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Episode 206: Card complexity and how high goblins can count
232 Plays1 year ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast! While Hobbes takes a night off to recharge Taya and Alex use that opportunity to once again talk mechanics and melthos topics, this time talking about increasing complexity in Magic in recent years, some history around that topic, and some personal stories about the impact increased complexity of board states has had on the two of them and folks in their play groups.
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Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle)
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Fundraiser Success
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. This is Taya and I'm here with Alex tonight. Hobbs is off resting after doing a couple of pods on the Praetors for Change fundraiser over the weekend. I also did a pod.
00:00:48
Speaker
We did a pretty good showing for the goblins over here. We both won. I don't know how Hobbs did yesterday, but we both won games on Saturday. So pretty good showing from the goblins. And we raised over $2,000 for Equality Texas and Equality Florida. So it was a pretty good weekend.
00:01:09
Speaker
and want to thank the Grinding Coffee Company who helped us with our fundraisers when we have them. They weren't involved with this fundraiser because we were working with a different group, but they always help us out and we're happy to have them participate with our show.
Exploring Mechanics: Goblins and Hellbent
00:01:26
Speaker
But yeah, so we're going to have a talk today
00:01:31
Speaker
about a mechanical episode with Alex and I being on together. We always like talking mechanics and melt those things. So it's time for another goblin mechanics episode. We're going to be building some artifacts like good goblins do. That's right. And so we're going to start with the opening question. And that is what mechanic that hasn't been seen for a while, would you like to see back? And mine is going to be Helvet.
00:02:02
Speaker
Like a good red mage, I like using all my spells and I'd like to have some bonus for being out of cards or low on card or auto cards. And I think they could do a lot more in that space, especially if they open it up to more than just Rakdos colors.
00:02:19
Speaker
And there's a lot of mechanical opportunity they could do for things, bonuses you could get for being hellbent in other colors. Yeah, and even like hellbent, you know, just a mechanic that turns on when you have no cards in your hand, like that could work well with other mechanics, which kind of fits into
Complexity and Unique Card Interactions
00:02:40
Speaker
my thing. So I'm Alex, as Taya said, my pronouns are he, him.
00:02:45
Speaker
I found it on Twitter, sometimes Mel underscore chronic or whatever. But I need to answer this question sort of sideways because that's my brand. That's what I do. So the mechanic and I'm using air quotes that you can't see is what I would really like to see more of because these are some of the just most interesting cards to me despite the fact that often they just aren't terribly useful in the formats I play.
00:03:08
Speaker
are what Mark Rosewater, who's the head designer of Magic, called the mix and match cards. I believe is what he called these from Future Sight.
00:03:16
Speaker
So we'll get into, as we talk about mechanics, I get to talk about the times power block again tonight. That's just my favorite set of cards. But the future site, the third set on that block had a cycle of cards that combined two mechanics that were never in sets together and did some funky things with that. And I love these sorts of cards. So I've talked about like marshalling cry on this podcast is like one of my absolute favorite cards that I don't play because it's really not.
00:03:45
Speaker
It's terribly good, but it's just all your creatures get plus and plus one in Vigilance. It's a sorcery, but it has both cycling and flashback. So with cycling, you can discard it to draw a card, and then flashback, you can cast it from your graveyard. But because it has both of these mechanics, there's a lot of different play lines you can do with this spell. You can cast it conventionally and flash it back. You can cycle it and flash it back. There's just a lot of options of what to do with this card.
00:04:10
Speaker
Give things like sprout swarm that are probably too strong with convoke and buyback and it creating creature tokens and so convoke letting your creature tokens start to tap to pay for the spell and once you get enough of them you're kind of going infinite with the spell almost it's. I love these sorts of things.
00:04:30
Speaker
We got a couple things a little bit tiny bit like this in Modern Horizons. One and two both had red spells, red sorceries that had two mechanics on them, but they didn't really play with each other in the same way. Like throws of chaos, I love. Has cascade, it has retrace. It has no other thing that the card itself does, but you cast it, you start flipping cards off your deck, you get to cast something, and then retrace lets you just recast it from your graveyard by discarding a land and paying the mana so you can just kind of cast it again.
