Maro says the same thing in all of these so it shouldn’t really be a surprise anymore, doesn’t make it less frustrating for me. Perhaps the most frustrating thing though is how he always avoids the actual substance of this recurring player complaint.

Things everyone already understands yet MaRo keeps distracting with: that WotC is a business and needs to focus on profit, that WotC will inherently cater to the market segments that spend the most, and that the UB sets to date are popular.

There are so many nuances that he ignores or blanket “data” that he won’t share that take these from useless to disingenuous and I think thats why his corporate explanations always feel bad to me.

I have two main issues that I feel never get properly addressed in these, and won’t get properly addressed:

1. Chasing profits or short term profit maximization does not need to be assumed to be correct. It’s a valid criticism to say that chasing near term UB sales may not actually be the best business decision in the long term! To just hand wave that away every time as “well people buy UB so we are going to cater to that” is very unfair. What if barely any of these new players convert to longer term players or what if none buy another UB or MTG product? What if by chasing short term profits, WotC wakes up in 3 years with no core player base and new/UB player base interested? MaRo never addresses this point (obviously) and it really takes away from his credibility here.

2. The marketing research they do is also highly suspect and another related thing he just hand waves. “Research” indicates UB=good so they’re doing it. I think the fact that Hasbro has otherwise failed to succeed in its other product lines should weigh heavily in whether they conduct accurate product research.

   It’s very easy for them to say successful UBs are successful because UB=good. But bad ones, like Transformers, are ignored or because of other variables. Not all UBs are equal. LotR, the wildly successful one, cannot be lumped together with Spongebob such that all UB sets are treated equally. They’re wildly different fanbases and have totally different impacts on the lore, nostalgia, and game feel.

I’m not sure either but I would love for them to go back to 2 for the same reason. Way more manageable.

Really looking forward to the energy one!

Yeah they’ve been ratcheting it up it looks like, I just checked the price of a Duskmourn bundle and MSRP is $51 (thought they’re selling for $42 still). Crazy.

I too had purchased these things for the slight discount on packs and the oversized dice. To move that to the premium bundle is sad yet unsurprising. Also never going to be buying these again unfortunately.

Here’s a summary of the relevant Pioneer cards still missing:

How many different ways can they sell us the exact same card before players just get fed up? If I want to (digitally) play Modern I have to buy the card on MODO, if I want to play Historic I have to buy it on Arena, and if I want to play Commander I have to buy it a third time? This is their master strategy?

I likewise played a TON of Mono U Flash when that deck was relevant and loved every minute of it. Also will be trying hard to make it work with similar reservations sadly. I just love that tempo style in a single color.

They love to cite how great these sets are for attracting new players but do they really become players? This is rhetorical at this point as we’ll never see the data but what is the actual player retention rate from these sets? If they knew this and it was good they would show it.

I realize the goal is to now convert them to a more accessible format like Standard but my gut says most of these buyers are one time buyers and are not actually growing the game long term. As long as they keep cranking out sets then this will be fine financially for a while but I can’t understand the long term thinking here, particularly as this pretty much forces enfranchised players to now cross the Rubicon. This is a fundamental shift/fork in the game.

So unbelievably cool that Kai Budde is in the top 8! Not only for the insane career and being back 25 years since he won Worlds in ‘99, but particularly given his very advanced cancer diagnosis not long ago. So happy for him and will definitely be rooting for him today.

Wow I never would have expected this change, or that this was even something WotC was discussing. This feels like a massive change and really hurts defending players.

Their justification is essentially:

[Blocking order is] somewhat unintuitive, adds a fair bit of rules baggage, and losing it means more interesting decisions and less double-dipping if you know the tricks.

Not sure how it’s any more or less intuitive or how it adds any more rules baggage than the new rule creates, they just hand wave these things and gloss over the reasoning. Curious how it develops but off the cuff not really happy about this change.

Was about to quote the exact same sentence, that’s insane and really speaks to how big of disruption this card was for Bo1.

For a second I thought Phyrexian Dreadnought was a Phyrexian Construct before I remembered it’s on the reserved list. Plus there’s 0 chance they’d reprint that anyway!

My vote too is for Walker. Really cool classic card and another 0cmc for the bigger formats.

This is awesome! Love how ambitious it is.

I didn’t click through the discord server yet but how many players are the current teams looking for?

Hilarious that Nadu, designed for Commander but released in a Modern set, is now banned in Commander too (after it’s collateral damage in Modern).

Kinda do not agree with the fast mana bans :-/ I understand their reasoning but I haven’t thought they were banworthy at all.

This is so cool, thanks for sharing!

Do you have any more details on it? Was it just printed by another attendee (presumably Brothers Wilmot 😜) or is this an official wotc reprint?

Wow this feels like a pretty significant color pie break. I realize they’ve printed black enchantment removal a few times before (Feed the Swarm) but this is an instant and seems like they’re just shifting to giving this to black now. Seems like kind of a shame to me.

Wow that is some freaky looking artwork

Altanak, the Thrice Called

You’re absolutely right and Mark’s straw man arguments like that are pretty frustrating. I have the same meaning as you when I say stop designing for Commander as I’m sure the vast majority of others do. I don’t know if he’s being intentionally dishonest or if he just doesn’t get it still but it is 100% stop printing overstatted Commander cards that warp eternal formats and these ability soup engines-and-payoffs.

Re: playtesting I wish they would come out and say what their playtesting process is. How many people are in each group, how long do cards get active testing, etc. Barring those details I kind of disagree that they can’t do more and while they definitely cannot catch everything, their process should be sufficient to not let a Nadu get by.

Yeah that’s a good point, I guess since it was admittedly for Commander they were find letting it leave the 60 card formats.

Exactly, the fact that “interacts with 0-mana abilities” isn’t on a list of mandatory checks is just crazy to me. It just signals that they don’t have any kind of process/infrastructure in place to help them see these things.