I’m sympathetic to this complaint, but COVID-19 is what took me away from paper Magic. I was out of the game for three years and I’m only back now because of Arena.

I agree with most of this.

Regarding the speed/balance issues – I really just want to play Magic with a much, much lower power level than anything that is currently supported, but WotC has been pushing the power level for so long that I don’t even know if we can get back there. I would be open to playing something like Standard Pauper or Standard Artisan, but even that is probably way beyond where I really want to be. I want to turn the clock back 15 or 20 years to when 2R got you a Goblin Chariot instead of a Screaming Nemesis.

Regarding the Arena interface – I turned off voice lines and background music, changed my graphics settings to Low, and set my default pet to none, all within about a month of starting Arena. And then after a while I just started leaving my headphones off anyway. I put up with emotes for over a year, but broke down and disabled them within the past month or so. It’s been an improvement. I feel bad that I might be missing the occasional sincere “Nice” or “Thinking”, but not as bad as I used to feel about getting a premature “Good game” or a “Your Go” during a complex turn. I would love a setting to disable non-essential animations. Sleeves, pets, ripple effects in the background. I play Arena despite those things, not because of them. And the card highlighting! I realize it actually provides information but I’d still shut it off in a second.

As for sitting through combos… Arena really needs more sophisticated skipping controls. MTGO has had “Pass until end of turn” and “Pass until next turn” for two decades.

I would like to see Sol Ring banned, partly because it’s an obviously overpowered card and partly because it reduces space in your deck. Your options are to accept that the real deck construction rules are “Sol Ring plus 98 cards”, or to accept that you’re voluntarily building an underpowered deck, neither of which are satisfactory IMO.

That said, I think it’s interesting that their logic for not banning Sol Ring echoes the reason why I thought Gush shouldn’t have been banned from Pauper: it’s “the iconic card of the format”, and telling people that they’ll get to play it is a good advertisement for the format.

Yeah, I was hoping to see more (or any) actual cards with Phasing, like Sandbar Crocodile. The highest Mirage block card on the list was Teferi’s Veil at #18, and there was sadly no mention of one of my pet cards, Dream Fighter, who can block first-strikers, flankers and deathtouchers with impunity. But I suppose it’s Wizards’ fault, really, for making the original batch of Phasing cards underpowered, and then never revisiting the keyword.

I feel there are much better examples, but I wanted to stop thinking about it.

A relatable sentiment.

I admire the restraint it took to write calmly about a subject that must be pretty personal for Mark.

I think Mark is misunderstanding what “stop designing for Commander” means. His response here would be more appropriate if fans were saying “stop balancing for Commander” – which of course nobody is. I don’t know about anyone else, but speaking for myself, when I say “stop designing for Commander” I mean “stop printing undercosted legends with as many abilities as you can jam into a text box”. It is okay – preferable, even – if one card can’t do everything by itself.

I think Mark is probably right about playtesting, in that no amount of additional resources would be enough to guarantee they’d catch every mistake. But I still don’t love the “eh, what can you do” attitude. I keep thinking, maybe they could hire a consultant with experience in an industry where rigorous testing is the norm. There’s got to be room to improve their processes.

Yeah. Which is why they’ll never do it, I know…

I’m just saying if they’d banned it after the “card starts to dominate” stage they could have spared you and everyone else from the “try to play around them” stage, saving both money and heartache.

Of course, in my fantasy world, they would stop constantly pushing power level so much, and we’d all have to go through this whole cycle a lot less often.

Also, I can’t speak for everyone, but I caved and started playing decks with Sheoldred, and I’d still be delighted if that card were banned tomorrow. Admittedly I spent Arena wildcards on it rather than actual money. But the point I’m trying to make is, I’d rather have a fun Magic format than economic recompense. The purpose of spending the money in the first place is to have fun playing Magic. Making Magic affordable is a laudable goal (which they could pursue in numerous other ways, many of which they are currently ignoring), but if making it fun doesn’t come first, what’s the point?