00:04:59
Speaker
I love that interaction, but those two aren't specifically interacting in the same way that these mix and match cards from future site did. Yeah. And I think that segues well into what our main topic is going to be in. And it's going to be generally discussing the complexity of where the game has gone today mechanically and where things are. And I think it's interesting because
00:05:26
Speaker
I came up with this topic this morning when we were trying to figure out what to discuss on the show without Hobbes being here. And I came up with this topic and then just this morning, the professor released a video on the same topic, which is amazing timing. But there's a few things on that video when I want to talk about first. And one was the mind blowing fact that
00:05:52
Speaker
There had not been a vanilla creature printed in a standard set since Strixhaven until Yargle and Miltani was printed in March of the Machine. And the only reason that was printed as a vanilla creature is because that's just part of the creature itself, is that Yargle is a vanilla creature. It's just keyword bake.
00:06:15
Speaker
Yeah. And like for a long time, that was a big thing that helped kind of control complexity in the set. You just had cards that had creatures that had no abilities, or then you'd have some like creatures that enter the battlefield effects that once they trigger, then they're done. They're vanilla once they're in play. And so things like that helped to kind of control this. And God, I hadn't realized that we haven't had a vanilla creature for two years.
00:06:40
Speaker
Yeah, that blew my mind when the professor talked about that. And I mean, I haven't been playing a lot of standard sets. I'm almost exclusively playing commander now, so I haven't seen what the draft environments are like lately. I kind of stopped going to Friday Night Magic when the pandemic started and
00:07:05
Speaker
I'm not a big arena player, so I'm not up on draft environments. So I mean, this just for me was mind blowing because I'm so used to, you know, your curve fillers being your, your colossal dreadmaws, your, you know, six, five for five or whatever.
00:07:24
Speaker
Yeah. And like how many sets have had a grizzly bear, which is just a 2-2 for 2. That was a standard metric that draft folks who talk about draft a lot that use that kind of as a standard measurement for cards. They're just like, certain formats, it's not good, but most formats, a 2-2 for 2 is a good curve filler, like you said, Tytea. And so the fact that we just haven't had those cards for two years is kind of
00:07:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's, I mean, now the replacement, you know, he showed off in the video is a 2-2 with lifelink for 2. That's what the replacement is now in a draft set. And that stills your 23rd card.
00:08:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and that is still less complexity than some of these other cards with a lot of text on it, but it's that suddenly becomes something you have to track on the battlefield. You need to pay attention to life gain from lifelink that your opponent can gain or that you can gain, as opposed to that does two damage, they trade or it dies or whatever. Yeah, plus all the other things that lifelink can trigger on the battlefield. That's true, yeah, then your whatever life gain is triggering and yep,
00:08:39
Speaker
So yeah, the game has become more
Universes Beyond and Player Experience
00:08:43
Speaker
complex. And then we look into products that are designed towards new players or to bring players into the game that are not as familiar with it, like Universes Beyond and Doctor Who, it being the most recent. I don't know if you've played with these decks at all, but the complexity level of these decks is mind numb.
00:09:06
Speaker
It's absolutely off the charts. I mean, you've got playing from exile, you've got cascade, you've got cycling, or not cycling, but suspend.
00:09:16
Speaker
you know, you have legendary on everything, partners, you can mix and match partners and everything. I just recently played a game with three people that are longtime Magic players that, you know, we played a D&D campaign together for years that used Magic as its combat system.
00:09:37
Speaker
And all of them had been away from the game for over at least a year. And we played a whole pod of the Doctor Who decks and all of them were like, I have no idea what's going on in this game. And that's just how complex this is. And this is a product that is like, let's bring people into magic that might be interested in Doctor Who, but aren't into magic.
00:09:58
Speaker
Yeah, storm in here vanishing multiple cards with vanishing. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, I hadn't I hadn't really looked at at this said too much. That's a whole other conversation about how much stuff is coming out and doctor who is as excited as I'm happy as I am for how excited people are. It's a thing I know nothing about. So I just sort of checked out from from these cards. I hadn't looked at them too deeply. But
00:10:25
Speaker
Yeah. And like you're saying, Tate, it's incredible. Not just that there's this much complexity. And that was a thing for a while. The game got really complex. We can kind of get into some of that history in a little bit. But then one of the steps that was taken was to pull that complexity into other products and try to leave standard, which was, at the time, the default new people funneled through draft and standard.
00:10:50
Speaker
and to try to make those a little bit less complex and shove that complexity into other places.
00:10:57
Speaker
but now Commander is the most popular format and a lot of people are coming in for Commander and then you've got things like Doctor Who and Lord of the Rings and upcoming Fallout and all sorts of other properties that are getting people to look at magic because they're from those fandoms. And if they come in, like my dad is someone who hasn't played magic for 20 years, but he started playing because of the Lord of the Rings sets.
