A Modern Horizons 3 Compliment Sandwich 

Also worth pointing out, it’s ironic they say the set is for everyone when it will be literally the last magic set ever printed in portuguese, talk about tone deaf

I really like MTG. But gods do they make it hard to like MTG.

Listening to the original lore of six it would’ve actually been neat if Six is a legendary land after Wrenn parted with it

And remember, they’re called Meddling Youths because there’s already a card called Meddling Kids from the Unhinged silver-bordered set.

That lines about "does not line up with the price point players are willing to pay" is one of, if not the single most disrespectful thing that Wizards has ever allowed to be published. They are the ones printing the cards, regardless of the aftermarket price of a card they pay the same to print it, they decide how much of it to print and what price to sell it to retailers at(even if they want to claim their isn't an msrp). They have full control over the aftermarket pricing if they want to change them and also still try and claim that they don't use after market pricing when designing sets. This spits in the fact of all of that and of the players. They could 100% with absolutely zero problems print decent starter modern decks and have them on shelves for $20-$40, the only reason not to is to keep prices high to drive sales on reprints in the future. Its actually disgusting to me that he would word it in this way. Not to mention that one of these commander precons is starting at about €120.

The reason I don't try playing any formats outside of Commander or Pauper, is because I could buy a new pre-built gaming PC for the price of a tier-2 modern deck.

MaRo breaking the rule and openly acknowledging the secondary market exists as an excuse to not print modern precons was crazy

Compliment sandwich, but its a club sandwich and the bread is like the slices that donald duck cut in that one catroon

Pokemon does the modern deck thing your talking about. They literally print legal copies of the champion decks so people can actually play with the cards. Its wild that Magic doesn't do this too

I think that the references in this set is much more okay, because it’s not a story driven plane driven set. It acts as more of a fun call back to magic of old. Also I like it much more as in universe references rather than references to pop culture. I’m much happier with this set than other recent sets.

imagine if six was just a land that tapped for one green

I do think the fact that MH3 dosent have Modern decks to go with it is insane. I do like the commander decks bc ya know. Commander, but the modern set not letting people get into modern is a massive mistake.

On the topic of the "in joke" cards, I do think MH3 handles them better than OTJ or MKM did, as while psychic frog is technically a referance, the name "psychic frog" doesn't sound like a referance unless you already know what its referancing. It just sounds like what it is, a frog that has psychic powers. I don't think all of them are handled so well. As you said, Six is a mess in its lore breaking design. But I do think that referance cards like Wurmcoil Larva are necessarily a bad thing, as while it is a referance, its also something unique that has spawned off from the original card.

The 'Witch Enchanter' thing... I guess you had to be there. Glad I wasn't.

WE’RE BREAKING MODERN WITH THIS ONE 🗣️🗣️🗣️

BUY SINGLES Wait, wrong channel...

I do hate that MaRo has to talk in such veiled language about precons, but... I THINK here's the thought process; A modern-viable precon requires a modern-viable mana base. Giving players this would either smoke the reprint equity of these game pieces they use to sell their sets, or they would be printed in just enough of a limited supply that it gets the dickens scalped out of it by second hand market resellers, who are already comfortable scalping the commander precons for ridiculous mark-up. I hate that 'Reprint Equity' is a thing and that we can't reprint format staples into the earth like we have with Sol Ring. I really do not think it'd stop people from buying packs if we got Fetches and shocks in a precon, guys!

I actually like all the jokes and references in MH3. That's part of what Horizons sets are about imo. The problem is as you said, that every set has been like that for the past 6 months so it does get a bit tiring. If the majority of standard sets took themselves seriously, then it would be a great change of pace to have a set like this that doesn't. And even having a silly standard set once in a while could be nice too (despite the issues with OTJ, the community had been asking for a wild west set for ages). Jokes and silly sets are great when they're the exception not the rule.

“Witch Enchanter. Dis enchanter!” That was so funny. Glad they spent 2 minutes explaining the joke.

Interesting that you didnt point out that the unique cards for the collectors eldrazi deck couldn't be extended art so they claim. Yet in actual booster packs you can get the eldrazi commander cards with extended art frames, so its a straight-up lie from them. Also I feel you should have mentioned not only the graveyard deck not having Tarmagofy, but that this deck that was pushed as being themed around goyf's only actually has like 7 gofys in the decklist. And overall they only printed a few new ones

4:46 "The only sets Wizards seems to take seriously now are the Universes Beyond ones" hits HARD.

