I’d like to thank everyone for your questions – but before I answer I will issue, for the first and only time at this site, the Four Disclaimers (with apologies to Michael Feldman):
- All questions asked in this column have been thoroughly researched, although the answers have not. Ambiguous, misleading or poorly-worded questions are par for the course. Readers who are sticklers for the truth should get their own columns. I hear there’s an opening.
- Wouldn’t you know, just when you find a great place to work there’s finally a Supreme Court opening.
- Employees of Wizards of the Coast are lucky to be working at all, especially at Wizards, and many get to read this as part of their jobs so they’ve wasted enough time without actually asking the questions. Once you’ve asked your question, I’ll let you get away with multiple parts – but after that, sit on your hands and let someone else have a chance for a change.
- Opinions expressed in this column are not those of Wizards of the Coast, Star City Games, their members, or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itching for a fight.
Q: How far should R&D push to make cards playable? Are Chimney Imp and Horizon Seed acceptable?
A: Cards should be pushed to the extent that they are designed to be playable.
If I stopped there that would be a cop out, so I’ll elaborate: You can’t make every card playable in Constructed (or even draft) without inflating the power curve, so choices have to be made. Any individual card can be pushed easily enough, unless the effect is bizarre and dangerous. There’s nothing wrong with Horizon Seed and Chimney Imp other than that they cost far too much mana…. But I’ve been desperate enough for flyers on rare occasions to flirt with the idea of Chimney Imp when I had good equipment.
I think that most cards should at least be at the point where if you want the effect badly enough, it can be worth it to use them in Limited. The more I ask “what if?” the better, but a small number of unacceptably expensive cards give the game character and offer the opportunity for bad players to start learning about what makes cards good.
One Horizon Seed is fine; ten would be bad. Overall, I would push a little harder but not drastically so.
Q: When designing cards for Limited, how strong is too strong? Should “I win” cards be pushed when it allows unskilled players to steal matches? (I’m thinking of cards like Umezawa’s Jitte, Meloku, Master Yamabushi, and so forth.)
A: You need to keep the bad player coming back. Bad players are where we get most of next year’s good players. We also need to give the decent players a chance to beat the good ones – and even win tournaments on occasion. If no one ever won at a casino, people would stop coming and everyone deserves a chance to win every now and then. How many people would play poker if the better hand was never cracked? That’s no fun.
Extreme examples like Umezawa’s Jitte are the only way some players are ever going to win against players not on their level. These cards need to be rare, and there should be a very small number of them. I think that Master Yamabushi is at the right level for an intentionally broken Limited rare. Umezawa’s Jitte goes too far… but I don’t think that the downside is so big that it should stop the card from being printed. Constructed considerations should do that!
There have always been “I win” rares like Phyrexian Processor, but I wouldn’t sacrifice the Constructed impact of that card or the fun casual players had with it to save us from a broken Limited rare. Also note that all three cards you mentioned have Constructed applications; if they did not, they would be evil cards.
Q: Would like to ask a question regarding White and White Weenie particularly in light of Aaron Forsythe latest article, in which he reiterates the philosophy of color pie as it relates to White (i.e., having strong two-drop creatures with abilities). Specifically, will there still be a place for the time-honored WW/Aggro after Mirrodin and 8th are gone, or is Wizards forcing White players to be either splash or some form of control?
On the one hand, the entire “Wisdom” mechanic seems to be anti-WW (which seeks to play out its hand early) to the benefit of White’s primary enemy, black (discard and removal) and control. On the other hand, Charge Across Araba seeks to give White an ability that figured prominently in elf decks – an alpha strike for the win. But with only one card at 4W, it isn’t very dependable.
So where is White headed?
A: I can’t say where white is actually headed even if I knew, for obvious reasons – but I wouldn’t worry too much about this. WW is not a control deck and never was. If you’re looking to turn it into a control deck, you’ll likely need another color because white is not good at control, especially when Wrath of God would be counterproductive.
To me, WW is a group of good fast creatures with backup, and we certainly have good white creatures. If you’re pining for Swords to Plowshares and Armageddon then you’re not reading magicthegathering.com too carefully… but you have solid options, and equipment is a great boon to this strategy.
