(Author’s Note: This article is in some small way a companion piece to This Isn’t Star Trek — Changes to Organized Play. Whereas that article stirred up a ton of controversy, much of it deservedly so, I believe this to be a much more consensual piece. So, if you feel the urge to bury me for my idiocy after reading it, that’s your right, but if we can avoid personal abuse, that would be just lovely. Thanks.)
Be honest, that was a major shock to your system, right? The idea that I might actually respond to the burning topic of the day, to wit, the changes coming with the arrival of M10. Of course I’m going to. It’s the obvious topic du jour for any self-respecting writer here on StarCityGames.com. However, out of respect for a community in something of a tizzy, I’m going to work very hard in this article to bring you a few thoughts that have rarely been aired thus far in assorted forums. I will also work very hard not to simply tell you my thoughts as if they must be right, because although I’m sure many of you are desperate for me to tell you exactly what you should be thinking, I also consider the soapbox I’ve been granted here to be a significant privilege and not a right, and I don’t want to abuse that privilege.
Let’s begin by getting my professional relationship with Wizards of the Coast out in the open. I work for a variety of companies in the gaming world, and, at the time that I am employed by them, am utterly content to work within their particular guidelines, framework for coverage, and so on. In short, I am 100% on the team, or even The Team. It is also the case that, thankfully, I genuinely enjoy all the games I’ve worked on so far, so me saying so is not a lie. Indeed, on the one occasion I got asked to write promotional material for a game I thought was hideous, I declined on that basis. Wizards of the Coast pays me to travel to the European Grand Prix, all the Pro Tours, Great British Nationals, and assorted other exotic locales. I do various side projects for the company, and am paid by them for those services.
Never mind the money. As a result of all this work I do for the company, I’ve made many treasured friends, and many of them are people who are the custodians of Magic, ranging from the Organized Play team, through members of R&D, the creative team, and so on. In short, I am passionate about the game succeeding not only because I love the game, and not only because I have a financial interest in its ongoing strength, but because I care about my friends, and many of them make Magic.
What does this mean for an article like this, where I may be in a situation where I don’t like some of what’s coming? Well, for one thing, it means that you won’t find me using words like ‘idiot,’ ‘retard,’ ‘f***wit’, or ‘monkeybrain.’ Or indeed ‘twanglethorpe.’ With the last being the notable exception, I believe the forums have more than taken up the necessary allocation of those words in recent days. Plus, more significantly, it’s genuinely next to impossible to describe the people responsible for these changes in those terms without being, er, wrong.
Wizards of the Coast is packed full of overwhelmingly smart people across the board, and it amuses me that so many people seem to disregard the answer ‘be smart’ as flippant when asking how to get a job at Wizards. It’s a monumentally tough gig to get through that door, and the number of people who stay there for many many years are a good indication of what a wonderful creative and stimulating environment that building is for someone who wants to have a hand in making games.
I suppose therefore that I approach these changes to the rules that are forthcoming with a measure of humility noticeably lacking from some quarters. By most academic standards, I’m no mug, but that means I know just enough to know how little I know, and rarely is that more apparent to me than sitting in Wizards Towers listening to Mark and Chris and Greg and Ken and Tom and Witney and… you get the picture. So, underlying all my comments is this one simple premise, one I think we could all do with having at least somewhere in our peripheral vision:
It’s fine to think I’m right. I might be, after all. But what exactly is it that makes me so certain that this roomful of super-smart people are wrong?
Of course, the quickest (and no less fair for that) comeback is to point out that during the last 16 years Wizards of the Coast have made mistakes. With over 300 employees working on everything from Axis and Allies to Duel Masters (in Japanese only) to Dungeons and Dragons to Magic to a vast and sprawling web presence, mistakes are inevitable. Personally, my mistake count stands at six, and that’s just this morning.