Your segment at 16:00 blew my mind. Ive always felt like something about the paper design felt like it had changed, but could never find a solution to my hypothesis. This completely makes sense. The influx of cards that copy triggers and permanents as a payoff, add ability counters to creatures, and other additive properties that are easier to code instead of things that are harder to code like replacement effect makes so much sense now. If you look closely, cards are even designed as if someone chooses at random from a bunch of categorized bins and pastes them into the rules text like Madlibs. "Whenever [Cardname] [Action], if you've [requirement], [payoff]." Cards used to do so much weirder stuff, and no wonder they are regurgitating the old stuff and playing it for a laugh! Its easier to play off the ease of reusing safe to implement cards as a joke than actually come up with mechanically weird and interesting effects. They design all the cards so that it will be easy to code into arena, and if any card like one of those 1% chances happens to crop up, they scrap it.

We’re not playing Magic the Gathering anymore, we’re playing Commander the Gathering. The sooner they rebrand the better. I mean in the reveal stream the chat kept spamming “Commander Horizons” so much Blake ended up saying it out loud.

Okay okay I agree with the general premise of the sentiment, but "once upon a time, a blatant Minecraft reference would have been silver-bordered" is incredibly funny when you consider Aggressive Mining from M15

To be fair, the whole point of Modern Horizons is to shake up a relatively unchanging format with cards so powerful that they HAVE to upgrade. I also think they went too far with Emrakul being immune to interaction. Just print a card that declares you the winner and can't be countered.

I think the main point of this video is that they're trying to turn a non-rotating format into a rotating one. They tried this with Legacy 15 years ago and they messed up. They tried it with Modern 5 years ago and they messed up. And yes: Modern Horizons 3 is actually targeted to Commander, because Modern is already messed up. Now they're trying hard with Commander and in fact they've already messed up with that as well.

I will point out that the card Aggressive Mining, which is a Minecraft reference and was made by the old lead designer of Minecraft is in a black border set of m15, which also had plants vs zombie card made by that game designer and the card hot soup, so not all references to other IP used to be in silver border sets. I will concede however that cards like psychic frog are the kinda of cards that the original silver border sets were filled with, jokes about magic cards and magic players mostly,

As a commander player, my experience has been "These cards are amazing! 😃 They belong in every deck! 😦" The dual face lands are particularly egregious. 20 total, a full cycle of 2 color ones that come in tapped, and a cycle each of monocolored creatures and instants that can come in untapped for 3 life. These are nuts, and almost every deck will want to run at least one of them. They will become EDH staples and probably multi-format staples. Thankfully they are all uncommon so at least they don't touch pauper.

Little did we know that Ajani's Pridemate getting functional errata to accomodate Arena was just the tip of the iceberg.

I’ll still never get why Magic doesn’t make deck for the other formats? They don’t have to make them every set release maybe just like every year or 2. Though what gets under my skin is adding modern horizons 3 in the game but not just add in the older cards and just add modern to arena. Like how can mtgo play it and not arena? Like seriously most of the cards are their and only need to add a few more sets to do it. If yugioh master duel can come out with all of the cards in the games out the gate so could have arena.

The ratio of bread to filling in this sandwich makes it more like a "compliment artisanal burger". To add another ingredient: I have a theory on why everything is a joke set now. I think it's the direct result of MTG not having lore anymore. The way that set design usually works is that you have a ton of ideas for mechanics, themes, archetypes, and cards, then you whittle them down to the ~150 cards you can fit in the set and shelve all the ideas you couldn't fit in so that you can revisit them later on. According to the linked video, the way that MH3 was created was that one of them would make a joke, and then the team would say "Yeah I guess we can put that in". I doubt that the design team today is significantly more interested in humour than the design teams of five or ten years ago, given a lot of them are the same people, but I bet that sets used to have an easier time preventing joke cards making the final cut, because there were lore cards competing for set space. Current MTG sets are low flavour, focusing more on top-down genre tropes than on actual storytelling. Settings are smaller, there are fewer things going on during a set, and the set story focuses more on interacting with named characters than on interacting with the world. This most certainly has the consequence of set design having fewer lore cards, so joke cards will experience less competition for set slots, meaning more joke cards released. For what it's worth, I have no problem with the Arena team being able to tweak paper cards; it's not like I know what got replaced for what, and there's no point being upset about what that idea makes me imagine. The paper team just needs to make sure that changes the Arena team proposes still work in paper. And keyword counters could be quite easily solved by wording it "with a finality keyword counter" rather than "with a finality counter", to tell the reader there's a keyword attached to this word and they should go find out what it means.