Personally, I hate WW, so if it turns out to be good then don’t blame me – and you can’t blame anything on me for over another year either way. The Wisdom mechanic was for Saviors, so it’s nothing to worry about; it’s not a permanent part of the color pie.
As for where white is headed overall, white tends to be weak because it has several themes like lifegain and protection that to support that tend to produce a lot of bad cards and few good ones. I think the way to give white its fair share is to remember the ways in which it can break out of its box with the universals like Wrath of God and making sure its removal is playable.
Q: How would you have fixed Netrunner?
A: I would have printed it and sold it! Netrunner didn’t need fixing; it needed to exist and it needed to be supported. I didn’t have a problem with Silent Impact. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have tried to make a great game even better by trying to fix some of the abuses of UnLimited Constructed and trying to find a good midlevel format that was not completely degenerate.
The key problem with Netrunner in the long term was that it didn’t have all that much design space. After another year or so, it would start to get difficult to create unique new cards. The game is very structured and carefully balanced, whereas Magic is freeform.
Q: Is the current mulligan rule in need of being fixed? If so, how could it be made better?
A: I like the current mulligan rule a lot, it creates a lot of skill testing and interesting decisions for players. If it can be improved, I don’t know how; I certainly don’t want to hand a deck like two-land Belcher the keys to the kingdom and tell it to lock up when it is done. Mulligans and dealing with mana issues are part of the game and anything that did too good a job of fixing them would be worse than the disease.
Q: Which draft format took the most skill to draft? To play? Which took the least skill to draft? To play?
A: My favorite draft format of all time is Invasion-Planeshift-Apocalypse, and I consider it the most skill-testing format to draft and play.
The least skillful one is an odd question, but I believe that it is Mirage-Visions–Weatherlight. We tend to romanticize the past, and not remember that MVW’s dominant strategy was to take every W/U card in sight hoping to pick up Empyrial Armor and Heavy Ballista. IPA could be frustrating, and your mana was never going to work right, but that’s what made it great: If you didn’t know what you were doing, you ended up with an unmitigated disaster.
Q: Do you feel current blocks stand alone to too little or too great an extent? Would you favor block design that produces three sets based around their own themes, mechanically or otherwise, with few outside synergies or connections, or would you rather see blocks designed less independently?
On a similar note, what’s your view on mechanic-based decks like Madness and Affinity – do you think that highly synergetic mechanic-based decks should be encouraged or discouraged?
A: Blocks need to function as their own formats for draft and for Block Constructed, and they need to be able to function on their own to make sure they can play a strong role in Standard. However, a block that forces you to play in-block to get any use out of its cards is going too far. I think that there is a tendency to have far too many of the pushed cards in each block end up going to the cards that reinforce the central mechanics….and that limits interaction between different blocks.
I have no problem with Madness or Affinity as concepts (well, Affinity is dangerous, but it’s also interesting), but they shouldn’t get all the goodies. The themes should work together naturally and the synergies involved should make the decks worth playing. If too many cards that fit the same theme are pushed, then it’s like R&D is building the deck for you – even if they don’t realize what they’re building when they build it. Madness is a great example of a deck that comes to us already built, and that shouldn’t happen often.
I would encourage these concepts, but I would try to avoid forcing them down players’ throats. The best cards from a block for the long term tend to be the ones that don’t rely on the rest of the block.
Q: Several questions, mostly about the color wheel:
The Color Wheel is like the law. They both evolve. Research and Development can decide that one particular class of spells makes more sense in one color than in another. Take the new Fork, Twincast. The card, flavor-wise, makes more sense in blue than in Red. Historically, Blue has most of the copycat spells: Clone, Vesuvan Doppleganger, Copy Artifact, etc. Another example is Rule of Law replacing Arcane Laboratory. Arcane Laboratory makes more sense in White than Blue in some ways.
The problem with this constant evolution is color bleed. If you dig deep enough, you can find precedent supporting any claim that a color should have a particular effect or ability. If Research and Development wanted, they could justify making a black Seal of Cleansing on the precedent of Dystopia or a black Counterspell on the precedent of Withering Boon.
