What is Flavor and Why Does it Even Matter? 

I like that

@@DiceTry Happy to hear that 🙂. Your opinion means a lot to me because from the way you talk and analyse things you seem a person with deep thoughts, seeing things that the most people don't.. I guess the blue mana flows in your veins

And if you want to play a stock broker, I would assume some azorius senate and the brokers cards would help the feel

​@@pokegardI think Orzhov would be better for that. That is the guild about money and banking. Azorius is more of a politics guild. They are distinct. In real life some politicians are into using taxes and regulation to keep businesses in line. Businesses don't like that. That is the case where there is real conflict.

@@c.d.dailey8013 fair/true

Oh wow. That reminds me of Catan. It is a game about settling on land. There are managing resources. There are important materials such as wood, brick and grain. I am a fan of Catan because the gameplay is really fun. However the flavor of settlers is pretty bland. I think this would be so much cooler if this was fantasy themed. There can be magicians managing different flavors of mana and building networks of magical leylines. I played with the idea and developed a game out of it. Come to think of it, there is a Catan spinoff games based on outer space and another based on Game of Thrones. May this was an attempt to fix the bland flavor.

@@c.d.dailey8013 fair, it is way easier to trade resources in catan compared to mtg by default tho(mostly cuz mtg is more of a war game then catan), and the space one I think is flavor but the game of thrones one I think is just a brand deal

It's honestly impressive how good the designers of this game are at intertwining flavor and mechanics

@@DiceTry you could have a game with similar mechanics, but if it was something more mundane it wouldn't nearly be as popular, or have the same potential to keep going. That's probably why it's gone on longer than any game tied to specific properties, M:tG has the freedom to keep making NEW worlds rather than being tied to something with established lore like Dragon Ball.

"your attack has been rendered harmless. it is, however, quite pretty"

@@samwayne8961 oi, Masques has one of the best! 😂 "enthusiasm is no match for preparation"

@@brendans1983 My fav has to be, "No."

“It that betrays” never had the card but the idea of a monster that sacrifices allies and close friends and turns them against you as husks brings a great deal of emersion

People do underestimate how much flavor shapes our enjoyment of this game

I had a game of commander with one player playing Queen Marchesa. Another player completely loved to feed into the Monarch-making nature of his deck, so he "bowed to the crown" and became a puppet Monarch, while me and the other guy quickly noticed what was going on, that we could barely attack - and as such stopped taking Marchesa's gifts and offers and teamed up to fight against instead of for the crown! Suddenly our FFA Commander game became a 2v2 where we told a story of trying to convince the Puppet King that his ways are wrong and that we should work together to defeat the crown, for she is the one pulling the threads. We weren't exactly role playing and 3 of us outside of the Queen marchesa player are fairly new to magic, but my mate got to defeat Marchesa, then self-destructed for his purpose in life was fulfilled: His people were finally free (to attack without annoying combat tricks haha). It all came down to me fighting the vassal, the puppet king in a final, actually very close fight with my Chishiro. This was probably the most memorable card game round I've ever played. It was an actual story being told through our gameplay and I love that.

they're probably still having fun though. folks that go past the flavor and into mechanics do exist and some players will inevitably dip into that side over time too, johnnys are likely to do that too.

They make a great goblin cheeseburger after playing a meathook massacre. My favorite fast food shop in the multiverse!!

Another gobos and planeswalker enjoyer 🤝

I do have a discord, that would be a great place to share your custom cards

Honestly universes beyond could be a video all it's own

Like a fully wedge plane? That would be interesting. We have seen wedge factions but not a Plane. Ok marking that down for a video in 2024

That would be cool. Tarkir and Ikoria would be the closest. This can definitely be taken further.

I think that ends up being the difficulty with creating a 5 color cycle. Some are going to fit together naturally, but some might be harder to make fit. Black already had removal, which is most of red’s instants. So it went the route of a soft counterspell that you see more often than you notice in Red.

I am developing my own card game. I am just making cards for playtesting. I take regular index cards and write mechanics on it. This has got to be barebones because I am still figuring out how the mechanics works. Yet even then I have the decency to draw a doodle on each card to suggest imagery and flavor. Card names are also written for flavor. I do put small colored circles to classify cards and add more flavore. Some cards even have the doodles colored. That is some flavor, even if it isn't a lot. Doodles are not nearly good enough for a finished product, but they help with my mindset. This is more than about extreme nerds doing math problems for fun. It is where one reads a fantasy book like Lord of the Rings, and wanting in on the action. One not only immerses into a fantasy world, but they can also interact. DND, MTG, World of Warcraft and Legend of Zelda all deliver that experience incredibly well. They are vastly different in terms of mechanics. However all of them have a great fantasy to experience. I am a hardcore fantasy nerd, and I love all these games.