Those of us who have been around Magic for a long time can look to a wide range of moments in the history of the game where things went wrong. Skullclamp would be high on my mental list of ouch moments. The combo of Storm plus Two-Headed Giant made for a Pro Tour in San Diego high on memories but not perhaps high on great Magic. If you listen to the mood music coming out of Honolulu last week, it seems as if the way Pros were able to take Cascade to the max was unanticipated beyond the Limited environment. R&D apparently saw it as something that should have remained largely a factor in Draft, much as Ripple managed to remain unbroken in Coldsnap. The Pro Tour fell from five times a year to four. The game is littered with assorted bannings and restrictions that cause various player groups to throw up their/our hands in horror.
All this is understood, but the number of times that Wizards as a whole gets things right is so vastly greater than the number of times it gets things wrong should be an indication to tread cautiously when damning them as having taken leave of their senses. That said, let’s take a look at what’s coming, and how important the changes really are.
Simultaneous Mulligans
I was about to begin this section with the word ‘genius’ to show that I think this change is good, but I understand that people are ready to leap on comments with the slightest provocation, and I don’t want to throw out a bone unnecessarily to the flame wars brigade. Clearly, this idea is not ‘genius,’ because it’s a pretty simple idea that has been around for a while, but the implementation of it is a welcome addition to the game. As someone who watches a lot of Magic, I’m acutely aware of the time during a match that no actual Magic is being played. One of the reasons we debuted the player profile screens during the live webcast this past weekend was because the visuals of watching two players relentlessly pile shuffle before mulliganing yet again are just tedious in the extreme. When you’re in the game, your hands are busy, and you’re probably not really noticing the time drifting by. If you’ve been standing under the lights for four hours, and both players mulligan to five for a game 2, you know that you’ve been watching a whole lot of nothing.
Ignoring the simple boredom aspect, this is going to actively cut down on the number of draws in Magic. You might think that this wouldn’t really make much difference, but a player who mulligans to five on the play is going to take at least two minutes from the time he sees his opening seven to the time he keeps his five. Indeed, I would argue that it’s almost certainly at least two minutes just to go to a mulligan to six, especially if your opponent is rigorous about pile shuffling your deck before handing it back. Not waiting for each other means many games will have an additional portion of actual gameplay time that could easily be 5 minutes. Doesn’t sound like much, but that’s a full 10% of your typical Pro Tour Qualifier match. At the very least, you’re talking about one or two extra turns apiece, and how many games have you played where one more turn was all you needed? Altogether a massive thumbs up. Tinkering in the margins, sure, but a big plus to the game.
Terminology Changes
Whilst I’ve only seen a few positive responses in forums to these changes, I’m going to use this moment to lay a few cards on the table about exactly who I believe (and yes, that means ‘guess’) our forum-dwellers to be. For the most part, anyone who takes the time to respond to an article here or on the mothership is by definition and self-selection a committed member of the Magic community. That marks us out as a very small group in and of itself, since there are approximately 6 million people who are (and I know this is a woolly phrase, but it’s the official one right now) ‘players and fans of the game.’ I guess that’s a way of not revealing the exact number of people who are playing at any given time or the precise number of boxes sold of any given set, and so on. The number of people who are active in the forum communities around the net are a tiny, even miniscule, portion of the wider Magic community.
Forum communities are by and large catered to very well by the powers that be. I know for a fact that the mothership forums are read extremely carefully by a lot, if not all, of the most influential people in the game, and Mark Rosewater for one has stated time and again that he makes a point of reading every single email he’s ever received on the subject of MTG. To suggest that we are disenfranchised seems to me to give ourselves less credit than we deserve. Our calls are always noted, and they are always heeded, even when it’s decided that they should not be acted upon. Indeed, one of the most difficult problems facing Wizards is in finding out what people beyond the forum shores have to say about the game. You better believe that the guy with a huge collection who has played 3,000 sanctioned matches including multiple Pro Tours during his 14 years in the game is going to tell you exactly what he’s unhappy with, after his many thousands of dollars of investment down the years. What’s harder to find is what the grandparents of the thirteen year old boy think who give him an M10 starter set as an end of the school year present for doing well in his exams. They are not on the DCI database, they may very possibly have not purchased it from a dedicated Organized Play store, and until he turns up to play in the Zendikar Pre-Release, if he likes the game, we don’t know what the 13 year old thinks either.