00:11:26
Speaker
And so the complexity of some of these sets makes it awkward for people coming back into these things. I'm like, I know in a couple of years we've got Final Fantasy coming up and I work with someone who actually plays, I didn't know this, but Final Fantasy has their own collectible card game.
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if it's still going, but yeah, they did have at one point a fairly sizable, collectible card game. Yeah, and that's the thing he plays. He's never really played Magic, but I told him about that. He's like, oh, maybe it'll be time for me to look at Magic in a little bit. So these sets are doing a good job of
00:12:06
Speaker
And the very small sample size that I have, they're, they're definitely grabbing people's attention and getting people to like look at magic either again or for the first time, but. Yeah. I have a friend who's a big Dr. Who fan that hasn't played magic in 20 years that bought the full set of four decks and just wants to keep them as like a game night. You know, if I have some friends together, I can play and they know how to play magic, but magic is Richard Garfield intended.
00:12:36
Speaker
Yeah. Or maybe expected is the better way to say it. He kind of intended the game to be its own thing and evolve as it will. But that was how he expected the game to be played. You get some cards, you stick it on your shelf. When friends come over, you play some games and you stick the cards back. Yeah. And I mean, I absolutely love this product. The Doctor Who product has been one of my favorite products that they've released in a while. So I'm not
00:13:03
Speaker
I'm not putting down this product. I'm, I'm a huge fan of it. I love the decks. I love the flavor. I thought everything that we're going to talk more about this one Hobbs is on because he's also a big doctor who fan. So we'll get more into those details later, but I'm not putting down the decks. I'm just saying it from a complexity standpoint, these products are just.
00:13:31
Speaker
off the wall complex and I don't think we have a new person friendly entry point at this point. It used to be the core set. That was what they advertised as new person friendly. We don't have a core set anymore. What would have been the core set this year was the Lord of the Rings set.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah. Which had some very complex mechanics in it. Yes, it did. I mean, like, I still don't fully understand how the ring tempts you. I'm not going to lie. I'm still going to have to sit down and reread the thing to tell you how that thing works. And that's a set I didn't ignore. That's a set I bought a bunch of stuff for. And yeah.
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah, when you're dealing with, you know, you have like every set has its classic draft archetypes and, you know, in some sets it'll be like blue-green will be counters or plus one plus one counters matters. So a pretty clear archetype that is easy to grasp, but I'm like Lord of the Rings, it was scrying.
00:14:38
Speaker
Which is, you know, if you tell a new player that your deck's goal is to scry cards and get synergy off of that, you know, what are they going to think about that? Yeah, that's a good point. And something we, you know, as in franchise players, we've been playing for a while, we think it's
00:14:56
Speaker
I think I can say scry is a fun little ad mechanic and value add thing but you're right if you're new to this there's so many decision points to make when you're scrying you have to is this a card I want to keep especially if you're scrying multiple cards how many on top how many on bottom what order in both directions what do I have in my hand what am I do I have on board that I'm planning to interact with these cards and now you
00:15:21
Speaker
When do I even play my Scry cards to trigger my Scry payoffs? Is there something that I want to... Do I want to trigger this before combat? Do I want to trigger this on somebody else's turn? There was so much going on with the Elden mechanics in that set. That was just one of the set of mechanics.
00:15:48
Speaker
So I think this just goes, and then just the individual complexity on cards, and this is another thing I'm going to take from the process video, is he was showing that there is more text on the Ashiok card from Viles of Eldraine than there were on two of the previous Ashiok cards combined. Yeah, it's a lot. A fairly small sample size for what I've looked at, but a lot of the Planeswalker cards
00:16:14
Speaker
Again, the ones I've seen at least. I just feel like their abilities are so much more dense. They don't seem like some of the early ones were just like make a beast. Yeah. Draw a card. You look at the initial chase. It's everyone draws a card. I draw a card or target player of Mills 20. I mean, that is- There are non-unset cards that have more words in their title almost. Yeah.
00:16:41
Speaker
It's tough. And like I said, this is a thing the game has gone through before with the Time Spiral block was a place where that really came to a head.
Magic's Historical Complexity Shifts
00:16:52
Speaker
That cycle is my favorite. I love those three sets because of how much they pulled from the previous years, because I'd been playing the game from almost the beginning of the game. And so Time Spiral, why do I always forget the middle set, Planar Chaos?
