Is It Better To Have Powerful But Broken Sets Or Weak But Balanced? | Dies To Removal Episode 39 

Brian, perfection doesn't exist because it's subjective, expect "great" or "epic" instead

I wonder if Prof has ever encountered a cheater whilst playing a game of magic haha

@@21Kikoshi Given the prevalence of mana weaving, yes, definitly

@@Greg501- True, but in a scenario when he knew it was happening and did something about it.

Did you hire a new editor recently, or did I just never notice in the past? I like it either way!

My cousin loved Kamigawa and still plays MTG but isn’t hyped at all about Neon Dynasty. “I liked the classic Japanese homages. It’s literally ruining what I liked about it. Fun dimir commander stuff though.” They tried to get fans of Japanese history and fans of cyberpunk garbage but I think they’re gonna end up missing on both.

New planes are not interesting because they introduce a new planeswalker every time, and than it follows with introduction of that new planeswalker to the Gate Watch. And the Gate Watch is what killed Magic and its story telling.

@@JStack Your cousin hit the nail on the head for my misgivings with the Neon Dynasty. Its ironically less unique now.

@@mindustrial They have luckily stepped away from the gatewatch for now though. Since Eldraine there has, to my knowledge, been no mention of the gatewatch within the story. The introduction of new planeswalkers in every set is older than the gatewatch though.

Really good points!

Some art in it is cool and it has good cards for spirit tribal, a few decent werewolves and vamps. But wasn’t my favorite set. Olivia and toxrill were pushed to the moon and became more expensive than they should have been

While I think it would be cool to explore different regions within the same plane, you don't need block sets to do that. You could just return to an existing plane and explore a different region. Outside of Dominaria though, all planes have had a defining gimmick, so it would require a new conceptualization of what defines a plane and distinguishes them from other planes. I am personally fan of block sets though since they allow for more immersion and better storytelling.

This reminds me of the first few years of sets, where they thoroughly explored all the different realms of Dominaria (for example) over a dozen sets. It's a good idea and I'd like to see it too.

When I first started magic, and didn't known anything about lore, I thought that was what the idea behind it was. That Kamigawa was just a country in this world because, well - japan is also just a country in our world. That Mirrodin was some metal wasteland off in the east, and Ravnica some sprawling cityscape central to a continent. And I found that idea fascinating, because imo fantasy in general tends to be way too monocultural. Hell, when I learned that this wasn't the case, that disappointment made me start writing my own fantasy stories to have a fantasy world that diverse.

@@AricHaldan0782 Well, Ixalan has an obvious sequel in another location; the Sun Empire launching an invasion of Torrezon was heavily hinted at in the epilogue

@@AricHaldan0782 That's why Dominaria is my favourite plane by a good margin. They spent so much time there it got really fleshed out, and felt like a real place instead of a pile of tropes.

Agreed times a million. Whoever is editing is doing great!

Last time someone said that he did lol

Yes!

40:35 was just such a punch out of nowhere. I was rolling!

Can State four fact that that editor was absolutely bored of watching that video and was just trying to have some fun absolutely needs a raise

Hour-Ixilan-Dominaria was a great Standard. Yes it was a literal Battle of the Gods with Scarab and Hazoret being the 2 best decks but they didn’t force out other strategies. It wasn’t until Wilderness Rec entered the picture that Standard fell apart again. More low power sets are great for the game.

@@ZakanaHachihaCBC you and I remember that standard season very differently…

@@TrainmasterGT Standard with Hour, Ixilan and Dominaria wasn’t bad. Esper Control and RDW were the best decks but not so much that other strategies weren’t viable. It and Guilds standard were fine until Allegiance came out and printed Wilderness Rec, and then War with Tef3 and Tamiyo.

@@TrainmasterGT I honestly liked standard back then as well. Though I did miss the BW vampire tokens from just before Dominaria, the format was pretty interesting with multiple different types of decks. What was your gripe with the standard of that era ?