In the law, just because there is a precedent for a particular card doesn’t mean that that precedent shouldn’t be overturned if it is wrong. Dred Scot and Korematsu are two infamous legal cases that are now soundly rejected. Determining whether a precedent is wrong basically depends upon your color wheel philosophy.
The danger of bleed is a real one. My first question is: what is your view of color bleed – how serious do you think it is, and how vigilant would you be to stop it? By having lots of “bleeds,” you discourage people from wanting to play a specific color.
Two of the cards I am happy to see move to white are Propaganda and Arcane Laboratory. Both cards are strong Enchantments. That alone makes them good candidates for White. But their effect is to do what White seeks to do: Control. They are both good complements to blue in case blue gets viable countermagic once more. I also think moving Guardian Beast to white was a good move. Leonin Abunas is a cool ability that would be playable in Vintage if it only didn’t cost four non-Mishra’s Workshop mana.
My second question is: which recent printings reflect precedents that you think were incorrectly decided, and which printings do you think are appropriate precedents? In other words, can you shed some light on your view of the color wheel?
A: I think the biggest danger of the color wheel is not bleeding but its opposite – a distinct lack of bleeding like what we saw in Saviors. The new color wheel runs the danger of stereotyping the colors, and when you adhere to it too strictly it ends up making things somewhat bland. That’s fine every now and then, but the game needs its spice.
I also think that it needs to have instinctive bleeding, and for that reason I don’t agree with Twincast – and not because it’s trampling over all my precious childhood memories. Yes, Twincast is a copying spell, but it is a very chaotic effect. When you Clone, you’re making a deliberate, sorcerer-like decision and twisting reality. When you Twincast, you’re making a spell split in two, often making it go places it wasn’t supposed to go. Deflection has become Shunt, which I agree with, but by that logic I think Fork should have remained Fork. Fork feels like a very red thing to do, being cast to duplicate destructive spells or to turn your opponent’s spells against him but without stopping the original. If anything, Fork is more red than Shunt and it adds more to red than it does to blue without taking away blue’s territory. I agree that the enchantments you speak of belong in white.
I think we need to be vigilant to stop the wrong kind of color bleed, but that the pendulum swung the other way with Kamigawa. I also wouldn’t worry about precedents, because no one is arguing that mistakes weren’t made in the past. I doubt you’ll see a reprint of Dystopia… but I think that every now and then the colors should get something that gives them a power they shouldn’t quite have. I like living in interesting times.
If there’s one big decision on the wheel that I would have fought against, it was Disenchant becoming Naturalize.
Q: Do you think that the best deck needs to have a lot of rares in it to stop it being too widely played? (As in, the only thing that stopped everyone from playing Ravager Affinity was finding enough Arcbound Ravagers….)
A: I think that the best deck being hard to assemble is not a solution. Perhaps it can limit the damage on the casual level, but all it does in the end is make life more expensive for those who need the cards.
I was at the Marvel PC and everyone knew what the best deck was; there just weren’t enough copies. In Rome, most players who had an Tolarian Academy deck played it. That’s not a good thing, and the lack of copies can help the deck by making it hard to spend too many sideboard slots to keep it in check. Imagine if only five people at your Regional last year could have played Affinity: Most of them made the top eight, because who is going to change their whole deck to beat them?
The way to stop the best deck is to give people the tools to fight it.
Q: Do you think the key to good Magic design is creating an environment where it is fun to lose?
A: I’d go a step farther than that. Good design for a game means the game is always fun, or fun as often as possible. It should be fun when winning, fun when losing, fun when drafting, fun when building decks. If it’s no fun to lose, that’s a problem – but the biggest problem is when a player sits down, sees what his opponent is playing and knows he that won’t enjoy the match, win or lose.
I don’t think we should kill strategies purely because people don’t like playing against them if they serve a purpose, but as many games as possible should be fun.
Q: Do you think cheating/collusion on the Pro Tour is more widespread now than it was in 2000?
A: No; in fact, it’s the opposite. The good old days are now; people romanticize the past. Cheating has been on the decline for a long time. Early in the Pro Tour, cheating was rampant and you spent a lot of your mental effort guarding against it; these days, you keep an eye on your opponent but with the assumption that he’s clean until proven otherwise.