00:17:10
Speaker
Yes, Planar Chaos. Sorry, there's Plane Chase, Planar Chaos, other Planar sets. So, Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, Future Sight, the three sets were kind of set up as past, present, future, and all of them, again, we were talking all Melville stuff, and when you get Teh and I on here, and this kind of really digs into my love of sort of the mechanics and the flavor of the mechanics.
00:17:33
Speaker
But these three sets did a lot of that. The Time Spiral had the time-shifted sheet that brought back a bunch of old cards. Planar Chaos had the color-shifted cards that were just the exact text of other cards, for the most part, shifted another color. That's where you get damnation from Wrath of God. And then Future Sight had a bunch of cards from the future, which
00:17:56
Speaker
is just ridiculous how how complex that set got just on its own and At the time future site had more keywords than any other site ever Created or set ever created and I wonder now if if that's still true I'm sure it's still true for any other standard set But if you count supplemental sets, I doubt that is still true Yeah, yeah, especially with with the way some of these commander sets are built and
00:18:27
Speaker
they intentionally cherry pick cards to build decks, which is kind of what they're supposed to do, but the way they're built ends up.
00:18:36
Speaker
specifically pulling in lots and lots of mechanics in the same way that Future Sight did. One of the things that made Future Sight so mechanically complex is there's like 14 mechanics that I counted on this article, maybe more, that were brand new just for this one set. Most blocks add like three mechanics in the first set, maybe a couple later, but they mostly iterate on the things back in the three block.
00:19:02
Speaker
three set block era, they mostly just iterated on the mechanics introduced early on. And this set not only iterated on those mechanics, and then brought back like another eight or so, and then keyworded a few things. So like lifelink and reach used to just be written out like reach, this creature can block flying. It used to just say this creature can block creatures and fly or something like that. I can't remember exactly how they worded it, but
00:19:30
Speaker
So that helped a little bit, but those were still mechanics being brought into this. There's just so many new words to read on these cards, and some of them were for one card, or three cards. Yeah. Like the card with gravestorm on it. Yeah, the one card with gravestorm. Yeah, one card. Yeah. We had a cycle that had a Delve web mechanic, which was originally printed in cons. Yeah.
00:19:58
Speaker
Yeah, there was nothing wrong with that mechanic. No, I love the mechanic. But it was just like, again, this is this, I think that's the top. Like most of them were one to, I think they're all one to three. Yeah. Whenever they do a cost saving mechanic, nothing ever goes wrong with that. No, absolutely not. Same with anything that has storm in the name of it. There's probably why there was only one card with gravestarp in this set.
00:20:26
Speaker
But yeah, so that ended up leading to something we don't, which at this point is really old, so we don't need to talk about it too much, but that literally led to something they call New World, or they created this entire thing where they're like, we are going to change how complexity is put into Magic cards, because this was such a, it caused such an issue with new players being really unable to, having a very difficult time entering the game, it just made the game very opaque for people to get into. And so,
00:20:55
Speaker
they create like this is this whole thing our wizards came out and said we're gonna do this stuff and here's all the details of it and this is how we're gonna try to change and trying to communicate all these change not just it was so big they didn't just make a few tweaks and say hey by the way we changed some stuff like they had this whole name for it this whole campaign internally externally to try to communicate all of it because that just
00:21:19
Speaker
It was, it got to a point where it was an issue for the game. The game wasn't in a good spot. It was hard for people to play and it was, it hit a big downturn. And if you ever listened to Mark Rosewater's podcast at all, he talks about the ages of design and that was the start of a new age of design for magic.
00:21:41
Speaker
Yeah. If, if you're interested in like behind the scenes stuff, there's so much that he covers in, in drive to work where he literally just records on his phone while he's driving to work. It's just don't listen to anything he says about lore. He is not the third person at magic. And no, no, no, that's true. Yeah. The last time he was actively involved in lore was what tempest block 25. It was something like that. Yeah.
00:22:10
Speaker
But he has a lot of, if you're interested in behind the scenes stories or some of the mechanical things, because he's been the head designer there for a while, he has a lot of insight on a lot of those things. And it's, I haven't listened to the podcast for a little while now, but that, when I kind of got back into the game, that was one of the things that kind of helped bring me back into the game was listening to a few years of that podcast and just immersing in some of that sort of angle of things.