For that, Wizards spends a ton of time and money on ferreting out that information. Online surveys, telephone polls, going into the wider community, there is a huge list of marketing tools that go into finding out what it is that People want. I gave that P a capital, because People are very different to The Community, which is how most of us would describe ourselves, the forum-dwellers. I know it’s tough to deal with, but we are not the pyramid of Magic. We are at or near the top of the pyramid to be sure, but that means we are utterly dwarfed by the vast sea of slightly less competitive, semi-casual, or utterly casual players ‘beneath’ us in the model.
Therefore, cosmetic changes like Battlefield and Exile and so on have to be seen in the light of background data that we just don’t have access to. Sad man that I am, I regularly participate in online surveys for all sorts of products and services, and have lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to choose between a bunch of names for which sounds the coolest, the most trustworthy, the most luxurious, sensible, dynamic, energetic, whatever. You can be utterly certain that there is a papertrail of doom sitting somewhere in Renton that shows Battlefield and chums simply makes the game more popular to various demographics. Does it make it more popular to 32 year olds who’ve been playing since Revised? Unlikely. 13 year olds in Omaha? Apparently.
One final thing before we move past the terminology changes. I am devastated to find that a Facebook group has not yet been organized arguing for the reinstatement of the Removed from Game zone for the sole purpose of allowing my column to remain current in its branding. Devastated.
Mana Burn
This is the first change I concede is somewhat inflammatory to longterm players. Actually, thinking about it, I’m not sure ‘longterm’ is the correct term. It’s probably more accurate to say ‘longterm players who fit the Spike demographic who want to win at all costs.’ Mana Burn was the kind of thing that turned up out of the blue every so often, and you got to mess people around with it. Part of the fun of giving both players extra mana was that you would be set up to take advantage better than your opponent, and sometimes you’d get to enjoy watching them burn when they couldn’t find a way to spend GG in their first main phase. Good times, and gone times. I think there was some interesting strategy that has now been eliminated, what with the whole Hidetsugu’s Second Rite or Forge[/author]“]Pulse of the [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author] now gone forever.
That said, these sorts of situations appealed to the part of the community that liked to invoke rules that occurred one time in a thousand. It’s been many years since I’ve been a casual Magic players, but I play ‘grown-up’ boardgames from time to time, and find it infinitely frustrating to spend five hours playing a Twilight Imperium or whatever for the first time, only to find that the win condition you thought you had locked down was in fact a red herring, thanks to Rule 34 (I) (a.2), a Rule that your host didn’t tell you because it comes up so infrequently.
I’m currently teaching someone to play the game, and the temptation to try to tell them everything is massive, since I feel such a fraud every time I have to explain that the next thing they’re trying to do doesn’t work the way they think it should, because I’m about to tell them all about yet another little-used but crucial corner case in the game. If we’re going to grow the playerbase, we want to keep ‘WTF?!?’ moments to a minimum. In future, the number of new players who bemoan the fact that they can’t mysteriously channel some mana for the express purpose of wounding themselves in order to avoid the wheel of life stopping on a particular number with tragic consequences will be negligible. The number of players who scratch their heads at yet another corner case are many. Many, many, many. They may not be your friends, but they exist. And they go away, just as you or I do when something doesn’t make sense to us.
Marketing types understand that it only takes one small thing for us to walk away, because we live in a society where our expectations are set incredibly high. Our cola must be the right cola, with the right combination of caffeine or no, calories or no, artificial sweeteners or no. Seattle is the home of Starbucks coffee. A generation ago, you went to a cafe for coffee. Coffee didn’t need a menu all of its own, it was simply a drink that wasn’t tea. The logic tree for coffee involved black or with milk, with or without sugar. You know that a degree is required to get a coffee from Starbucks now. Then there’s the Star Trek magazine phenomenon. A while back, some enterprising (sorry) company brought out a magazine weekly that charted the worlds of Star Trek. As moderate fans of the various shows, Helen and I decided to subscribe. We quite enjoyed the first few weeks, reading character bios, storylines, technology schematics, The Religion of Bajor, and so on. Then, in a week we still refer to with a grin more than a decade later, came magazine number eight. And there, in a full page spread, sat…
Momentous Shuttle Craft Journeys.