Q: Do you think the Power Nine should ever be reprinted in a tournament playable form?
A: No. A contract is a contract is a contract. You don’t go back on something like that when it would destroy the value of cards that are now well into the four-figure range.
Q: Do you think tournament-legal good cards should be made available cheaply? I’m thinking like making the World Champion decks tournament-legal, or maybe running a Vintage tournament and making tourney-legal versions of those decks (or for 1.5, or for extended) – or just re-releasing old sets, like what they’re doing on Magic Online? The Eternal formats have serious problems with card availability; what would you do to fix that?
A: I don’t think it can be fixed. It’s a permanent problem. The game was helped early on by the existence of cards like the dual lands, but there are not enough to go around and there never will be.
At the same time, let’s not forget that Magic is supposed to be a collectable. I don’t think that it was a bad thing when you could open a pack and sell the singles for more than the cost of the pack, and part of the value of your cards is that they could become highly valuable in the long run. What is happening to Force of Will is bad for players of Legacy and Vintage – but it holds out the promise that the right card could join it in the future. If anything, “fixing” the problem would make it worse because it is much more expensive to buy cards when you can’t sell or trade them for full value afterwards. These formats are meant to be special, but special comes with a price.
Proxy tournaments like those run by Star City are great for allowing people to participate in these formats without breaking the bank, but you can’t say that Magic should be divorced from problems of card access.
Q: I’m going to miss your set reviews the most. Are you going to write for magicthegathering.com at all – and if so, can we expect some sort of set review-esque thing from you. If not, can you give us a brief overview of 9th Edition (I know you can’t confirm or deny the list that is out there, but hypothetically, if it were the real list)?
A: The good news is that there will be a 9th Edition review. It is already written, and will be available once Wizards has officially spoiled the set.
Beyond individual card previews, I don’t believe that Wizards can review its own sets, and I would be hopelessly tainted by knowledge of future sets. I’ll miss the reviews too, but hopefully someone can pick up the torch.
Q: Here’s my question – what do you think of the current state of Blue? With Ninth Edition, it loses all its instant speed card draw and just in general is looking like a total wreck nowadays. It either dominates or just flounders as an incapable color. What do you think Blue’s role should be in terms of power – and what sort of changes in power level should the color receive, if any?
A: Blue is one rat bastard of a color. The bulk of its cards were never that great, and now they’re even worse…. but you don’t need a hundred cards to build a deck. You need about nine – and you can use artifacts and/or a second color. If even a few cards slip through the cracks – say Mana Leak, Meloku, the Clouded Mirror, and Vedalken Shackles – then you’re already a good chunk of the way to a great deck.
Blue offers card drawing, counters, and control elements, so its best cards often end up being the best – and that’s what determines dominance. The color’s overall power level has been reduced to dust, but it’s still on the verge of being good.
I think that the persecution of all things blue has gone too far (or at least swung to the extreme end of the spectrum), and the color will have to be freed at some point. What we need to do is keep an eye on the high end to prevent it from dominating again. Making its card drawing Sorcery-speed is a good way to guard against its power without taking away its ability to draw cards and to force blue players to not just say “go” every turn. That’s a lot of what makes playing against blue not fun for people.
Q: I just wanted to reiterate the question on blue. Clearly, Wizards is working hard to nerf blue, with multiple mechanics moving to other colors and a total of six instants in the color come 9th Edition. What should blue be? Was it broken? Has the change in concept from “planeswalkers slinging spells” to the more-currently-vogue “army-style battle of creatures” left this color in limbo?
A: Blue had a lot of broken cards before. The question would be cards like Counterspell: Is it a staple card that has a right to be above the curve or is it a broken card?
That depends on your perspective. Blue is very dangerous and will dominate if you give it a few cards that fill its traditional holes, so having the color start from behind can be thought of as almost fair. Right now blue is down – about as down as it should ever be – and things will get better. Also, consider that new players tend to dislike playing (and especially playing against) blue, so perhaps a decision has been made that many of the best blue cards will be in the expansions. It’s not like blue doesn’t have any toys.