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah, I pretty much did the same thing. It tells you a lot about the design philosophy of what's going on. And if you don't want to listen to hundreds of hours of podcasts because he releases them constantly, you can also just read his annual State of Design articles, which
00:23:00
Speaker
Kind of cover he reviews all of the sets that came out during the year and talks about what went right and what went wrong Yeah, those are really good too. Those I have been I don't think i've read every one of them recently, but those i've mostly been keeping up on recently those are
00:23:18
Speaker
And it's a smaller little piece, and it's really interesting to get that perspective. And again, there's some things that you may or may not agree with all of his conclusions on stuff, but it's good to get his perspective because of where he's at and what he's actively involved in a lot of this stuff. And so he comes out and says, here's a priority I have. You know that's a priority that's going to be sort of involved in the game, at least in the building of it.
00:23:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's, you know, he's, if it's about designing the game, he's kind of the voice of God for that. Or if it's silver border on stuff. He's also, he is the rules manager for silver bordered magic. So he makes rules decisions there. So I think we discussed a couple of weeks ago, the fact that there are, there are gatherer rulings,
00:24:14
Speaker
for silver boarded cars. Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if he was involved in that some way because he is a big champion of that internally and talks about that.
00:24:24
Speaker
that's a thing at least for him how he uses it now is it's a good testing ground it's a good proving ground for some of these mechanical things that either they don't know if it's worth the work to make it work or they're not sure if it is fun or if it would even work at all and so it lets them sort of test things out and
00:24:48
Speaker
decide is this worth putting into the base game or even if they don't ever look at it that way it might just be we can just do something fun that doesn't fit in the normal rules like one of my favorites that he talks about a lot is last strike so you have first strike and then he wants to get last strike in the game but the rules like rules manager for the actual rules of the primary game says you can't do it we can't do it it can't work
00:25:14
Speaker
And so he gets to just squeeze that into a triple strike too, which then you get to have triple strike, which is a lot of fun. Yeah.
00:25:25
Speaker
which I would love to be a real mechanic. Oh, that would be so cool. And that's another one where I don't know the rule stuff and maybe it really just doesn't fit with the current rules and things. And that's too bad. That's too bad. But that is one that is super easy to grok. It's super easy to understand the concept. If you understand first strike, you can understand last strike. It makes things a little bit more complex, but way less than some of these brand new, all these other mechanics that are on things that you have to read.
00:25:55
Speaker
the card every single time to see all of the details of what it's describing. I want to read a specific card here because this is what kind of brought the whole idea of this episode about. It's a new card from Lost Caverns of Ixalan. Sovern Akanek Oahu. I'm sure I butchered that name. I'm sorry. I need to learn how to pronounce these.
00:26:19
Speaker
Whenever a sovereign Akanek Oahu attacks, for each creature you control with power greater than that creature's base power, put a number of plus one plus one counters on that creature equal to the difference. Now, I had to read this like three times before I understood what it was saying. You and I were talking about that before recording, and I still didn't realize it was a trigger when it attacks. Oh my God. That is...
00:26:48
Speaker
What happens is you basically look at each creature and if its power is modified, it gets a number of counters equal to the difference. So if I have a creature that has equipment on it that's giving it plus two power, it's also going to get two plus one plus one counters. And the next turn, it would get four plus one plus one counters because it has the equipment plus the two plus one plus one counters.
00:27:12
Speaker
Oh my God, and I didn't even understand how it works. Oh, this is, I mean, it's cool. It's a really powerful card. It's a mythic, like, those things are supposed to be powerful and splashy, and it's a legend. As you said beforehand, it fits really well in a cat deck you have. Yeah, I have a cats with swords deck, so they're all usually getting buffed by their equipment. So this goes right in there. It fits right in there. It's a cat noble. It's perfect for the deck. That's interesting.
00:27:41
Speaker
It's a really great Victor Adame Meninga's art. He's just amazing. Probably my second favorite artist in the game. And in both arts, this cat is left-handed too. Yes, he is. I didn't even notice that. Sorry, I notice weird details sometimes. Yeah. But yeah, so...
00:28:09
Speaker
That is a super cool card, but that is so complex. And then speaking about complexity. Besides that ability, it's a 3-4 with Ward 2 for four mana.