@@AricHaldan0782 it was basically all Temur/4c energy decks and Burn. Energy could beat Burn slightly more than half the time, and Burn could beat everything that beat Temur. The net result was effectively a two-deck format where trying anything outside the binary was basically suicide. It felt less diverse than even the Uro-Nissa era pre-ZNR, because even then there were 5 or 6 different viable decks even though most of them revolved around Uro.

Imagine talking about ZR and not even mentioning the greatest design of the last 2 years: MDFC lands, which are still absolutely relevant in standard to modern, and greatly improve the issue of flooding.

Bala ged recovery is touching 4 bucks at uncommon

And almost all of them are playable. The mythic ones are basically auto include in all commander decks.

I thought zendikar rising was fantastic

And I am absolutely in love with my Tazri Party EDH deck, which is like 40% ZR cards and is just a blast to play.

Wow, thank you!

I 100% agree. For me, I care more that limited is fun, has strong flavor, and feels fresh. For me, Strixhaven totally hit those, so even if it doesn’t have a ton of cards for commander or eternal formats, that’s fine with me (and as an EDH player, I don’t WANT a bunch of cards in each set). Of course, there has to be some stuff for constricted, and standard especially, but I think they can still push towards new design space without breaking everything

Forgotten realms was interesting and had some super fun cards.

I loved Strixhaven until it came to the Learn mechanic. Wishing cards into your hand that fix whatever problem you have at the time made most other playable cards in Strixhaven pointless and narrowed deck building to the point where you couldn’t play without them in any colours. I still see them regularly in Standard and I hate it.

My favorite set of the last few years was probably Theros:BD. So many cool sagas, constellation was one of the better 'parasitic' mechanics, not to mention awesome buildarounds like Enigmatic Incarnation. Kroxa even is clearly a powerful card, but it never broke anything in Standard even when Lurrus was in the format. Uro was a mistake, but the rest of the set was pretty good, none of the other Escape cards were nearly as problematic.

@@user-et3xn2jm1u Absolutely, escape was a really fun interesting mechanic with a reasonable cost. The irony is with all the graveyard hate in current standard I don’t think Uro would even be that broken anymore, especially if they upped the mana cost for formats like Alchemy and Historic.

Well said!

Hear hear

Your comment explains the biggest problem with MTG that no one talks about. Decks use to be built around certain game machanics and themes. now cards go into every deck that if you dont play you are putting yourself at a disadvantage.

"Must remove or lose" cards are one thing, "must remove or lose" cards that are also X for 1 are just nuts...

My favorite part of the format has always been finding cards that make your commander “work,” not cards that take your 1-card engine and just break it beyond belief. I’d rather they print more cards like Emmara, Soul of Accord than cards like Urza

What about when your opponent is playing Show and Tell and they mill Emrakul?

I was waiting for the Professor to say something like Hold up Vince. How are you going to just skip my turn 0 play? Judge!!

@@jadegrace1312 Emrakul never enters the graveyard as it is sent directly to exile.

@@thisbymaster Right, leyline.

Kaldheim was the first set since I started playing magic (WAR) that felt like actual old school classic magic to me. Both the world and card designs. I would say its the second most fleshed out plane behind Dominaria.

Kaldheim would've been so much better as a block.

I also remember people saying it was a power down set too lol

@@faultier1158 All of the new planes would have been. They wouldn't have been pushing to get all of the Great stuff into one set's design. Maybe Adventures would have been the start of MDFCs if they were thinking about doing it for 2-3 sets rather than just one. Maybe they'd have recognized that Foretell absolutely NEEDS a way to look at the face-down exiled cards and force a "discard" of it to prevent countermagic being the only way to deal with some of those powerful spells if they were doing 3x as much Foretell design. We'd have had more dungeons and opportunities to Venture into them for different reasons. Sure, they wouldn't have been able to do 8 different planes over the past 2 years if they did that but 2-3 planes a year depending on whether they do an AFR and make the "Core" set thematic or not feels like a better use of the release schedule.

@@krimhorn 8 different planes over 2 years is a terrible idea and it shows in how undercooked some of them were - Arcavios from Strixhaven being the worst example, because if you ask anyone what the name of that plane is they'll probably assume it's "Strixhaven" (which it wasn't, Strixhaven was just the school) and you can't really fault them for that because Arcavios is a weird and forgettable name and the titular school was 90% of that set's focus.