Q: For the record, I think Netrunner is the best CCG to be no longer in print. (The original Rage being a very close second.) What made it so great? What lessons can Magic learn from it? Why did it fail? What can we all learn from that?
A: I tried Rage for a bit, but I never got into it. I think Netrunner was so great because it forced players to make so many real choices. You had bluffing, you had resource management over the long term, you had short-term and long-term priorities: I can get in right now, but at what cost? The mind games you can play in that game are amazing, and it is far better balanced than it looks – especially in Limited. Netrunner plays better out of the box for experienced players than any other collectable card game.
However, Netrunner had problems. Its first problem is that as I noted above it is a small game with Limited design space: I don’t think you can print thirty expansions. It requires bits (counters of some kind) to play, which can be a bigger annoyance than you might think, and you had to have a Runner deck and a Corporation deck.
However, the biggest problems were in the realm of marketing. The double-size starter decks made the game expensive to try, which hurt sales, and the game appears unbalanced at first because the Corporation is easier to play correctly than the Runner. In a game, the Runner starts with the edge, then it swings three times; Corporation protects, Runner breaks through, Corporation makes breaking through so expensive that Runner can’t keep it up. The balance is similar, and the Corporation tends to win too often for new players to the extent that I would be tempted to give the Runner a bump in newbie games.
The real reason Netrunner failed was that it simply wasn’t worth the effort and time for a company that had Magic exploding around the world. If the game had been spun off, it would have done well, but “doing well” wasn’t good enough.
Q: What are your comments on the Legacy format?
A: When I read Stephen’s article on Legacy, my reaction was “Okay, who’s the wise guy who let us use four Lion’s Eye Diamonds?” In general I think that Legacy is going to need some tweaking to avoid its obvious potential balance problems and that it may end up being an inherently broken format but it is too soon to tell and that’s a wonderful thing. I will learn more at GenCon, and I will report back.
Q: What avenues of Magic Theory do you believe have been the least explored/need to be expounded in greater detail?
A: There is one area of Magic theory and strategy which is radically underdeveloped right now, and that area is the testing of Limited, especially drafting.
When you test Constructed, you set up the matchups you think are important, put yourself in the situations you need to learn about. In Limited, you… draft some more. That can’t be right. There also aren’t any good statistics involved. I will see if I can write about this in-depth before I leave, but time is Limited and my plate is full.
Q: How important is pushing the envelope in design? It’s my opinion that Skullclamp was a fine card to print, since it showed how far a card could go before it became “too good.” Is it okay to print some of these “too good” cards from time to time, to both push the envelope and keep things interesting?
A: I believe Randy Buehler was the first one to state it flat-out: If you never have to ban anything, you’re not doing your job. Magic is a far better game when there is the danger that there’s a broken deck or card waiting around the corner. It keeps things interesting.
Obviously, any given card that has to be banned is a failure, and you hope that you have to ban cards for the right reason: You took a chance on an interesting card and went too far. Skullclamp was unfortunate because it was essentially an accident, but even accidents have their place in keeping things interesting. The envelope should be pushed up to the point where you think it can be pushed – and if you’re doing it right, then occasionally the players will show you the error of your ways. One train wreck every few years is about right.
Q: A few tangents to the Skullclamp comment: How often is too often to have to ban cards? To look at this in another light, how much can you push the envelope before you risk causing too much damage to a format? Is an emergency banning an acceptable solution to a card that gets so out of hand as to completely ruin a format? How often would this be acceptable?
Considering the recent, well…. I hesitate to say “panic,” but “general hub-bub” generated by Krark-Clan Ironworks, how playable should Combo be in the formats with smaller card pools (like Block and Type 2)? How many new cards should Wizards be printing that get restricted in Type 1? Is it too hard to push the envelope (outside of artifacts that can only be powered out reasonably with a Mishra’s Workshop) without causing damage to less broken formats?