Future of Magic's Complexity in Design
00:28:19
Speaker
So you stack that on top of the ability. Yeah. And it can't even have round stats to be like a 3-3 or a 4-4 to make that easier to track. Yeah. So this card inspired
00:28:34
Speaker
cardboard crack comic that basically was the same, the guy reading the card three panels in a row. And then it was like, I think I finally understand. Yeah, it's unfortunate. And then the punchline card is like, now there's only 200 more cards to read. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. We've had cards that complex before, but I think what's unusual is that we don't have cards that are
00:29:05
Speaker
We don't have the vanilla cards anymore. And so even the base cards are more complex than they used to be. Yeah, it's changed really fast. And then the real question is, where does it go from here? Are they going to have another reset like New World Order where they ratchet everything down again to kind of rewind everything?
00:29:30
Speaker
Or are they gonna just continue this complexity overload to the point where people can't play the game without getting a migraine? I talked about my group of friends playing Doctor Who, and by the end of the game, they were all just mentally exhausted. I don't know if they really enjoyed playing that game a lot because they were just having trouble following what was going on.
00:29:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and complex cards, speaking as a person likes mechanics, those things can be a lot of fun. Cards with multiple mechanics can be a lot of fun to sort of interact with those things. My friends and I used to joke about Predator Flagship back in high school as a, we called it a one-card combo because it has the ability to give a creature flying and it has a separate ability where it taps to destroy a creature with flying. I've always loved that design too, especially in the story.
00:30:30
Speaker
you have Greven tossing people overboard. Yeah, like it is. It's a great melville's design where it has a good flavor and the good mechanics that sort of fit with the flavor and but like so I love those things. But it can be tough when you play a game of magic that is so complex that you don't want to play another game. Like that is starting to
00:30:55
Speaker
And it can be an isolated thing, but that is starting to feel like that could be an issue. Like I had a game and this has nothing to do with current design because this boils down to a friend of mine playing a Kainos interior deck that has Hivemind in it.
00:31:13
Speaker
But that was a game I played recently where it was so complex by the end. There was so much going on. We were basically done. We did play one quicker game after that, but we all very specifically found simpler decks. And we ended that game pretty quickly. There were some people who even toward the end were just like, you know what? I could try to drag this out. I'm just going to be done now. Because we played for two hours.
00:31:41
Speaker
And I had a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun digging through all the extra triggers that Hivemind is giving this instance and sorceries to every person at the table. I also won that game, despite the, I mean, we all lost the game, but I officially on paper won the game.
00:32:02
Speaker
Yeah, we ended that game with five copies of Tefarious Protection on the stack, five copies of Demonic Tutor on the stack, and one copy of Expedite on the stack that I didn't cast because everyone else died to the Expedites that they cast. Oh, jeez. Because before that on the stack was a Crimson Wisps, preceded before that by an Enter the Infinite.
00:32:29
Speaker
So the short version is everybody drew their entire deck except for one card and then had to draw two cards. And then had to draw two. And because I was the person who cast the last draw spell, I didn't have to draw the second card. It was ridiculous. I'm gonna get into it. There was an extra time thing, there was an extra turn thing that was basically a reverse from Uno for a little while. It was a strange game. It was a lot of fun.
00:32:56
Speaker
But games like that are like, we're done. For me, I'll play one game like that in a day. And if things start to ratchet up enough, if a set of pre-cons is playing games that are complex enough, like that you're done after one, that is tough when I get together. Yeah, it is.
00:33:16
Speaker
you know, and the game went three hours. So far, I've played two games with these pre-cons in all a pod of four with the pre-cons and both of them have gone three hours. Yikes. And that's just a lot. And it's like, I don't mind long games, but long, complex games just leave you tired. It sounded like that was your experience. You're in your friends. No, it was.
00:33:42
Speaker
You know, we had this conversation, uh, Hobbs and I had this while we were, we were playing, uh, the car, the decks with some members of our discord. And, you know, that kind of started this conversation. And I'm just like, look at our board states and look where we're at. And then you add planes chase on top of that. And that just rashes up the complexity even more because you have a whole nother state to track.
00:34:07
Speaker
And then you have planes that are, you have the one that's sort of like a hive mind that puts, everyone has to put a spell in the center and you can play other people's spells out of the center of the table. Oh, see that was like in the, in that game, I was talking about the, the kind of central player actually played telepathy, I think is the name of it. Which is an enchantment that makes everyone else play with their hands revealed.