I disagree with you in regards to Forgotten Realms. I think Forgotten Realms is exactly the power level they should aim for. There are over a dozen cards from that set that have made it into standard decks. Some of them commons and uncommons. The cards from Forgotten Realms that see play are good, but not game winning. They are synergistic pieces as opposed to the powerhouse bombs that the other sets brought into the format. Eldraine made Oko. Zendikar made Omnath. Kaldheim made Epiphany. Those are bomb cards that warp the format around them. In contrast, Forgotten Realms made Class cards, creature lands, Portable Hole, Lymrith (blue mythic dragon), Deadly Dispute, goblins, Prosperous Innkeeper, and many other cards. There are also cards that had potential to see standard play but were pushed out by other sets. Goblins, Dungeons, Mono Black Sacrifice, and some others were good, but not strong enough to contend with Eldraine. When Eldraine rotated, they were not strong enough to go against Epiphany, and Cat Car. Despite the set being overpowered by other set, it still acts as support for those stronger sets.

"Deck Rules" style mechanics could have been really cool. I feel the problem is that they were tied essentially not only starting off the game with 8 cards, but that 8th card being guaranteed "enabler". Another problem is that not all restrictions were built equally, with Yorion being a big offender in a deck that can easily run a bunch of value permanents to bounce back and get even card advantage.

@@KreuzDrache Yorion is a worse offender in Standard, but Lurrus is absolute lunacy in eternal formats and easily the most broken companion overall. Yorion enables weird 80 card blink decks that didn't exist without it, even if it is a bit too strong. Lurrus is an insane value engine that requires almost no specialization (because most permanents in those formats are already 2 cmc or less) and subsequently demands to be in every deck with cheap permanents. You can fit Lurrus in just about any kind of deck with minimal restrictions - there are aggro, midrange, and control decks that can and do use Lurrus. He fits into a ridiculous variety of decks and pushes out a number of higher-cost cards in the process, and there's no way the design team didn't realize it would happen when they printed a low-cmc-based value engine into formats where most things are low cmc already. Lurrus changed the character of those formats by giving cheap-permanent-based decks a new long game option they didn't have before, and it's almost an accidental inclusion in many decks. Yorion in Standard brings together a singular broken deck - Lurrus bends entire formats around his sheer utility.

@@noesunyoutuber7680 Ah alright then. I am sorry, I am not familiar with the older formats, since I only touched upon Arena's standard and draft formats when I came back to the game momentarily about a year ago. But I can definitely see how Lurrus can be a problem in older formats where lower CMC is prefered to begin with, even if it was just one Lurrus. Heh, Lurrus would be pretty funny with Black Lotus though lol. Opponents probably wouldn't be laughing admittedly.

Did you just suggest Banding?

This

Dev?

Who?

@@elipetrou9308 Simply Better MTG channel

Arena did Eldraine draft so dirty. That's easily the best draft format of the modern era and it got completely ruined by bot drafting.

Eldraine draft was such a great and flavorful format. I miss constantly having a gingerbread man with a spear hit people

I wasn't around for eldraine but I saw the drawbridge card and it blew my mind. Best mechanical flavor I've ever seen.

@@Tacklepig My go-to gal was the lucky clover. I drafted at least 1, sometimes 2 every draft.

I loved the flavor of Eldraine, but the Adventure mechanic alone is broken as heck. They've turned Exiled (removed from game), into a second hand.

I loved Kaldheim too. Does not need to be powercreep cards to sell a set. With Kaldehim they had a cool new world, a great mechanis in Foretell, flavorful and nice artworks. Its default for me was that there was too much going on with many mechanics and sub-theme that in the end gave the set a feel that it was two sets cramed into one. And I dislike that the Sagas were too nich with their abilities and there was no other card or mechanics that cared about them. But, nonetheless, Kaldheim left me a good impression and one that looks like creative had many ideas and where all WotC staff had fun working on it. That is what it takes for me to make a set good and interesting. I think we can add that Kaldhein did not have a low powerlevel and at the same time appart form Elrund's Epiphany (as far as I know) there is not a buch of cards that were worth banning. The set as a whole was well balanced.

