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  • Veteran Magic Players Shocked at M10 Rules Changes

    Last month, Wizards of the Coast announced a salient set of rules changes. Although many of these changes are superficial, one in particular is not; combat damage now uses the stack. While events like these can be expected to raise cries that Magic is dying among scrubs, even more cogent veterans expressed unhappiness at the change.

    “The change removes decisions a lot of interesting decisions from the game,” commented one player. “Consider blocking Savannah Lions with a Sakura Tribe Elder. Under the old rules I had to make a choice between trading and getting a land, but now there will simply be only one correct play. I understand their desire to make the game more accessible to newer players by removing the unintuitive waterfall damage system but they’ve done it at the cost of dumbing down the game for competitive players.

    “The changes don’t even make sense from a flavor perspective either,” he continued, “under the new rules if I triple block a Dauntless Escort with Scion of Oona the attacker can split the damage and kill all my guys. How does that even make sense at all? Is it that when the Scion dies his buddies are torn up about it and suddenly realize that their wounds are lethal? And how does Nantuko Husk fight some dude and then eat one of his buddies who was just fighting at the same time only his buddy still kills the dude he was fighting and husk survives? Two Ravenous Baloths engage in a fight to the death and then both commit ritual suicide in order to avoid dying normally? What?”

    Although many competitive players believe that the changes give them fewer opportunities to outplay their opponents during the combat phase, others point out that these opportunities have just shifted from declaring the order of blockers to damage assignment.

    “I’m really surprised that people are getting worked up about this, if you play with the new rules for a bit you’ll see that the changes are pretty minor and don’t come up very often,” said another player who acknowledged that he was going to miss windmill slamming his cards ‘onto the battlefield’.

  • Pro MTG Online #226

    Pro MTG Online #226

  • Dominion Comix #14

    Chancellor’s ability is secretly powerful. It helps you draw your new cards earlier, which can be a big advantage. If you can keep track of the cards you’ve discarded, it becomes even better.

    Nevertheless, Chancellor seems to be overlooked in favor of flashier cards like Village and Silver.

    Mouse over the image or click here to view it in full.

    Here’s the actual Chancellor:

  • Dominion Comix #13

    Now we join our Dominion heroes as they encounter a new type of ally: The Duke! His amazing power is to leverage Duchies, but when the supply runs out there’s only one thing he can do.

    Mouse over the image or click here to view it in full!

    Here’s the original Duke:

  • ‘BlockRogue’ Wins Game Contest

    One of our very own members here at Good Gamery has won Microsoft’s Silverlight game development contest called “Dr. Dobb’s Challenge Deuce!” His entry was called BlockRogue, and you can play it right here!

  • Pro MTG Online #225

    Pro MTG Online #225

  • Dominion: Intrigue Spoiler

    Donald X. Vaccarino’s board game “Dominion” is the hottest “board” game on Earth. Next month, Dominion’s first expansion, “Intrigue” will be released. In order to prepare you for this new castle building experience, Basilisk has put together both a spoiler list and visual spoiler.

    Visual Spoiler

    Spoiler List

  • Sakura-Tribe Elder: “I Will Fight No More Forever”

    Facing an overwhelming force intent on expansion, redrawing the map and its resettling and modernizing its traditional homelands, the Elder of the Sakura Tribe has declared an end to years of armed retreat and asymmetrical warfare by surrendering to Magic: The Gathering rules manager Mark Gottlieb. The surrender took place on October 5, at Miren, the Moaning Well (now a national historic site), about 40 miles south of the Canadian border.

    While the Sakura Tribe has responded to repeated attacks by giving up its traditional lands for years, it had long engaged in a practice of putting damage on the stack, wherein a rear guard would inflict a single point on the advancing army before committing ritual suicide. This practice made the tribe folk heroes among many Magic players, who, while they still settled into the seized lands, applauded the snakes’ courage, resourcefulness, and ability to keep counters off Umezawa’s Jitte.

    “I always liked Steve,” said powerful wizard and Baylor College freshman Ankur Kartamian, using the common racial epithet for the tribe. “He was a good man, a common man. Sometimes he even got there, but mostly, he showed us to die as we lived, and to never make a choice between the two.”