00:34:32
Speaker
yeah within i don't know a turn like we're all looking at each other's hands the rest of us basically stopped it was just the game was complete the board was a complex enough we just like whatever's in your hand it's sitting faced up on the table i'm not even looking at it because whatever i don't do you i used to play when i first came back to the game i used to put zur's weirding in all of my decks but i just
00:34:56
Speaker
And for those not familiar, this card says everyone plays with their hand face up, and whenever anyone draws a card, a player may pay two life to make them discard the card. Talk about having to track everything going on on the board. And it just basically grinds the game to a halt.
00:35:20
Speaker
And the red player in me who's like, I want to see everybody on equal terms and just not have any cards is great, but I also want the game to end. So that was kind of my thought when I came back to the game is I'm just going to make everybody play evenly. And if I don't have any cards, no one else is going to have cards either. Yeah.
00:35:45
Speaker
you know, it just turns out it's no fun for anybody when everybody's just paying two life to make them discard everything they draw. Yeah, it makes all your draws like the Rhystic cards from Prophecy and outside of Rhystic Study that manages to sort of turn that on its head because of the way that it works, those cards just don't get played. So many of this is just like, you get to do something moderately okay, unless someone pays two. It's like, why?
00:36:16
Speaker
No, it's, and they used to design things differently back then. It also has, appropriate to the name, it has one of the weirdest art of any card. The original printing is basically like a shop looking up his robe from the bottom. I've never quite understood what's going on in that art, but it's a really cool piece of art.
00:36:40
Speaker
to look at that, because I was looking, oh, that's right. Yeah, the Ice Age one, pulled up the ninth edition, which is probably from seventh. Yeah, it's a Liz Danforth piece, and it looks really cool, but it's also just like what is going on here. Yeah, and it's just like colorful for no reason, kind of loved the art in Ice Age. Liz Danforth is an amazing old school magic artist. A lot of her work is just top notch. Yep.
00:37:10
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. We'll have to see. Ultimately, the last New World Order when that happened like that was in response not just to this complexity getting to that point, but also
00:37:25
Speaker
It got, Magic hit a downturn. It hit them in the wallets or whatever the expression is, where people just weren't buying cards because people weren't able to enjoy the game as much. And so I don't know, I'm hoping we don't have some big fall off that causes them to have to scramble.
00:37:49
Speaker
Magic is making Hasbro truckloads of money and they're going to keep doing what they're doing because it's working. It's making Hasbro just release their financials and Wizards is making them a ridiculous amount of money. So they're going to keep
00:38:04
Speaker
releasing product at this breakneck pace. They're going to keep releasing 100 secret layers a year. They're going to keep announcing a new product every week because that's what their stockholders want. And it's making them money. So there's no reason for them to change course from a business perspective until it starts to affect their bottom line. And right now, that's not the case. No.
00:38:31
Speaker
I don't know. Well, we'll have to see kind of how that shakes out. And I think we are in a little bit of a different environment. A commander itself is a little more complex, but it's also more friendly than the standard and draft that the entry point before was. And we say that despite the fact that
00:38:55
Speaker
Historically, kitchen table was still always like the most common, the most people do kitchen table stuff, but I. Yeah, I also think one of the big differences from the time spiral block till now is just how many people play like draft on arena that people aren't just playing one draft a week or one draft a month. They're drafting several times a week, so they're used to the higher complexity.
00:39:23
Speaker
The people that are drafting are doing it a lot. Yeah, the enfranchised people are doing it more, and so they're not getting hit by it as much. I think the new people coming in are less likely to go into competitive formats than they were in the past, and so if you're sitting with friends around a table, that complexity is something you can navigate.
00:39:47
Speaker
more easily because you're all just kind of working through it while you're hanging out as opposed to at a draft table where you are incentivized to not help your opponent navigate the complexity of the board state so that you can win and take advantage of that. So that might help support higher levels of complexity in the game without it having the same negative ramifications.
00:40:14
Speaker
Yeah. I do think though that it's, and I think it's, it's going to be a bigger problem with some of the universes beyond product because if you're trying to bring it, bring in players from outside of magic and giving them these ultra complex products is going to be counterproductive to keeping them interested long-term. Yeah. Or even just to teach them how to play that just to get them started and.
00:40:43
Speaker
And the thing is, I want these products. I want these complex products because I think they nailed the flavor for Lord of the Rings. They nailed it for Doctor Who. As far as I know, they nailed it for Warhammer. And I'm staring at the Fallout revealed cards and some of these are real good. Yeah.