Concur, Kaldheim was one of the best in years. I love the showcase, the God's really feel great.

I loved kaldheim so much. I wish I was able to draft in person when it came out, but looking back at these cards, the art - everything is amazing. Same with forgotten realms too imo

I'm with you Kaldheim was great. I enjoyed it and Strixhaven the most of recent sets.

Maybe not a full block, but two sets would have been great in my opinion.

It does sound like less frequent sets would be a good move.

The other eldraine problem was that very few other cards had any impact from the other sets. It meant that mono red with embercleave, bonecrusher and the knight dude were there for 2 years. The same with adventure cards and such.

I agree! I took distance from a playgroup because I was tired to have games turned into archenemy against that one player that always play busted decks and becomes a treat by turn 3 all the time and win by turn 7 almost every time. I was building my decks in an attempt to try to match this powerlevel and didn't found it fun nonetheless. Now when I build new decks I seek for fun gameplay and interesting concepts.

The other day I read MaRo saying: "Players are bad at evaluating card cost." When they do a once per turn restriction it is usually because the effect is strong for the cost of it. If they would not put that restriction they would have to cost the card more. I would add that I like this once per turn restriction for the simple reason that I find it boring when playing games where my opponents takes turns that last very long because their deck can abuse multiple trigger effects that even sometime can go almost infinite. So that once per turn clause help in having some triggers and then "pass the turn" without waiting more than 20 mins before it comes back to my turn.

Why? MH2 had powerful but is balanced and has plenty of archetypes.

@@daveSoupy MH2 was a fun draft format, but that doesn't mean low level limited isn't also a great deal of fun. There's something special about weaker levels of magic where it doesn't rely as much on strong effects and relies more on combat and evergreen mechanics. For example, I loved AFR limited as well and that set wasn't powerful.

Or... we just need cards like Thoughtseize, Siege Rhino, Pithing Needle and Reanimate in every single deck.

10 years ago when I played standard and legacy there were almost 0 standard bans. The sets felt well tested and balanced. With standard sets well tested and balanced for standard that ment there weren't as many gamebreaking, overpowered monster-cards that everyone had to play. The metagame felt more diverse to me. So the only cards that needed banning in legacy were cards that had special interactions with older cards that are very hard to test against. They did that almost perfectly for more than a decade. The only crazy offenders I can remember were Valakut and affinity. Now? There are standard, alchemy bans every couple weeks and every set. It really seems like they push out overpowered stuff on purpose to sell shit to commander players and then need to mostly ban those.... It's really annoying if they cannot even design their own game anymore.... The main problem is that they are not designing for standard anymore and killed organized standard. They try to do too many things with their standard sets and therefore ruin the standard enviroment. Noone wants shit like questing beast and oko in standard. These just push other colors/cards/decks out of the metagame. Where is the choice?

It's only on a few cards, but they were gonna kill Sigarda at the end of the wedding. The goal was to stop them from killing sigarda! But also they kinda just fixed the "eternal night" problem in the background while everyone else was distracted? It's really weird how all tovolar's old werewolf buddies didn't show up at the now-much-smaller celestus 2 party to try and stop them doing it a second time.

Or cringy american style magic college set with as cheesy storyline as it can get... or dnd set that instead of giving you insight on dnd lore focuses on the power of friendship... seriously some of the sets could be an un- set and it would fit.