    “I am deeply saddened by his surrender,” added Kartamian’s roommate Mitchell Hart, as he tapped seven of the tribe’s ancestral mountains, plains and islands to cast a Bull Cerodon and have it enter the battlefield, “Some of us are getting together to protest this. We are considering a strongly worded e-mail, or maybe quitting Magic.” Hard then ordered Kartamian’s blockers and cast Unsummon before damage for a 2-for-1.

    The Elder’s surrender was as eloquent as it was saddening:

    “Tell Mark Gottlieb I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Seshiro is dead, Shisato is dead. The Kamigawa Block is all dead. It is the Coatl who say yes or no. He who put damage on the stack is dead.


    It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little Orhan Vipers are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have left the in-play-zone and run away to the removed-from-the-game-zone, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find, collect and trade with my friends. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.

    Hear me, my chiefs! My mana neither floats nor burns; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

    Claims that this speech was written by Wizards of the Coast poet laureate Doug Beyer, and not in fact by a playing card with a snake on it, remain unconfirmed.

    Gottlieb responded to his longtime foe with a knowing respect, “It is true, many of the Elder’s children have left the battlefield and gone into exile. And I wish we had made this change earlier, before so many of the Sakura Tribe had to die. But this game has a bright future; a Manifest Destiny.

    The Sakura tribe is part of that destiny. It is very hard to explain to our own children the lives that are lost in what is already a decided conflict. It is merely the march of history. To live together as one people, we must put an end to these senseless murder-suicides, as courageous as they may be.

    Or else the whole country might collapse, replaced by a larger budget for Monopoly or other such bullshit.”

    “You just watch,” said Sachi, daughter of Seshiro, a longtime advocate for a more violent, fireball-based Orochi policy. “This will change nothing. The Sakura Tribe will keep getting played and killed by the white man and giving him land until there is none left in its library. This amicable surrender is just a fog effect for genocide. The only choice our Elder has made is to die rather than fight.”

    While the exiled Orochi were promised basic land, rumors are flying they have instead been forcibly relocated to the Dust Bowl.

    “Whatever the damage this has caused, it has been assigned, and it is now too late to prevent it,” mourned Sachi.

  • The Evolution of Magic’s Rules and Flavor

    With big changes coming in 2010, now is a great time to look at the past to help contextualize the new framework of magic. In this series, we’ll consider an area being updated in 2010, trace it back to its earliest roots, and look at what 2010 means to its future.

    Flavor and Terminology

    Alpha — Ice Age

    Cards were often printed with their initial inspired-by-fantasy-flavor wording, with any revisions or clarifications tacked on the end rather than represented by edits. As a result, it was common to see effects such as “Draw an extra land or spell from your library in addition to your normal draw for the turn, but only once a turn, and not if your hand is full already or you didn’t pay 4 mana.”

    Ice Age — 6th Edition

    Designers get tired of magic cards that sound like your drunken uncle trying to tell a joke he barely remembers, and standardize the wordings of common effects and meanings. Now all the cards with the same intended effect say the exact same thing, except the 90% of those cards printed either before this standardization or after one of the several changes to the standard in question.

    6th Edition — 2010’s Paper Release

    Flavor takes a back seat to functionality in card wordings. Terms are further standardized, and evocative fantasy words are replaced with mundane gaming ones. For instance, ‘cast’ becomes ‘play.’ Unfortunately, due to a rather severe editing error, the words ‘tap,’ ‘control,’ ‘card,’ ‘phase,’ ‘attack,’ and most confusingly ‘library’ also become play. Thus prompting Noam Chomsky to famously declare Godo, Bandit Warlord’s text…

    … to be “completely friggin’ indecipherable.”

    2010’s paper release — 2010’s MTGO release

    Evocative fantasy words return in greater numbers than ever before! This brings an end to the confusion over how coming into play is different from being played, and replaces it with confusion over how three islands and an underground river can be in a field.

    2010’s MTGO release — ???