Simultaneously, we looked up from the page, and realized this was a publication the Hagon household could live without. If they were coming up with this stuff after just eight weeks, what would magazine 137 look like? No, it was time to cut and run. It only takes one little thing to send someone away from Magic, and we have a rulebook that’s packed full of them. Now we have one less. Hooray.
Deathtouch
There are lots of ways that Magic flavor works beautifully, and there are also lots of ways that it doesn’t. You get to make your own bed and lie on it, but for me, I go for a selective approach. Where flavor works, I like to embrace it and consider it a great addition to an already-great game, and where it doesn’t, I just concentrate on the game. The fact that an elephant might struggle to hold my two-handed sword of doom, or that it might benefit from such a weapon, is something I’m quite prepared to leave to one side as my opponent dies in an Equipment-related fatality.
Looking at the keyword itself, you might expect something with Flying to Fly, with Trample to Trample monsters underfoot, and with Deathtouch to have a touch of death, or rather a Touch of Death. To me, you look across the battlefield (and that phrase got typed without thought and quite naturally) and stare at a guy with Deathtouch and think, ‘Hmm, better not let him touch me, or I’ll be dead.’ This is subtly different from what occasionally happens currently, where you have to think, ‘Hmm, better not let him touch me, or I’ll be dead. Twice.’ Please. If he touches you, you die. That’s it. It works in a flavor way, it works in a gaming way, and the phrase Messrs. Forsythe and Gottlieb use in their article, ‘which is unnecessarily hard to intuit’ can approximately be translated as ‘and we thought that was rubbish.’ They were right. It was rubbish, and now it isn’t.
Lifelink
Some you win, some you lose. Of all the lifegain in the game, I’ve enjoyed this the most. Those of you who have written to mourn the passing of multiple stackings of Lifelink have a point. The days of sticking multiple Equipment on a guy and seeing your life hit the stratosphere are done. In a game that likes to accommodate rampantly over the top moments — I’m thinking of Cruel Ultimatum for example — we’ve got one fewer to enjoy. That’s a shame.
Shame also features in this next story, and regretfully the shame is mine. You may think that players didn’t get the whole lifegain interaction wrong, and that you could never get away with actually, according to the rules, dying, and claiming that the lifegain happened all at the same time as the damage and that you were in fact still alive. Surely nobody would pull a cheap trick like that, and surely nobody would be taken in by this lie. Yes they would and yes they did, because the cheap trick was played by me, and I won a match because of it. At a Grand Prix. Definitely not my finest hour. And the reason I was able to get away with such a shameful breaking of the rules? Because my opponent, along with almost anyone below Pro level, automatically assumed that that’s the way Lifegain should, and therefore does, work. Now Lifegain will work the way it obviously should. Lifegain is binary, it’s either on or off, which works nicely in terms of flavor, and all that timing nonsense is cut at a stroke. A price well worth paying.
Combat Damage No Longer Uses The Stack
It will not have escaped your notice that I’ve left this one until last, and unlike the song, I didn’t go and save the best for last. By far and away the most controversial of the changes, this is the dealbreaker to many, the one that tilts them over the edge and results in toys being actively propelled out of many prams. I understand this, and to an extent I agree with it, but I think we’re possibly ignoring a couple of pertinent points.
First, it’s noticeable that there is a distinction to be made between people complaining that cards won’t work the same way in the future, and people complaining that Mogg Fanatic won’t work the same way in the future. One of the great strengths of the game is that players become attached to particular cards, either for their part in special decks (like maybe Force of Will or Masticore) or just because there’s something inherently cute/absurd/powerful/awesome and therefore iconic about them. Mogg Fanatic is utterly beloved by huge numbers of players. This is not a scientific research moment, but my anecdotal recollection of forum response to this news features the following cards:
Mogg Fanatic: 27,638 mentions
Sakura-Tribe Elder: 53 mentions
Ronom Unicorn: 0 mentions
Kami of Ancient Law 0 mentions
This suggests to me that people are generally far more affronted about the neutering of one of their favorite cards rather than objections to the new rules per se. There’s an old saying that individual cases make for bad law, and a huge swathe of us want Wizards to reconsider on the basis of the case of Mogg Fanatic. Nobody cares about when we have to sacrifice Kami of Ancient Law, because it was always a Disenchant on legs. Almost nobody cares about when we have to sacrifice Sakura Tribe-Elder, even though we all liked the bonus of killing something en route to fetching a land. But Mogg Fanatic? Mogg Fanatic was the poster boy for awesome 2 for 1 goodness. And now he isn’t. Plus, it’s human nature to get personal about an abstract issue. ‘Bring Back The Mogg! Bring Back the Mogg!’ is something you can just about, if you close your eyes, hear on the internet winds, yelled by the passionate hordes. ‘Bring Back The Combat Damage On The Stack! Bring Back The Combat Damage On The Stack!’ doesn’t work so well, and that’s why at least one Facebook group needs to employ someone like me as a political strategist.