Wait, did Rosewater just acknowledge the secondary market on his blog about the commander precons???

Ehhh I'm probs biased as primarily a commander player and Arena draft junkie, but I actually really like the set. Since I play primarily on Arena I am actually glad that they take it into consideration when designing cards. I also really enjoy the draft environment, it feels like a pauper format where mostly the commons and uncommons dictate your draft, not too many hardcore unbeatable bombs, heck the "best card" is a common. To that end, 80% of the cards I want for my commander decks are uncommon MDFCs, which if people are cracking this set for rares/mythics I don't care about, should be relatively affordable. I hear you on all the marketing, price gouging, and general WOTC/Hasbro are a big corporation that are gonna lie and steal from you as much as legally allowed points. They definitely should have printed Modern decks, but I've been playing long enough to remember the last time they did, and they weren't particularly well recieved. They certainly didn't get me into Modern then, and in my 11 years of playing I've never had much interest. Idk, the problem with this set to me is the price, though I'm relatively insulated from it because drafts cost the same on Arena. I wouldn't mind buying a box to draft in paper at a normal price but this is "premium" because WOTC/Hasbro are corporations in 2024. Doing whatever they can to scalp every last cent they can. I just think it's a little harsh to beat up the designers, arena developers, etc, when they are doing their best to deliver us a quality set under the constraints of late stage capitalism. Maro has to tread the line between the players and corporate, but they could replace him at any time with someone who will keep to their side of it. As I always say, if we Magic players just pooled our seemingly endlees money to buy WOTC/MtG from Hasbro outright we could print cards for the price of cardboard and put an end to all our constant outrage. So if you're mad about it, save your money and let's all go in y'all!

I get what you mean about the other sets doing it, but the horizon sets are like the time spiral block, referencing old cards and suggesting new unusual cards, so I accept it and actually enjoy the nice call backs to old cards in Horizons sets. ( I'm probably biased cus all of time spiral seemed so awesome to me when I learned about it. ) I agree with pretty much everything else you said though, my god why did the not make modern precons, ( I mean, we know why, because they don't wanna drop the prices and know the secondary market exists, but still, why??? )

The modern horizon sets have always caused some changes in almost every format the sets cards are legal in but this time it is so blatantly focus on commander that it is a problem

I didn’t even know Wizards made videos like this 😂

Modern Horizons sets have a history of breaking not just the modern metagame, but also the commander, pauper, vintage, and legacy metagame.

@10:40 Except that their official stance is "they don't acknowledge the secondary market." Of course, that is invalidated by them saying that line about a modern precon being impossible because it "wouldn't match the price point people will pay for a precon". And hey, they also "don't have an msrp anymore" so that makes the price point statement nonsense as well, right? The real answer is that they look at "cost" to print these including how much potential money they lose by not saving reprints till some other set, but yeah, what a tangled mess of lies and predatory practices.

Um ackchually, The Incredibles is a Pixar movie. 🤓

However they want to spin it, they don't necessarily have to print the most competitive modern decks. They just need to build some preconstructed modern legal decks that at least each have a core that could eventually be buiilt up into a competitive modern strategy. Surely there are a few combinations of 60 cards they could slap together for the same price as, if not cheaper price than, the commander decks.

