolutely nothing. The most competitive decks of these formats do not follow the established archetypes at all. If you follow the archetypes and can't see past them - you're just bad at the game.
@@Vesdus and for the case where your archetype drastically limits the card pool like say lizards or an underrepresented mechanic like incubate or energy of course you're gonna play the most recent cards because those cards tend to be the most powerful
@@jmanwild87 Buddy if the best you can do while deckbuilding is pick a mechanic and then try to play cards with that mechanic, then you are a bad deckbuilder.
In eternal formats, Magic has an incredibly large pool of cards, and there are very few mechanics that function outside of the rest of the game's cards (like Energy).
If you look at decks as simply 'an incubate deck' or 'a lizard deck' then of course all decks are going to seem predetermined to you lol. You can't even see outside of the cards that were printed in a single set.
@Vesdus sure i could build a deck based around say Glissa Herald of Predation where its a bunch of stuff that benefits me making tokens and putting counters on stuff but that's not going to stop the fact that i'm stuck with a lynchpin commander if i wanna build around fully utilizing it. could also build it as phyrexian tribal but then 2/3s of the text box is pointless. my issue with building say a deck that focuses on utilitizing energy in commander prior to mh3 is that you were stuck with a bunch of mediocre cards meant for standard and this gets even worse with incubate because then you have to build around protecting and maximizing the one good card you have if you're going green black
That's the issue with underrepresented mechanics. Some people like making it work. me? i just find it too much effort for not enough reward.
@@jmanwild87 you’re right he’s wrong
Interesting. When bloomburrow released and I looked at the cards I got a feeling of a yu-gi-oh set. I haven't played much yu-gi-oh but I know they release self-contained sets with cards that work well together and then are never, or very rarely, later revisited.
I thought it could have been the new 'care about tribe' cards that didn't exist before (otters, frogs, mice, lizards, rabbits, racoons), as opposed to bats which kinda relate to vampires which has been a thing for a while and rats.
Your line of thought makes a lot of sense though, and it vindicates my hunch a little bit.
I've played a Grenzo, Dungeon Warden edh deck for over a decade. I can remember having Reito Lantern and Soldevi Dagger as pretty much the only ways to loop endlessly, otherwise you'd use Canal Dredger to get something back once per turn. In recent years Hoverstone Pilgrim, Tomb Trawler, Reito Sentinel and most recently Barkform Harvester have all been printed, making what was an obscure mechanic rather more common. I still love playing the deck but these newer cards have definitely crept up its power and infinite combo potential.
I noticed this (not for the first time) in MH3. Anytime I'm looking for cards to slot into a deck I would go through recent sets. And everytime I look through MH3, I'm just like "right....there's nothing here unless I'm playing X, Y, or Z"
Before even watching the video, I just wanna that I love your YT name.
I totally agree with this take, and also outlining the strengths of set synergy. I think that most (signpost/archetype focused) cards should be doing something very clear, something that defines a strategy. However every card in that strategy shouldn’t directly support it. I think this is the inherent flaw in energy. If something makes or relates to energy, it can’t work in a non-energy deck, which is why it is so parasitic. So synergy for sets and set-spanning synergies are good, but parasitism and extreme synergy is bad.
You have described how modern Yugioh decks are designed. So your rhetoric feels lost on me
obvious synergies are fine but they need to be clearly delineated from other synergy packages to prevent everything bleeding together into one big mush, and add some friction to trying to merge together different sets. yugioh operates like this and the fun part of the deckbuilding in that game is finding ways around the constraints each package forces on you, which provides space for creative deckbuilding despite the very tightly knit in-archetype synergies.
i’ve only played yugioh casually, but i also drew the comparison between archetypes in that game and the point that elk is making here. i think the difference between magic and yugioh archetypes, and why elk has an issue with this design philosophy, is the disparity between archetypes in magic.
taking the current standard format for example, magic archetypes are either very, very general (i.e. golgari midrange, prowess variants) or highly specific (i.e. rakdos lizards). these archetypes are diametrically opposed from a design perspective, so the fact that such a contradiction exists in magic creates the sort of apprehension that elk is describing.