And lastly, how many “interesting” (rulebreaking?) cards can you print in a set? Mirrodin comes to mind as a set that pushed the envelope on what could be printed, with Mindslaver, Platinum Angel, Chalice of the Void, and so forth. How much rulebreaking/setting and innovative concepts is too much before the format becomes too incoherent for stuff like Limited and Block, when sometimes you just need a 2/2 for two mana with a reasonable ability?
A: Wow, that’s a lot of questions.
I think it’s a question of risk vs. reward when you print a dangerous card. Sometimes you print a card like Krark-Clan Ironworks and you generate excitement and player interest – and another viable deck without causing problems. Other times you end up with Skullclamp and mayhem ensues.
The question with each card should be: What is the chance that this card is too good, and how much damage could it cause? How hard would it be to ban if it got out of hand? If it’s a fair card, how much value does it add?
I still think KCI was a mistake, but not because it was broken. It was a mistake because it was a bad risk. Affinity overall was a good risk: It was a new and interesting concept that turned out to be too good. KCI, however, was good for only one thing: generating broken combinations. For other levels of play, it seems like it will add little value.
So my position would be that you don’t print a card like that, because when you’re right you don’t get much and you can pay a heavy price for being wrong. Mindslaver is a great risk: It’s fun for the whole family and has lots of good uses, so you are rewarded for taking a chance. The same would be true of Platinum Angel.
Also, I don’t think that envelope cards cause damage to Limited formats when they are rare. It is understood that sometimes weird things happen or cards are unplayable. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I love odd draft decks. I had one last week with the full Hana Kami engine, including Ethereal Haze.
As for emergency bans, people get the wrong idea about them. An emergency ban is just that: a response to a true emergency, and they have to be considered an extreme cost. You do it only when you have no alternative.
Q: What is your opinion regarding appropriate power levels to print cards at? Do you believe cards like Ravager, Skullclamp, and to a lesser extent, Jitte should continue to be printed, or do you think that Wizards should avoid pushing the power envelope so as not to require bans later?
And in a similar vein, do you believe that a card like Umezawa’s Jitte becomes more balanced and less necessary to receive a banning because of its legendary status? Do you think that we’ll be seeing Wizards pushing the power envelope more but only with the legendary supertype tacked onto it? Do you think this is a fair way of adding powerful cards to a set even though the legendary restriction is irrelevant in Limited and introduces an effective lottery to the format?
A: Broken rares for Limited are an issue I’ve already addressed.
I don’t think that the Legend supertype should be used as an excuse to print cards above the curve once we’re out of Kamigawa block – but I obviously can’t talk about what is coming, whether I know about it or not. I don’t think Legendary status is that big a deal in the banning debate, except that it does make the card slightly worse and makes the dynamic (to me at least) more interesting for Jitte.
As I’ve already said, I believe that some cards need to be pushed to the point where they might end up being broken in order to keep Magic new and fun. If you do your job right, you won’t have to ban cards too often.
Q: Which is your favorite Block Constructed format of all time?
A: I liked full Tempest Block a lot, because it had a lot of solid, “good stuff” cards and different decks while allowing skill to decide a lot of matchups. While at the end the blue decks took over, for most of the season they weren’t even the top target and the buyback cards forced players to make a lot of complex, long-term decisions.
Q: As I inquired after your previous article, I would like to know what ideas you have for the future direction of Magic and the role you may play in it. I realize this is a rather vague and enormous question but I also realize, having read your articles for four years, that you can be quite guarded and rarely speculative – so there is probably only a small amount of information you would be willing to share with us anyway. Perhaps you believe another color may enter the game? Perhaps you envisage the day when we play one game in two zones, the Real and the Ethereal?
Silly suggestions, I know, but I was just hoping to get the creative juices flowing. Again, we are all very happy to see you get the gig with Wizards. Enjoy!
A: I don’t think that Magic needs to take any drastic steps, let alone introducing purple or another zone. (And I think the zone idea was tried with shadow, and the results were interesting – but ultimately a failure in terms of wanting to do it again in that form.)
I think that sets like Invasion and Mirrodin push the game into new areas without having to change the core of what Magic is and that we are not going to run out of such ideas for a long, long time.
Q: When you started playing Magic, how did you get past the boundaries of not playing on Shabbat? I am wondering because it is that same thing that stops me from playing a lot of Magic now. FNM is a definite killer.