Yeah I really dislike the over the top ones, especially ones that take ya out of it. Like ancient grudge, is a funny themed card, but it doesnt take you out of it and its a serious card with a wink and a nod. Like Holy Cow did not have to be called holy cow. It couldve been called something else, and the community can easily just find an angel cow funny. It doesnt need to be called "holy cow" like that feels more like a colloquiel name for it than an official one.

can i say the flavor of energy trows me off a bit, first, energy was temur, when it bicome jeskai, second it was implied that ir was used for powering artfacts and creatures that lived close to eather, besides the izzet ones, most of the energy cards feels so distant from the original idea

Here's a thought I had for a while - I wonder how much of this are corporate decisions and how much is this R&D messing up? Especially when I look at MaRo, I wonder how much he has influence over these decisions, and how much coporate has decided that he's a suitable mouthpiece so that R&D gets the blame. It seems weird to me that designers would decide not make modern precons without influence from above, but it also seems weird that Rosewater is the one who's telling us about these decisions. Not to entirely defend R&D, they have their issues, but it also seems to me a lot like they're becoming scapegoats...

The humor point for this set is overstated, mogg mob isn’t a joke wight isn’t a joke, cards that’s reference back don’t necessarily have to be jokes Also the complaint about clue being a joke is also off the mark just existing and referencing the source material doesn’t make it a joke at all ??

Tarmaqof is not even expensive to get a reprint. No one would have complained but also what a flavor fail in the theme deck.

Another thought I have about the finality counter cards is that one of them has Adapt. I've been slowly getting back inot Magic, so that's another thing I have no idea how to handle. Not that I'm getting many cards from this due to my current budget, but the idea this set is for everyone while there is so many cards without reminder text makes me upset. How can it be for everyone when there is so much to research for how even single cards work? Makes me look forward to Bloomburrow even more because at least that stuff looks like I could actually teach my friends curious about Magic how to play.

Haven't finished the video yet but I hope you mention the actually functionally broken Wheel of Potential.

18:10 to be fair, their options were A. Don't use finality counters, and make the already wordy cards even more so B. Do use finality counters, and include reminder text (which is worse than option A) C. Use finality counters with no reminder text, assuming that franchised players (that this set is marketed towards) would remember the fairly recent mechanic or would just look it up

I want to be a little more forgiving on the digital collaboration side. I forget what set it card it was, but I remember a story where one card required two months of extra work by programmers to make it work as written on Magic Online, where if it had been worded slightly differently but functionally similar it could've avoided all that work. So if it's something minor like that, I'm all for avoiding forcing others to do unnecessary work, especially if it causes people to be stressed and forced overtime or something. It doesn't set the best precedent though and can be a slippery slope, that can lead to cards being designed not just to avoid unnecessary excess work, but to restrict functionality to only things currently doable within the client. If it leads to every card is just "(old card) with set's mechanic" that's a problem, yeah.

4:52 Which makes sense, cause I imagine the IP holders have very strict rules on how their brand is portrayed. Probably means that magics customers are no longer the players, but IPs willing to give them millions of dollars to commission cards for them.

Cardboard rectangles are serious business. Six was probably still sentient at that time.

I really didn't catch that the Arena team dictates mechanical design, and I know find that deeply troubling. It stifles the old weird wording that made certain cards a delightful rules enigma.

The debut video for this set was a massive lens into the mentality surrounding this set, both from advertising and from design. It was “so modern horizons again, but *more.*” More power, more references, more deep cuts, more “exciting,” more formats to make the set relevant to, etc. etc. It’s like WotC is trying to get their next Modern Horizons hit but needs more and more to get that high again.

Yeah they only make packs to sell to people to draft or to take advantage of edh players that don't buy sungles. They don't give a damn about any of the other formats. The only reason they care about edh is because they sell the 100 card bricks for two or three times the price that they used to sell the OG 60 card decks back in the day. Decks a lot of people only buy for a few cards they contain not for the actual precon decks. Todays wotc sucks.

As a game developer I can imagine how much of a pain to make replacement effects would be on Arena, but also there are a handful of "instead" placement effects already on Arena already. That game rakes it in, surely they can get some extra manpower on this?

The writing has been hotdog water for the longest time now, so them messing up Six is a clever nod to the fact that they don't actually have a cohesive narrative anymore :)

The bit about Arena controlling how cards work must be true because Wheel of Potential doesnt work in Arena like it does in paper. Because of the wording in paper you can set the X energy cost to whatever you want, and choose not to. pay it.

The dev team making Six a treefolk is accidentally an extremely interesting bit of card storytelling. If Wrenn isn’t animating Six… What *is*…?

The arena team being able to change paper cards is baffling to me. That's the type of thing Alchemy is supposed to be for, different card designs for Arena because of necessity, but then you keep the paper card as it was supposed to be. What the actual fuck.