on the other hand, yugioh archetypes are not only extremely numerous, they are also purposefully specific with cards clearly belonging to certain “engines” and only being tangentially synergistic with other archetypes. yugioh also has general toolbox cards, but these cards do not belong to specific archetypes (for the most part) and they don’t place a strain on deckbuilding in the sense that they would constrict you to a certain niche. even when you combine archetypes in yugioh, you only run a few cards as a toolbox, rather than playing two different archetypes in tandem (i.e. gimmick puppet, invoked, etc.). the design philosophy of yugioh is as if every set were bloomburrow, with each archetype being atomically separate from one other.
I agree on being burnt out recently on a lot of the new product. My playgroup and I have recently turned to pauper EDH. as an avenue to expand our deck building abilities.
I hadn't really thought about this, but it makes a lot of sense. There's also a kind of weird problem for it with commander I have found where if you try to lean into one of the Bloomburrow archetypes like Raccoons or Bats, it can be difficult to fill out the deck with good bats and raccoons, so if you want to go the jigsaw puzzle route in commander, you kind of can't, at least not all the way. I wanted to make a raccoon deck that was just tons of raccoons and "creature type" buffing cards, all for raccoons, but there just weren't enough decent raccoons, even including some changelings. It's the same with bats. You can't really lean fully into a bat theme, but there is PLENTY of stuff for the life gain/drain. While I have found this issue of there not being enough jigsaw pieces for some commander decks, I do agree that the deck building experience is better with cards that aren't exactly designed to work together. It's one of the reasons I stopped playing YuGiOh and started playing Magic. YuGiOh not only has every deck limited to a named archetype, every deck will run the same 8 cards regardless of archetype, at least in Master Duel
this is why the best commanders(from a deckbuilder perspective) that have been printed in the last few years are the ones that spin around more base mechanics of the game such as combat, draw, targeting(crimes). I particularly like Goro Goro and Satoru, Minn, Wily Illusionist and the most recent Marchesa. The line is thin between open-ended design and goodstuff tho. The simic goodstuff commander that gets printed every set is always sad to see.
As a Pharika lover (thanks to you!), I felt your pain with all the new pieces from Karlov Manor. 😭
As a Junji Ito lover, I appreciated your reference. 🤣
I believe that building decks around basic themes like Graveyard, Food, or Kindred restricts creativity because there are only so many cards that fit these categories before you're forced to include subpar options. When you explore more unique themes, you open up a diverse card pool that sets your deck apart. However, if you're committed to something like a Golgari graveyard deck, the similarity in deck objectives inevitably leads to a lack of variety. This predictability is a core issue with current set designs, as it feels like the deck is almost pre-built for you. Ultimately, it's up to us as deck builders to innovate and create decks that defy the usual patterns, challenging ourselves to break from the mold and bring new excitement to the game.
A deck tech that I enjoy is with my Niv-Mizzet Parun deck. He does 1 damage to any target on card draw - which makes it incredibly easy and consistent to flip battles over. Of the 9 battles you can run in izzet colors I run 7. The two I don't run are Kaladesh as the deck doesn't have enough artifacts to warrant it and Kaldheim as with the amount of draw the deck has impulse draw is almost entirely a downside. What's funny though is of the cards that are explicitly written with support for interacting with battles I only run Joyful Stormsculptor as the others are ... not great.
So you feel like it's become too easy for other people to build decks similar to your original idea? You just discovered that only certain mechanics get support in certain sets? Why people talk about Pre-EDH? Why people enjoy creating their own formats? Their own cubes? Their own custom cards? I get your point about too much support and MR's statements about homogeneity in MH3, how this all impacts uniqueness and feel, but this has always been the case. There is conflict between people wanting more of what they like and their pride in their independence/resourcefulness. People wanted more cards than what was available, so they made more. Yes, you could see that as them creating an open lane through a rough area you claimed as your own, but your options are still there, and it was a direction they could go to expand the card pool. You don't have to use the new stuff, if you still want to pride yourself on your uniqueness. You can play EDH with only cards up to a certain date, if you want, but the game does keep expanding and circling back when there are gaps they want to fill.