DND and MTG are the two big classics of fantasy games. They are a huge source of enjoyment and inspiration. If I had to pick one, I would say that DND is a tad more important because it is older, but both games are still incredible. Besides art style, another thing that both have in common is extreme world building. This is something I really dive into. This goes beyond just having one fantasy world. MTG has multiple planes that card sets are based on. So it can really churn out card sets without running out of ideas. DND has multiple settings that campaigns are based on. It even has a complex and intricate cosmology. So it can really churn out books. There is a campaign module about traveling around the cosmos, called Planescape. There was a boxed book set about it released a while back. I got so excited when I first saw it in my local game store. I bought it immediately. The amount of sheer creativity is absolutely bonkers. It even starts to go beyond regular fantasy. Then this gets into mythology, fairy tales, horror and even sci-fi. This is a major case of kitchen sink creativity. The video asked me what my favorite card for flavor is. I can't say because there are way too many to choose from. I can give groupings. One of my favorite planes is Ravnica. It was the first plane I experienced. The first sets I played was in the most recent Ravnica block. It had War of the Spark. The first DND book I had was a crossover book called Guild Masters Guide to Ravnica. I didn't play DND yet or even understood the rules. I just got the book for the pretty pictures. I think a lot of those pictures are reused art assets. I even drew pictures like the pictures in the book. Ravnica is a great basis for learning about color pairs. That really makes the games so interesting and vibrant. Maybe ten color pairs is a happy medium between being too bland and too confusing. I also like Ravnica is a plane focused on political intrigue. It is a lot like Game of Thrones. However the vibrant magic and robust color pie makes it even better. I am a huge fan of Game of Thrones, so this intrigue is great for me. My other favorite planes are Theros and Kaldheim. They are very similar. I like these planes, because I am such a huge mythology fan. Another one of the first DND books I got was one about Theros. Amokhet and Kamigawa are similar planes too, and I think they are very cool. My favorite color is blue. That is because I am a nerd and I relate to blue philosophy the most. The pair I relate to the most is Izzet due to creativity. The first deck I played with was an Izzet deck, mainly based on the recent Ravnica block. That is something super specific. I did this mainly for flavor. At the time I had no idea how good this was in terms of meta. The Izzet League of Ravnica is something I have grown very attached to. I am even fond of the leaders Ral Zerik and Niv Mizzet. I had cards for both of them in my deck. There are several versions of Ral Zerik in the block. The one I used was the one in the War of Spark set. For flavor I also like white. I am drawn to some of white's values. I like the community, religion and politics of white. Overall my personality is Jeskai. That is a combo of Izzet and White. I do like how the style of all the white guilds of Ravnica. They lend themselves to pretty imagery. I also like how all the blue guilds have cool philosophies and mechanics. When those go together, there is the Azorius guild. This guild is awesome. It is the one that has a flavor of government, order, pretty armor and pretty birds. It has the mechanics or being the best at control and defense. This video has a tiny example. There is a card where Azorius knights arrest a giant. I look at the picture and read the card text. The mechanics and flavor fit perfectly. Arresting or exiling and enemy creature is totally what Azorius would do. I know how they are. I have a tendency to get into flavor first. Then I learn mechanics. For MTG and DND I watched lore videos on RU-vid first. Then later I get into playing the games. My three favorite MTG channels are DiceTry, Aether Hub and Lorbrarians. The one thing that they all have in common is that they focus on the flavor of the game and not the lore. When I got into MTG, the biggest draw was actually the color pie and the guilds of Ravnica. There was no DiceTry channel yet. So I watched a color pie series on another channel, called The Mana Source. That series was a big mind blower. I'll tell you that. Interestingly the first video on a color pair was about Izzet. Once I watched that video, I was immediately hooked on that pair.

Close, think of it like how there are minis that are perfect in getting across their faction’s ideals. Orks slap together anything and everything and call it a weapon “dat Mork would shid ‘is pants for.” It’s character is what I’m saying

Thanks, it's a topic I just find so interesting so it was fun talking about it

Haha, hope you enjoy this one

The tastiest

I recommend having a flick through the art books they released during the Bolas-Arc. I know you literally just said you don't care for the lore, but it's actually really cool finding out small snippets of lore on cards you see played all the time, or just hear about all the time. Just things like Anguished Unmaking is Sorin 'killing' Avacyn, whom he created as a vampire killer to keep humans alive on Innistrad. Sounds weird but he basically didn't want to suck on rats for a feed once all the humans were gone. But he had to kill Avacyn because of what Griselbrand did, followed by what Emrakul did. The Immortal Sun was created on Ixalan to essentially stop planeswalking. It was then stolen by Tezzeret(who had the Planar Bridge installed into his guts so he could planeswalk it to Ravnica) for Nicol Bolas so he could trap and kill every planeswalker in existence, resulting in The War of the Spark. On Amonkhet, Oketra just sits back on her throne bombing these massive arrows into the wasteland of Amonket, depicted on the Invocation Wrath of God. Actually, the whole story is Amonket proper dark and twisted. Waaay darker than Innistrad. Emrakul still exists, but Kozilek and Ulamog do not. And apparently they were not the only 3 eldrazi titans in existence, just the 3 we know about so far. And, technically, Nicol Bolas still 'exists'. Sorry for the rant. I love lore 😂