Also, why were you forced to leave Team Cyberpunk?… What is the real story about all that?
A: You have to ask yourself, why is the Shabbat a problem? If it’s because of your own beliefs and traditions, then you’re stuck. If you can’t pitch Saturday games, talk to the manager. It’s your choice; I just don’t believe that you should let such a thing get in the way. Playing Magic is a great way to use a day of rest, technical rules be damned.
In my case, I eventually grew up and wore my parents down to the point where they decided that I wanted it enough that it was worth it to let me, but that was a long battle. Now, the other half of the question: I didn’t leave Cyberpunk; Cyberpunk left the building. The company ran out of money, and many promises made to me (and others) were not kept. I believe that I did a great job and delivered a fun and remarkably balanced game, and did it on a budget of almost nothing – but alas, it was not enough.
I am still friends with most of those I met in Denver, although the distance takes its toll. I most certainly was not “forced out,” I stopped coming to work after I realized that my position was no longer in any way relevant to the company as we would be unable to put out any new sets.
Q: How long do you think it will take for us to have another format as diverse and interesting as the soon-to-be rotated out Extended format? Is it possible to have a Constructed format that is extremely powerful overall that is simultaneously very balanced? I’ll leave any interpretation of those questions to you, should you choose to address them.
A: I’ll let you in on a little secret: Balanced formats are even rarer than they look. Remember the Chicago won by Maher? That was a balanced format, but Trix was legal. If we’d known, it would have been broken. At the same time, after a format breaks it tends to return to a new, semi-broken equilibrium after everyone adjusts to the broken deck. Extended should be an open and diverse format for at least its first Tour after the rotation, and chances are that once the cards that need to be banned are gone we will have a fine format once again. My only real worry is Affinity.
I do think there can be a “balance of brokenness” between decks – a Vintage-type of world where everyone goes nuts, but any number of strategies are viable and there is enough defense to keep the quick kills in check. However, it’s not the kind of thing you can design by yourself. It requires the players to stick with a format (such as Legacy) while the right banned list is developed.
Q: I have a simple question for you, Zvi: What and how would you recommend becoming a better player? I am already the person that everyone knows and fears, and I managed to Top 8 Regionals this year, but what are the critical steps I need to take to be good enough to play and place in big tournaments like a Grand Prix?
A: That question is far from simple, and I get asked it often. The short answer is: Read everything you can, especially theory, play a lot against good players and always keep a critical eye. Every game, ask yourself if you made mistakes, if your opponent made mistakes, why you won or lost the game, how your deck could improve and anything else you can think of. The more you understand the game, the better you will play. Concentrate on long term knowledge rather than format-specific knowledge until you’re ready to compete.
But there’s no such thing as “not ready for a Grand Prix.” You might not be ready to take a plane to a Grand Prix, which is fine, but if it’s in your area then there’s no better way to gain experience. Get in the car!
Q: What is your favorite pizza topping? How does that choice influence your Magic playing?
A: I like plain the best, and it helps my Magic-playing ability because it makes it easier to order pizza. Everyone likes plain!
Q: What is your favorite food?
A: Didn’t I just tell you? Pizza!
Q: I’m a female player outside the USA. A fifteen-card booster costs the equivalent of $5 and we cannot buy cheaper stock in bulk from many US suppliers because of the Wizards embargo on importing. Now that I’ve been playing for a year I would like to be able to play in Block Constructed tournaments, but I find the price of important rares such as Pithing Needle, Kokusho, and Cranial Extraction prohibitively expensive.
Yes, I am salaried, but I can’t easily justify pumping such a lot of money into Magic compared against other hobbies such as console gaming. Still, nothing is quite as alluring as the depths in Magic…
After a year I still find myself baffled (occasionally) by Magic jargon on the internet, terms such as “187 creatures,” “metagame,” and so on are alienating to new players. From your recent article comparing Magic Workstation, Apprentice and Magic Online to VHS, Betamax and DVD I gather Zvi, you have a very no-nonsense focus on the highest levels of play. I am sure that R&D has the tools to really open up Magic by making the game less elitist!