It used to be tougher, so many niche cards and mechanics were locked to blocks. You want Miracles? -> Avacyn Restored. Energy -> Kaladesh. Soulshift? -> Champions of Kamigawa. Tribute? -> Born of the Gods. MDFC Lands? -> Zendikdar Rising. Traps? -> Zendikdar.
And to an even greater extent, Fetchlands! If you wanted to compete in modern back in the day, you had to go Zendikar. No other option in any other set. Shocklands with Ravnica too. Reprints and adding support for popular, niche mecahnics is a good thing, even if you feel it allows other to more easily build decks similar to your original idea, even if you feel like people are encroaching on your unique territory. Don't get me wrong, power creep and homogeneity are big issues, but they come with the nature of making an ever-growing card game like this, so I don't see it as horrible when a niche, janky strategy (like cards leaving GY effects) gets supported with more options that fit a new set's theme really well (Chalk Outline is a good example). It's still the same deckbuilding process: consider your options and choose what you want to play. You don't have to pick the shiny, new, powerful stuff, and interest in them will likely die down as time passes.
It felt like back in the day, to do The Thing, you'd pick through for cards that when used together did The Thing. Now you pick cards that each do The Thing.
Riku of Two Reflections can copy my spells if I invest a bunch into ramp to feed his blue-mana-hungry butt and pay 5 to cast him, and protection for his fragile 2/2 with no abilities body.
Kalamax, the Stormsire is a 4/4 that grows and all I need to do to copy a spell is turn him sideways. You can attack with him and 3 mana open (4 if you want to get wild) and your opponent now has to decide what response won't activate the mother of all combat tricks. The only synergies he needs are a) instants and b) maybe ways to tap him in case attacking won't work.
Seeing this after getting duskborne stuff with a miracle commander is funny
There is, at least in my opinion, also an upside to this recent phenomenon: with more obviously and directly synergistic pieces, threat assessment becomes a lot more manageable for those who do not play too much Magic, or those who are just on the slow side (me).
I completely agree with your take, the same thing kinda happened to my cayth token copying deck, the precon from bloomburow just gave me like 6 new cards that do exactly what I want, and I feel this video sums it up well
Wow I cant wait to watch my favorite EDH UA-camr 3/3 El- OH MY GOODNESS HE BLINKS NOW???
I get your point and I don't even necessarily disagree with it, but at the same time tbh I prefer this to the more random set design philosophy that they had before. I'll never forget being really excited for the Party Time commander deck and the DND set that was tied to it, only for there to be next to no cards in the set that helped the deck out.
This exact issue plagued legends of runeterra the longer that game got developed, it originally started out with a lot of unique cards that people could creatively throw together and didnt have any forced synergy but as time went on and more sets got developed they started printing decks that were effectively premade while also being the best thing you could play, there was no longer any fun or creativity in the deck building process. This killed the game for me as each new set just added in some new meta deck while old decks got almost no new updates or interesting tech to include.
I had a lovely, janky, Golos shrines deck when the funny robot guy was still wandering around. It wasn't amazing, didn't have the vamp/enlightened/etc, but i could use overplayed budget cards as truly synergistic value pieces (ephamarate, brain storm, literally all of the scry temples). The goal was to stick an Alhammeret's Archive with a bunch of shrines and draw your deck with a lab-man effect. I loved that deck dearly.
Then, unbeknownst to me while I took a break from magic, they banned Golos. I sat down at the LGS near my uni and pulled out my Golos deck. One dude immediately got miffed and told me I couldn't play it. So, I just swapped the commander with the only 5-color legendary creature in my trade binder: Sisay. The deck, with sisay as the commander, is now incredibly streamlined. I don't get to spin the Golos wheel anymore and even worse, with the addition of the new Kamigawa set while I was away, shrines became the number one theme on EDHREC for Sisay. It's still a fun and interesting deck (acting more like an enchantress storm list than your typical sisay shrines deck) and still has all 10 temples like the old version, but I'd still love to have my old jank back.