Another facet of what seems to be making so many people so angry is the idea that the game is being dumbed down in the interest of new or casual players at the expense of the better players. On one level this is impossible to argue against. If you believe that knowing a Mogg Fanatic can sacrifice after damage is on the stack is something that at any given table only you are likely to be aware of… well, then you’ve just lost a competitive edge. That’s true. Personally, and for the most part I can only attest to a small portion of the UK here, the days when maybe half the room at a tournament had no clue about this sort of thing ceased round about 2001. Once you factor in the influence of Magic Online, the idea that this case is turning Magic away from being skill-based to luck-based is patently absurd.
In the next few paragraphs, I’m about to have my cake and eat it, since I’m first going to argue that all Magic players are intrinsically smart, and then spend the following paragraph suggesting that there are near infinite ways for us to make the wrong decision. First, the smart bit. I suspect that it’s a facet of a particular stereotypical Magic demographic of mostly young men who are smart and often distinctive (that’s a polite term for geek/lonely/misfit/deodorant-free) that the average self-esteem of your typical 17 year old player is not terribly high, and in my experience that is if anything multiplied once you reach the Pro Tour. It startles me that people who are to me so clearly intelligent and among the global elite at an intellectual pursuit constantly refer to plays made by opponents as idiotic, and many other words designed to imply that said opponents are stupid.
They are not stupid. Magic players are inherently smart. The bar to entry is set almost impossibly high for your average man or woman on the street. Magic is a game of mind-bending complexity. It has a rulebook — never mind instructions regarding tournament play and so on — that must surely be amongst the most forbidding in gaming history. Anyone who has actually read the cursed thing can be in no doubt as to the vast and intricate web of timings and interactions, and that’s before we get near any individual cards and how they might interact with any of the other 10,000+ cards in the game.
With or without the stack, the opportunity to get things wrong in the game is enormous. In my play circle we have a saying for turn one — ‘Wrong land, wrong Goblin, your turn’ — that serves to ram that home. One day, I’m actually going to carry out my threat of taking part in a scientific experiment with Steve Sadin. I’ll now allow you to conjure up whatever images you choose of me taking part in a scientific experiment with Steve Sadin, and then explain. I plan to do a Draft with Steve looking over my picks, my building, and my play, and attempt to accurately note how many ways our choices differ, and the things that he’s considering in making his choices that I’m not making in mine. My current working title for the resulting article is ‘100 Reasons Why Steve Sadin Is Better Than Me At Magic,’ because I believe 100 is the bare minimum number of ways in the course of a draft that Steve will be able to gain an edge over me.
Here’s the thing. I’m not stupid. I’m not a bad Magic player. Simply by playing a whole bunch of sanctioned matches I’m almost certainly better than the ‘average’ player (i.e. the 3 millionth player in a fictional ranking of all 6 million). Come to that, I’m a better than average tournament player, in that I’ve won more than I’ve lost, and I’ve been to a couple of Pro Tours. And the gulf between me and Steve is enormous. This rule change has absolutely not changed that. In one very small way my chances have marginally increased. I’m prepared to hazard a guess that there isn’t a single Pro who is losing any sleep over this change in terms of the inability to sacrifice a creature with damage on the stack impacting their chances of winning a Pro Tour.