    Due to a strconst.dat error, words on cards will be chosen almost entirely at random.

    Mana and Burn

    Alpha — Legends

    In keeping with the fantasy-flavor-driven motif, mana is conceived as magical energy drawn from the land – wild and not easily contained. Likewise, mana burning is conceived as absentmindedly leaving the eldritch stove on and setting your arcane house on runic fire.

    Legends — 6th Edition

    The game checks to see if you are mana burning at the end of each phase, but only checks to see if you’re dead every turn. Because of these questionable priorities it becomes popular to intentionally burn yourself to death, then later reveal that the game takes place in a mirror universe where it is actually the opponent that has been dead all along. Although this strategy never won any major tournaments, its supporters were vindicated when the film adaptation was nominated for 6 Oscars.

    6th Edition — 2010’s Paper Release

    Death makes up for lost time and starts killing people at 0 life any time anyone has priority. Mana burn keeps up its steady pace of once a phase. R&D members realize they can create cards that use mana burn as a weapon or a balancing drawback. This epiphany opens up fascinating design space for upwards of 4 cards, which range from “sort of ok” to “reasonably good I guess?”

    2010’s Paper Release — 2010’s MTGO Release

    Instead of mana burn arbitrarily taking effect at the end of each phase, it will arbitrarily take place at the end of each step, or it would if it existed at all. Previous cards built partially on mana burn degrade from their previous quality to “nothing special” and “meh, it’ll do.”

    2010’s MTGO Release — ???

    Whenever you pass priority with mana in your pool, a dialogue box will appear asking, “do you want to take mana burn?” If you click “no” you will retain priority. If you click “yes” you’ll be removed from the event for cheating and your account will be suspended pending administrative review.

    Combat and the Stack

    Alpha — Mirage

    Combat damage and its prevention or mitigation do not use “the stack.” Instead, there is a plethora of various reactive sub-steps for damage prevention. For example, whenever a creature is played, there is immediately a sub-step in which you can pay 2 mana to prevent it from ever doing damage. If you elect not to, you’ll enter a series of steps and phases where you can pay 1 mana to nullify its ability to deal damage. Finally, if a creature somehow entered combat, its damage was immediately dealt, after which point you had one last chance to prevent its damage. As previously noted though, there was no real rush even then, as you still had a whole turn to gain that life back before anyone noticed.

    Mirage — 6th Edition

    Catino’s infamous Grave Servitude ruling at PT Atlanta sets precedents that will be pivotal to the priority and the stack understanding of magic. The idea of judges interpreting and creating the rules in the middle of a high level event may seem unpleasantly arbitrary and unpredictable to neophytes, but savvy pros know you can count on them to make decisions along party lines 95% of the time.

    6th Edition — 2010’s Paper Release

    Alarmed by its loss of market share in the adolescent boy demographic to other collectible games, Wizards re-directs its marketing to Turing-complete machines. Abilities use a first-in-last-out stack to resolve. The game no longer contains unique, reactive batches and sub-steps; each step and phase operates in the same basic fashion. Play is accomplished by explicitly passing the right to use actions several dozen times per turn. Combat damage is now an object that takes time to process and exists independent of the source it is referencing. People looking to enjoy a casual game complain that only a computer program could process these painfully rigid rules in their stated form. Unfortunately, they are widely discredited when repeated attempts to create such a program fail miserably.

    2010’s Paper Release — 2010’s MTGO Release

    While the stack is still seen as a positive device, combat damage using it is deemed too confusing to new players. In order to remedy this, a system in which combat damage is dealt upon assignment is instituted, which renders damage prevention and regeneration terribly unintuitive. In order to remedy this, an unintuitive damage-prioritizing system is instituted which renders deathtouch terribly unintuitive. In order to remedy this, the system unintuitively doesn’t apply to deathtouch. Because of this corner case, the war is lost, and all for want of a nail.

    2010’s MTGO Release — ???

    Changes function exactly as intended; are reported broken by hundreds of players unfamiliar with the new rules.

  • Pro MTG Online #224

    Pro MTG Online #224