Im split on this because on one hand i love it when cards are designed to work together, especially when those packages mix well with one another, but on the other hand i love my sidisi deck which as a self mill strategy has a variety of options at its disposal while retaining that feeling of synergy. Maybe the main issue with these synergistic design packages is how narrow and parasitic they are with one another rather than that they spell out a game plan for you 🤔
Really excellent video, and something that resonates with me a lot. I am also probably more a brewer than player for EDH, and it feels increasingly more difficult to find deck ideas where the deck isn't just already full of purposefully designed cards that work exactly together. Also an excellent point linking it to the prevalence of strict synergy packages in modern sets for limited. One counterpoint to that for me was Kamigawa Neon Dynasty - that set's limited environment was so much more open, with a lot of very small synergies that you had to piece together in an overall deck, and some cards that could synergise with many other cards, but in different ways. I hope we move to an era of these 'small synergies', rather than the overhanded way they are being handled right now.
limited environments are by and large still dominated by small synergies. bloomburrow is an exception, not the rule. it is overtly designed to be a tribal-based set with clearly defined archetypes and synergies, simply due to the nature of the set. in my opinion, this isn’t an issue at all, but regardless, bloomburrow is not the standard for the current design of limited formats (see OTJ which was an extremely open and creative format).
I love how you can apply this whole video to heartstone. I recently stopped playing it cuz it was anoying how blizzard just buffs some tribals or makes up new things and if you don't play them you get destroyed by anything that is meta. There are some interesting decks that you can build but only in wild which they completely don't care about, so most of the times you either run into some really optimal aggro or get otk comboed by a deck that has so much sustain you couldn't possibly beat.
I play a mutate deck. One of my primary issues with it is simply that all of the mutate cards come from one set, and causes mutate inclusions that I feel are mediocre because mutate only got to exist for one set and wasn’t explored meaningfully outside of one environment. Back in the 3 set block environment things like mutate and other unique mechanics like energy would have time to make their own space for themselves and their the designers would begin to get clever with how the mechanic works, now with many of the new mechanics if you want to build with them you are locked into the one and only set they were printed in. The same is true for cases, and battles, rooms, and probably a few other ones I’m not remembering at the moment
My lgs owner and I talked about this and came to the conclusion everything is slivers now and we all know how people feel about slivers
Yup, totally. I had a Fain, the Broker mono black deck and it was blood tokens/treasures artifact token aristrocrat, full of Vampires too as a subtheme. It took me 2 years to tune that deck to make it work smoothly, and then this year we got Shilgengar xD! I just slapped him in the command zone, even if the deck is still almost MonoBlack and I dismissed the Angel theme besided the card Divine Visitation
I feel like the shift away from Block structure releases has exasperated the issue, as now whole packages need to be contained within a single set and cannot slowly emerge over the course of a year.
Furthermore, those single sets now seems to have less connecting points than even back when the single set structure began, as around Zendikar Rising, Kaldheim and Neon Dynasty you had at least the connecting theme of dual faced cards, for whatever that is worth.
I'm interested how Foundations will shift this and wether drafts with like one foundation pack and two of the current set will work in limited at all.
I think this is why I build decks with building restrictions to my themes. It stops my decks from having this issue.
My Radha Heir to Keld deck for example is a voltron favorite of mine. Its also a deck that only plays at intant speed. I have no creatures in the library because the deck prefers to run cheap protection spells instead. Farewell is a wipe, but Radha can kill potentially on t4, so I rarely deal with wipes like that.
Definitely a bigger issue would be if this occured between sets as well.
This is pretty much how yugioh has worked for many years. Archetypes are designed to work within themselves and decks made of cards that weren't MADE together but work together has become a rarity. (Save for something like stun pile)