Paying close attention to the power of cards in the Uncommon slot could create an environment where it is less costly to get enough tournament-quality cards to build a competitive deck. Please bear in mind newer players! Congratulations on the opportunity to work in Wizards, hope it lives up to everything you have dreamt of!
A: Thank you. I find it frustrating that a company like Wizards would even have the ability to stop you from buying cards on the internet, as I am very much a fan of free trade as well as a fan of access to Magic cards.
Of course, if you think Magic is elitist you should see its competition. Upper Deck is always around to remind you that things could be far worse for those on a budget. That doesn’t change the facts on the ground that if you want to play Constructed with the big boys, it’s going to cost you – even block Constructed. There should be budget decks, but even they aren’t free.
One note is that you should almost certainly be buying your Constructed cards as singles from StarCityGames.com, using your draft cards to provide commons and uncommons.
Magic does give you a lot of good commons and uncommons, but rares will always exist. It is, of course, a good thing to have budget decks that can compete, and I will do my best.
(Note: Okay, technically speaking Zvi simply said, “You should buy singles,” but you knew we were gonna put in the plug – T.F.)
Q: Why doesn’t R&D give us good combo decks in T2 anymore?
A: Because combo decks hate freedom. You don’t hate freedom, do you?
No, really. Combination decks are considered in a real sense to be somewhat evil, but at the same time the pendulum swings both ways. Krark-Clan Ironworks could have turned out to be the best deck in Standard, and part of the reason they banned the cards they did was that they had to defend against that threat.
Q: Why do birds… suddenly appear?
A: Either I’m near, or you paid about twenty bucks plus, shipping and handling.
Q: What’s your opinion on the proliferation of keywords in magic?
A: I think that keywords are good if they excite people or make the cards easier to understand… and they’re bad to the extent that they annoy players.
Overall, they’re a good thing in moderation but we do have to watch out to make sure we don’t go too far. Right now we’re at or just above the high end of what would be a good idea.
Q: Do you think some mechanics are simple, widely applicable, and flavorless enough to deserve inclusion across several blocks, or even the base set? Say, cycling?
A: I think Cycling should be a basic set ability, and I have for some time. It is simple and it helps the game by allowing players to make decisions and fix their mana draws.
I do not think anything else needs to be promoted right now, but I would like to see both Buyback and Kicker return. (Who wouldn’t? – The Ferrett)
Q: What mechanic wasn’t fleshed out that would you like to revisit for a future set? Ninjas? Banding?
A: It’s impossible to cover all the design space offered by a good mechanic in only one block. I don’t think Buyback and Kicker were given short shrift or anything, but I think they are huge and worth at least a second look. Ninjutsu, on the other hand, I don’t think we need to see again (or at least not for a while), and if we never see banding again it will be too soon. Banding was fleshed out, and it took about ten pages of the rules to do it in.
Q: Rotating Extended in blocks of sets means that some sets will forever be overshadowed by another set like Urza did to Masques. Do you think rotating out one block every season might be something to consider? I don’t think R&D are designing sets while thinking of how it’s going to fit into its group of three blocks, so I don’t see a reason to treat them as a single unit.
A: I don’t think that can be helped. Let’s take your example, Masques. Urza’s overshadows it, to be sure, but so do most of the other blocks in Extended. You’re not going to get it to shine unless you give it its own block or put it in some kind of special “overshadowed sets” format with sets like Kamigawa, Fallen Empires and Homelands. That might be a jolly good time, but it’s not going to be sanctioned any time soon.
I think that rotating every year adds an unnecessary complexity that makes Extended feel more like Standard. A big rotation feels special, and between them you don’t have to worry about what is leaving.
Q: Do you care whether you do well in a tournament with a deck of your own design (rather than a version of a well-known good deck)?
A: I care, but I try to not let it change what I do except in borderline cases. It feels great to use your own designs, and it makes you better as a player, but not using a deck because you didn’t design it is foolish.
Don’t confuse that with the advantages of going rogue; playing a deck because no one will be prepared is a valid reason as long as you’re not giving up too much.
All of that assumes you’re out for the win, of course – if you’re playing for fun, then everything changes.