00:41:04
Speaker
And they're hitting this mechanically so well, and they're doing a good job telling the story in the cards. But they're also getting the people to understand how to play with these cards, and I'm wondering if that's getting lost in this.
00:41:26
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And so like I said, these are products we've liked. These are products we've enjoyed. And I can say as a person who, I think the one person on the cast who's big into Fallout, I'm really looking forward to. I'm really looking forward to the fall. I'm very excited. I've played all the games. I am a new Vegas trans girl. That was my favorite Fallout game. I mean, it's probably the best.
00:41:57
Speaker
We can get in that discussion later. We'll talk about that next year. You and Hobbs still have to sit down and talk about Doctor Who. I'm very excited for you two to get to talk through Doctor Who. Yeah, so that'll be soon, very soon. Yes. Hopefully next week's episode will be that and if everything goes planned. Yeah, no, that would be good.
00:42:25
Speaker
But I do want to say, though, just and this kind of ties into our general.
Complexity and Mental Health in Gaming
00:42:31
Speaker
We haven't talked a lot about mental health lately, but, you know, people play magic as an escape from some of their other issues. And if they're really taxing their mind this much playing magic, sometimes it's not the escape they're seeking. And I know just sometimes like stress
00:42:53
Speaker
from multiple sources can sort of have an additive effect. In a small amount, no hubs talks about it a lot. Stress in small amounts can be very helpful, can be very good. But there's a lot of stress these days for a lot of various reasons. And your hobby, which is supposed to kind of be the escape and the recharge, causing that much
00:43:15
Speaker
And maybe stress is even the wrong term for it. But if it's causing you to have a migraine, if it's so complex that you can't actually just escape into a game,
00:43:27
Speaker
That is, like you say, maybe it isn't serving the same purpose that it used to. And that can be difficult. And that can be something that sometimes is difficult to identify until it's way down the road and it's causing other issues. And then you start to work your way back and realize, oh, well, this thing that used to be how I recharge is now taking energy from me just like all the other things in my life.
00:43:52
Speaker
So, I mean, just consider it, reflect on it, and are you getting what you need out of the game? Is the complexity or anything else, the daily magic drama or anything detracting from what you enjoy about it to the point where it's a net negative for you?
00:44:12
Speaker
Yeah. And, and maybe there's, and especially if you have a smaller, if you have a closer knit play group, a specific play group, there's some things you can do to mitigate that within the group of multiple people are feeling this. That's how a number of years ago, the Minneapolis group kind of came up with our dollar general format we built. Alex Zito, who's one of the people, I think he was just looking for a deck building challenge. When he just did a Twitter poll, it was like, what, what dollar amount should I cap my cards at? And
00:44:40
Speaker
then $1 and then he built that deck and so did a dozen other people in the area and that just became a format we played for a while and that
00:44:52
Speaker
At the time, for us, it brought the complexity down. It changed the format a little bit. For me, I loved that it just attacked Commander from a different angle. And so it's possible, if this is a thing, maybe find some other challenge. Find some other deck-building things or find some other way that is interesting to your play group and get out of that or change that, even just a little bit, take a break from it.
00:45:22
Speaker
Yeah, I personally enjoy the mentally challenging decks. I like it when people say I have no idea what's going on on your board, which I tend to get a lot, especially when I'm playing some decks like Nero, where I have six or seven triggers happening when I cast a spell. Yeah, that's enjoyable to me, but not everyone likes that.
00:45:47
Speaker
Yeah. So now I just like when I play weird cards and people are like, why is, why are you playing Fractured Power Stone? But, you know, it's, it's a matter of, I guess you never, you never know when you're going to need to roll that plane or die. Yeah, exactly. And that's our show for today. You can find all of the hosts on Twitter for now. Hobbs can be found at HobbsQ, Tay can be found at TayatranSends, and Alex can be found at Mel underscore chronicler.
00:46:15
Speaker
Feel free to send us any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to the Goblin Lord Pod on Twitter or email us at goblinlordpodcast.com.
00:46:25
Speaker
If you would like to support your friendly neighborhood Gobstugs, our link tree can be found on our Twitter account and in the description of today's show. This has everything from various discount codes to the link for our Patreon. The music for today's show was by Wintergotten, who can be found at vintergotten at bandcamp.com. The art was done by Steven Raff Hale, who can be found at Steve Ruffle on Twitter. Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing forthos content.
00:46:53
Speaker
Check them out on Twitter at hipsters MTG or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.