I can forgive a lot of the mistakes they made here; we’re all only human and I’m not going to pretend I’ve never shipped code with a bug that I really ought to have caught. They probably should never change any text without playtesting (unless it’s to make a card strictly worse, and even then you need to be pretty sure about the “strictly”), but I’ll bet they’ve gotten away with that a lot more than we realize.

But I think the cardinal sin here, and the mistake I can’t really understand, is that they changed an ability and “how does this interact with zero-mana spells or abilities” wasn’t in their top three considerations. Like, Cephalid Breakfast is over 20 years old. That type of interaction is not new or obscure; you can’t not have it on your radar.

As is tradition, this B&R announcement begins by saying that they will be changing the frequency of B&R announcements.

And then there’s this:

It is worth noting that we don’t plan on changing the current Standard B&R philosophy, meaning we still only want one window per year, barring an emergency, where we consider taking action in Standard.

I’m not sure I get the concept of non-emergency bans. If a card needs to be banned, ban it immediately; if it doesn’t, don’t ban it at all. This once-a-year interval makes even less sense for Standard than for other formats, since a year is proportionally longer for Standard.

I understand that they want people to feel confident that their chosen deck won’t disappear at a moment’s notice, I just don’t think that’s worth the trade-off of making everyone put up with an unbalanced format for months.

Ninja of the Deep Hours and Sprout Swarm are two of my favorite cards ever; it’s like they made this video just for me. Great showmanship to boot.

As I said elsewhere, I’ll miss the channel lands but not much else. I spent the last few days of the old Standard playing some of my decks that I don’t think will survive rotation, but I’m looking forward to making some new ones. I’ve lucked into opening three Darkstar Augurs so far and I definitely have plans for them.

Farewell is incredibly powerful, but it hasn’t even been the white sweeper of choice for a while. I’ve been seeing Sunfall much more often. Wandering Emperor doesn’t have any analogue to take its place, though, so it’ll be interesting to see how its disappearance affects white control.

Overall… it’s nice to see broken cards rotate out, but they printed some new broken cards to replace them, so… meh? I’m already eagerly anticipating the day next year when Sheoldred and Atraxa will depart. But there will still be plenty of newer nonsense then…

My initial reaction to Play Boosters was “okay, whatever” and I guess I still feel that way. OTJ was a fun draft format (even though I didn’t care much for the Wild West setting). Was it better or worse than sets designed with the old rarity distribution? Hard to say.

My buying habits are that I’m F2P on Arena and I buy one box of each Standard set from my LGS, which sits in my basement until hopefully I’ll draft it with friends some day. Prices on Arena didn’t change. I noticed that the price of the booster box went up, but not by enough to put me off buying.

So overall, seems like I’m fine with it.

They call them “Beyond Boosters” because, unlike normal boosters, they’re not made from meat.

October 2023: “Having too many types of booster is hurting sales, so we’re consolidating them.”

July 2024: “Hey check out this new type of booster we came up with.”

I must have watched too many Pre-Prereleases, because I heard this whole article in Nelson Salahub’s voice as I was reading it.

If there’s more fiction to come then I retract some of my complaining. I was assuming this was all there would be.

A fairly sudden ending. Feels like there’s a lot more story to tell, and it just wasn’t in the budget. We’re really not going to see fox Jace? Not going to get any character development for Zoraline? Why didn’t Glarb have the presence of mind to grab the egg before fleeing, making the party have to track him down? What’s the scoop on Gev’s tail? And how come there are only 16 unique cards spoiled so far and we still didn’t see most of those characters or locations?

Yeah, I mean, I play Standard for a variety of reasons, but “avoiding Universes Beyond cards” is definitely one of them.

I wonder how different the answer could be if they’d asked the question in a different way.

I’d like Modern better if it didn’t have UB cards, but banning UB cards alone wouldn’t be enough to get me to start playing Modern. So am I interested in a UB-free Modern? No, but that’s not approval of the current state of affairs.

Really enjoying the writing in this one so far. Good descriptions, good use of language.