I really like modern horizons 3. That being said I think this video does a pretty good job talking about the problems the set has (I'm glad that I'm not the only one who noticed those things in the 'Debut Video'.) I do wish that the set had some preconstructed decks aimed at getting people (like me) into playing modern. To be perfectly honest, I wish there were more products aimed at getting people into actual sixty-card constructed formats in general. I was originally going to type out a long-winded explanation of my thoughts on why they probably couldn't print the made-for-modern precons we all want but it was too long so I'll boil it down to just this: The decks would either be powerful enough to compete in the environment of the modern format and the demand would exceed the supply due to a glut of high power multi-format staple cards (ragavan, fetch lands, evoke elementals). Or the decks would lack those very cards but fail at their intended goal of getting people into modern, which would also suck. Again, great video, cheers. :)

I realise there's literally a format called Standard, but as someone who can't afford to keep up with every release, Modern is what I think of as "classic Magic the Gathering" (even if I mostly play Commander lately). It's a damn shame the company seems to be moving away from supporting it - surely there's room for sets that suit every format? In fact, wouldn't that make them more money? Sigh...

"I want a banana this big!" But yeah, magic design has kinda sucked for a while, and modern horizons has forced legacy format rotations since the inception of the product. Also, pretty sure that commander symbol is supposed to be a callback to the Eldritch Moon set symbol. But could be wrong on that one.

The eldrasi fairy doesn’t really make sense in lore either

I love Commander Legends 3, everyone absolutely loves power creeping eternal formats so hard that they're no longer truly eternal, best set ever!

Definitely think that the modern complaints about the secondary market and Arena's influence are totally valid. The "punny" nature is fine to me, but I understand how it can become slowly grating. Personally, I think the more serious cards are forgotten or taken for granted while the humorous ones get remembered. If it's not a pun, it's probably a Legendary at this point. The one thing that I wholly disagree with is the lore portion regarding Six. Modern Horizons/Masters (from what I understand) exists outside of the normal lore and story, which is how you can get things like Lazotep Sliver and Ulalek. Six has fun design space as a Plant or Forest, but they're giving fanservice in a set that can experiment with what-ifs.

Frankly, after several draft and sealed experiences with the set. It is hit-or-miss on how fun it is in limited. A lot of the powerful effects are ones that undo what a player just did or extend the game really long so you get lots of land drops rather than, you know, ramping you into having enough mana for casting Eldrazi. If you have two energy decks or aggro decks facing off it is fun and fast with complex board states making for some really interesting games. If you have anything else at the table it is boring and slower than molasses in would have been in January at the north pole during the Younger Dryas. You would think that after the disasters that were the last two Modern Horizons sets they would have learned not to do this "amped up Modern Set" thing again. At least it fits the previously established pattern and isn't as insulting as the MKM/Cluedo thing of printing Shock in the main set for the pun then printing Lightning Bolt in the other half for who knows what reason when Standard desperately needs better direct damage cards for Red. They have been using the "Commander is Popular!" excuse for shoving those decks in everyone's faces and discontinuing other products for over a decade now and the format had been about to totally collapse in popularity when they started. The whole thing is total marketing driven insanity! And they seriously need to stop with the Commander preconstructed decks every set. The whole point of EDH was that it was the thing you played with castoffs and one-of cards already in your collection not a deck straight out of the box!

So, regarding Modern precons: They *absolutely* should have done it. *But*... They did sell Pioneer Challenger decks. They've sold decks to get people into Standard. They apparently have seen that these sell underwhelmingly. That having been said... We had a ton of fun with the Pioneer decks we got. They were really interesting... And they could have been made even better out of the box, with things like more Hazoret copies in the red aggro deck, etc. If they were willing to print more valuable cardboard, which for some reason they refuse to do. The Standard planeswalker intro decks overwhelmingly sucked, but they could just have printed better planeswalkers. From a pedagogical perspective, showing players overcosted planeswalkers who often struggle to defend themselves actually will misteach them about the game. So I absolutely do think that these products *could* sell and get people in, but they probably do have *some* data that suggests otherwise. I'd just suggest that they can't build these other formats if they don't try.