@@Igor369 I think being a college set was by far the best part of Strixhaven, that could have been a fun jumping-off point for the dark wit the game used to show often. The problem is the execution was just too toothless and marketable to actually work. The flavor text on newer versions of Frantic Search ("It took the banning of temporal manipulation at Tolaria West to teach its students the value of time") is a perfect example of how Magic could have done a college theme (that is, following the question "what happens when you inject magical realism into a college setting?"). As a college student, I immediately saw the humor in that card. Instead, Strixhaven feels like boneless Ravnica, with "guilds" replaced by "schools." Hell, imagine what a college on Ravnica would look like - Azorius administrators who care about maintaining order and their reputation above all, Rakdos students performing blood sacrifices at keggers, Gruul football players getting busted for using growth magic to trample other teams, Orzhov business majors whose parents literally sold their souls to get them admitted, Boros student activists short on experience but long in action, Simic students trying to explain that their "homework" ate their dog, you could imagine how that place would be complete chaos. Strixhaven doesn't have any of that - the closest it gets is the Green/Black school being gross all the time, like if the Golgari's obsession with decay was played for cheap laughs. It's seemingly too afraid to explore any of the negative aspects of its color pairs or setting the way Ravnica did, resulting in this whimsical and sanitized portrait of a generic "magical school." Even the Black/White school, who are clearly supposed to be the Slytherin-esque pretentious evil school, just come across as blandly smug little shits with no depth. Also they shoot magical ink at people to express that they're the literary school (because R&D apparently has no other way to make things feel magical than themed variations on slinging fireballs), which is so resoundingly uncreative it physically hurts me. They didn't start with "college," they started with "school subjects" (art, literature, math, biology, and combat because Magic just can't get away from generic fighting), assigned each of them to a color pair, and then just lost interest. The whole set also seems to think being academically-themed justifies extremely wordy, fiddly cards, which doesn't help matters because it often squeezes out all the room for flavor text on cards with very generic effects. I'd love to know what Devastating Mastery is the mastery of or which school it belongs to, but I can't because it needs its entire textbox to tell me it's a sideways Wrath of God reference.

@@Igor369 in other news. Un-sets now black border.

Yes. Relying on synergy rather than I play this one card that if my opponent doesn't immediately remove it, I win.

@@k9commander of course, that's a strategy in itself, Albiet a very straightforward and somewhat lacking one. Limitations can bring in many innovations, but can also hamper as well. But i feel if power and limitations are balanced right, everyone wins.

Ha I’ll take it.

it is difficult to predict the best cards in a set Oko for example was thought to be a mediocre planeswalker before release other cards only become broken when later sets are released, so it's difficult to do that

Yeah, there was so much they could've done with a genre like gothic horror, but instead went a milquetoast route. They did a better job designing the zombies of Vow than they did the vampires. Still, that's no excuse for failing to make things magical. Prof was right about the everyday names for cards and the literal interpretations. Where's the magic in that?

That made sense however with the theme. Our current stint in innistrad doesn't really revolve around the lifes of the humans on the plane who are on the bottom of the food chain. Instead we follow the vampires and werewolfs, both the top of the food-chain on Innistrad. There is no reason to be scared if there is nobody who could scare you. Avacyn is long gone, the angels are borderline wiped out, and humanity is loosing itself in a new weird cult which means both vampires and werwols stand un-opposed.

Being a servant to bloodsucking monsters who rule the world now after the angel who protected everyone is DEAD and CTHULU recently ate 80% of things in the world and is now trapped in the moon you see every night is safe?

Sets like Eldraine? If you want looser themes just go to Lord of Rings. Lets not taint mtg with your nerdom.

@@Torriotorres you know they’re literally making a LOTR set right? No need to be so rude bro.

@@Torriotorres "Let's not taint mtg with your nerdom" Chill, dude.

Alrunds Epiphany wasn't broken, wtf. They legit went out of their way to make it not broken. It costs 1-2 mana more than these effects usually do and exiles itself, what else do you want? Them to not print extra turn spells at all?

@@Tacklepig With what epiphany has done to the arena standard meta, I can absolutely say yes. Its not fun to play my 9th epiphany deck out of 10 games I might play in a night.

@@Tacklepig The problem wasn't Epiphany itself but immediately printing a flashbackable fork spell and red mana ramp cards. But yes, I would argue never print extra turns into standard. It always causes issues.

Goldspan dragon, alrunds, chariot, bind of the old gods, god cycle, and more. I loved kaldheim

Not really, it just means we're playing Yu-Gi-Oh.

Also hard disagree on the Ikoria take. Remove Companions and you still have the Ultimatums, Godzilla Skins, Triomes. The set isn’t as forgettable as you seem to think it is.

Triomes all day.