Re:Set symbols, this is something that I hate now. Because of the intricate linework it become harder to use the small set symbol to determine rarity on more recent sets. There are some exceptions but it still something I check for more often than not. And the naming. Yeah. Don't change what is broken. There are a dozen ways to point out what's wrong with the naming convention of well, everything with this set.

Hey, nice video, i've just noticed you responde to every comment, or almost all, so i have a magic doubt that maybe you can resolve, if you attack with a creature atached with "knife" (MKM) that gives your creature first strike, after first strike damage can you sacrifice the equipment to its ability and does this make your creature now attack a second time for normal damage step?

Land bases are the big cost sink for most modern decks. And they don't want to price reduce for lands.

Your point at 10 mins was a knock out! You nailed the esrb/reprint Achilles heel with a fantastic example.

What's weird to me is that WOTC gives a shit about the secondary market of cards. Wouldn't it be more financially viable to just make packs or modern decks with a ton of reprints that everyone wants? Everyone would buy them and I mean EVERYONE.

i love commander and pauper horizons, wish they'd make modern fun and accessible again

To be fair, MtG has always had pop culture references on cards. For example Grave Bramble (plants vs zombies), Shark Typhoon (Sharknado), Repentant Vampire (Angel from Buffy) and Time Warp (Rocky Horror). Of course, they may be more common now when they used to be one or two a set max, but there have always been some.

You can probably blame the card "whims of the fates" for the fact that they consult the Arena team when doing card design to make sure it doesn't break anything. Arena didn't exist when they first printed whims of the fates, but MTGO did, and because this is the first time an effect caused 3 piles of cards to be created instead of 2, it broke MTGO, they couldn't include it at all for a really long time and they had to overhaul the code to get it in. I don't mind them consulting with the Arena team, as long as it doesn't hinder their creativity too much.

WotC can't hide from us what this is: A money making set to please Hasbro, since the cards go well into the current popular format, Commander, so the set has a large target audience. Thats a financial genius move, at the expense of good will.

The thing I will say about references is that they make far more sense in a Modern Horizons set because of how they are meant to change so many formats. It's just far easier to remember cards if they are like "oh, it's mulldrifter but eldrazi". It's not just about "funny, haha". It makes the game easier to play and makes the pseudo rotation that mh always causes far less painful to the players because it at least references the modern of old.

Some of the most compelling games of Magic I have played have been Packwars of Champions of Kamigawa, and other older sets, both players were low powered, and thus on an even playing field.

The critiques are right in so many ways because I'm a commander player and forgot what modern even was so I only bought the set for cool legendarys to be commanders or for really strong cards

Commander suffers from what I call "The Charizard effect" basically they take something they know people like and push it over, over and over into people's faces so much that they neglect other pokemon and players that like them. Not only that but the blatant favoritism is annoying people who would be neutral to the whole thing. At the end people like it because they promote it and they promote it bc people like it so it never ends, unless people stop consuming that thing in particular and then maybe they'll pay atention to the other parts of their game.

Gonna be honest, if myself or my friends had the option to buy a modern deck we’d probably pull the good stuff out for commander or 60 card kitchen table magic games. But they 100% should have made modern precons for the modern set. Commander decks being a part of everything isn’t really bad if it’s the money maker for wotc, it is bad though when it overtakes non-commander things. Also, the jokes and stuff like Six not being a tree are things that myself and I think most people don’t care about. Gonna be honest, I don’t know what a paychatog is beyond seeing it in some 45 minute long video essay about mtg. Psychic frog is a funny looking frog that I want lol Good video dude! Also, saw another youtuber show off your textless deck in a short which is awesome. ^^

The fact that Six is a Treefolk instead of a Plant is really the saddest thing out of this entire set :(

Isn't it possible Six is just from a point where Wrenn and Six are still linked but separated or am I fundamentally misunderstanding their bond?

Hi, real modern player here to complain ad nauseam. My biggest complaint is honestly those darn commander precons. I’ve been saying for YEARS that they need to bring back starter decks (precons for non-commander formats), especially for modern specifically where the price of entry is often $1,000+. It’s TOO MUCH COMMANDER. Like, we get it, it’s your pet project, now can you please print something with us competitives in mind? Can you lower the price of entry to one of your (historically) best formats so I can see other people at LGS tournaments? It’s the most frustrating part of this set for me, unequivocally. ESPECIALLY when you factor in MaRo saying “players wouldn’t pay what it takes for a modern precon”. It’s a not-so-cleverly disguised way to say “we won’t sell powerful format staples at reasonable prices, because line must go up and you competitive weenies will buy it anyway”. Just ridiculous, the whole thing. Next, let’s talk about set design. It’s not a terribly designed set, but it isn’t great either. I love limited, it’s my favorite way to play magic. I’m at my LGS weekly, always to draft the newest set (or sometimes chaos draft whatever bulk they have lying about, which is dope af I highly recommend). Now this set was designed around 3 specific themes: Eldrazi, Flip-walkers (think Tamiyo, Ajani, Sorin, etc.), and energy. Two of the three are generally considered to be “parasitic” mechanics by cube designers (Eldrazi and energy), and the flip-walkers aren’t really a mechanic as much as they are a feature. I personally never liked Eldrazi, and this set won’t change that. In fact, these new Eldrazi really subtract from the novelty that made their original appearance awesome for a lot of players. So, Eldrazi bad. I think they handled energy well in this set actually. They printed multiple cards that use energy and are generically good, making the mechanic less parasitic as a whole. 1 point for WotC. But these mechanics are bad in one limited set, because they are SO VERY COMPLICATED. These mechanics worked originally in Kaladesh and Zendikar because they were the most complicated mechanics in their respective sets, and newer drafters could just play with very regular/basic/easy mechanics instead, they weren’t forced to pick between multiple difficult mechanics. Last week I missed the draft at my LGS (thanks Spence lol) but showed up late anyway to hang out with my friends, dad, and brother. When I got there, my brother asked me to help coach a newer player thru the games. So I helped her, but she wasn’t even playing the right color lands. And the complicated af mechanics did her no favors. She was so confused and overwhelmed the whole time that she left early. And I felt really bad for her, because her friends had told her this was the coolest set ever, only for her to have to deal with not understanding what the heck was even going on. It’s all too much for one set. Beyond that, let’s finally talk about modern and the damage this will do to non-rotating formats. Modern has been bad for a while (because without cards ever leaving the format, it was always doomed to be mired down in overpowered garbage eventually) but it’s been at its worst since MH2. Modern Horizons 2 really killed the format, printing all sorts of cards that are still relevant and powerful today, years later. Ragavan is too strong, but so is grief. And Solitude. And so much more. But this set spits on the grave of modern with even more stupid designs like Nadu/Phlage/Psychic Frog. WotC wants so desperately for modern to be fun again, but fundamentally misunderstands why it stopped being fun. They think we want to play stronger cards, but what we really want is better gameplay and lower prices. It’s just another example of WotC killing something cool (and profitable) long term so they can reap rewards in the short term. This set is not the worst thing to happen to Magic: the Gathering, but it’s definitely a negative impact on the game as a whole. It is a product that is emblematic of all the game’s issues in the present-day: High prices even I can’t rationalize, power-crept cards to force players to buy in or not play, jokes in place of substance, unfriendly to new and casual players alike, and it’s all really built for commander isn’t it? It just sucks that a greedy corporation is so dead-set on killing this thing that we love in the name of money, and all we can do is watch with mild anger. TLDR: This set really f***in SUCKS.

Ah yes, commander masters 2.

Wizards: We printed commander decks instead of modern precons because it "does not line up with the price point players are willing to pay" Also Wizards: **prints a commander deck with so much power and scarcity that it's price point is $114 on average**

I didn't know about the lore of for six until you brought it up but it really feels like they missed a cool opportunity. And the missed opportunity show just how much more care they put into designing the mechanics of Universes beyond. Like imagine if instead if Six had vanishing 2 or 3 and "when Six dies return it to to battlefield transformed" and then the back half could either just be a forest, or maybe be a 0/4 plant with defender with the retrace effect moved to this side.

Im CONSTANTLY saying that i would kill to get into modern or other 60 card formats, but since theres no modern precons, insane financial barrier to entry, and hardly any support from the game stores since they all mainly focus commander and limited, its not even worth the investment since game stores arent incentivized to run events for it.

I get that people are frustrated with the de facto rotation, but if you wanted a static format, there’s premodern. The use of metagame tracking allows for formats to be solved since you can track over time what are the strongest decks, and the last thing I want is the gameplay to never change and tournaments coming down to successfully predicting the metagame for that event. So if you’re willing to accept that new cards to a format can be a good thing, the conversation then becomes what degree of change is acceptable. Hard to say how it will shake out, but new archetypes have been introduced, existing archetypes are bolstered, and dead archetypes are now viable again (cough storm). From a design standpoint, that seems incredibly successful. In terms of accessibility because of price, yeah it sucks. But if you can get 3 friends together for a commander pod, you can get a three round robin with proxies to see if you like the format. Rental services online also allow exposure. I get that these are reasonable hurdles to get into the format, but it seems pretty worth it given that it’s the most popular constructed format.

I was a competitive modern player until 2023. Lasted a few months after MH2 but eventually got burnt out on it. As far as I'm concerned, if they were actively trying to kill the format they couldn't have done so as efficiently as the MH sets have done. Part of the beauty of modern was it was a format that never rotated - there'd be a card or two from each set that'd make a bit of a splash, occasionally a deck would be incredibly broken and necessitate a ban, but you'd usually be able to play whatever you wanted and at least be semi-competitive. Plus every so often there'd be a modern masters set to fire off some much needed reprints, which helped people collect their modern staples at a discount. Then MH1 came around, and there was a massive rotation of what was playable. MH2 was somehow MUCH worse. And MH3 is looking like a rerun of that. My local modern scene went from booming and competitive to about as active as the standard scene {which is literally just one guy with 15 decks begging people to play standard}. Everyone just plays commander. And despite the decks staying around the same price modern has gotten considerably more expensive {unless you play burn} due to the fact that each time a modern horizons set comes out you either need to spend a mountain of money to update your deck, or in some cases your deck will be completely unsalvageable and you have to buy a completely new deck. Legitimately got to the point that I made my own format and people were actually interested locally. People would legitimately rather play against Eggs and pod than against free spells and busted cards, go figure. TL:DR - Modern was a format that was a decent bit expensive but possible to get into over time without spending a painful amount of money. It is now a format that is just as expensive but requires a fresh buy in damn near once a year.

I loved the part about Modern precons, WotC *COULD* make precons with an affordable entry proce point. But of course they arent willing to price one as such and print enough supply to meet demand for such a product to avoid scalping.

y'know, if players want a non-rotating format that isn't periodically revamped with new cards aimed specifically at it, they could play cube instead

I'm mad at wotc. The last time it felt like they cared about eternal formats was when they reprinted fetches in KTK

One thing I think MH3 does do incredibly well is the art. So much of the artwork in this set is phenomenal, especially compared to what we've been getting recently. Lots of standouts.

the quotes at super juiced chapter are my exact gripes and fears with the design today. they genuinely think powerful = fun and don't consider the fact that games where a bomb like that is not answered immediately snowballs quick into an unwinnable situation. you might not know you've lost yet, but the constant value a new card generates is so overwhelming that it doesn't allow for midrange games/decks to exist. the format speeds to a turn 2 wincon race and that might be fun to some but severely cuts the amount of variation a meta can have

The set seems to be at a reasonable power level with an expected number of stand-out cards. Its created new modern decks that arent unreasonably powerful and that the meta will adjust around. Outside of a few cards, it seems to not have affected legacy too much.

Fascinating to hear them actively discuss how Arena dictates paper design. I'm still extremely pissed off about when they changed how Training Grounds works because of it getting added to Arena and needing to match in paper due to it now being Pioneer legal. The change would be a lot less of a problem...if they hadn't just printed Dynaheir - a commander who cares about how much mana you pay for activated abilities - just the year prior. I tracked down an original copy so I could more easily rule 0 it to function as originally intended, but that change still sucked just about all desire I had to make that deck out of me.

I just built a Shilgengar deck and indeed needed to look up what finality counters actually do. Wanted to make sure I could flicker/blink a creature to remove the counter and you can since the counter only cares if the creature dies. Hopefully that doesn't come up in games to where I have to pull out my phone to show the ruling

The thing i hate most about WotC is that they can properly address the problem but then find an awkward workaround when they have the power to completely eliminate the problem entirely The commanderization of the game is a problem that THEY created, and one THEY can fix, but they don't, i can't imagine why it would be any less profitable for them to do so

I loved the meta references until I saw this video and realised how many there were.