In truth, the bit that scares me most is the change to handling blockers. If even my fragile little mind can come up with obvious scenarios where the defending player is going to have the opportunity to utterly destroy opposing plans thanks to the forced ordering of assignments when attacking into multiple blockers, you can be sure that those opportunities are plentiful. The one currently keeping me awake at night looks something like this:
I have a 6/6, attacking into a 4/4 and six 1/1 tokens.
Let’s start with the current rules. My opponent casts Giant Growth on his 4/4, making it a 7/7. I put damage on the stack, recognising that I can’t kill the 4/4, so I assign 1 damage to each of the six tokens and they all die. In scenario two, my opponent is a bit better. We put damage on the stack, and I assign 4 to the 4/4 and 1 to each of two tokens. With damage on, he casts Giant Growth on his 4/4. Two tokens die. In scenario three, I decide that the tokens are the big threat, because I have point removal down the line for his 4/4. I assign one damage to each of the 6 tokens. He Giant Growths one of them to save it. Five of them die.
Now here come the new rules.
I want to kill the 4/4, so I rank that blocker first, then the tokens as blockers 2 thru 7. He Giant Growths the 4/4. Instead of getting to kill every single token under the old rules, I now get to kill nothing, since I have to assign lethal damage to the now-7/7 blocker before I’m allowed anywhere near the tokens. My guy dies, and I have nothing to show for it. Suppose I want to kill the six tokens. He Giant Growths the one I’m assigning to first. Net result is that his 4/4 token dies, plus two more. I get to kill three, rather than the five I would have killed under the old rules (he gets to save one whether he Growths before damage on the stack or with it already on.) Now let’s suppose I’ve done some thinking on this, and suspect a Giant Growth. My correct ordering is then token 1, token 2, 4/4, then tokens 3 thru 6. If he doesn’t have it, I get to kill two tokens and a 4/4. If he does have it, he uses it on either of the first two tokens, and my net result is one measly token dying. This is despite the fact that I have more than enough power to kill five tokens, or two tokens and a 4/4. It’s just that, under the new rules, I won’t be allowed to.
There’s still time in combat for me to Unsummon my guy once he casts Giant Growth. I can still Terror something once he casts Giant Growth. I can still cast a Giant Growth of my own once he casts Giant Growth. But apparently there’s no time for me to say to my guy, ‘Tell you what. That guy over there’s a bit too hot to handle. How about you take a step sideways and batter the living daylights out of those other chaps over there?’ In flavor terms this is a nonsense. How can there possibly be time to cast entire spells from scratch, yet not to either issue new orders or presume in some way that my monsters will behave in the most beneficial fashion to me, rather than rushing headlong into disaster? Never mind the flavor, let’s talk gaming. Combat has always favored the defending team, because they get to choose where they block, and the attacker has to guess what those blocks will be. Now, the defender has been given even more help. When you double block, you use your Giant Growth to avoid both of them dying to the enormous man bearing down on you. One of them bites the dust, you save your favorite, and move on. Now, it’s a very good bet that you get to save both of them.
Oh look, I give up. Like many of you, I’m getting all hung up on a particular scenario of my choosing. It’s always possible to ridicule a system by looking at the most extreme and absurd scenarios that system is responsible for. Consider Democracy and American History circa 2000. The bottom line is this — of course I don’t like change, especially when it’s change I don’t entirely understand, either in execution or in philosophy. If there are indeed compelling reasons for the ordering of blockers in this new way, I’ve either failed to comprehend them, or they haven’t yet been presented.
But that’s not the point. Me not liking it, you not liking it, the Queen of England not liking it, all irrelevant. Because I come back once again to the question I asked several thousand words ago. Those super-smart people in that super-smart office in Renton obviously believe that they’re doing the right thing. It is INCONCEIVABLE that they are dumb enough to embark on such mammoth changes without actual serious cast-in-stone data to support it. Personally, I’ve never had a problem teaching the stack. Personally, I’ve yet to play with anyone who ‘doesn’t invoke it (the stack) at all’. Everyone I know uses the stack, but that’s because everyone I know is good at Magic. Everyone I know plays in PTQs. Many of my friends are Pros.
Many of my friends don’t buy Magic cards.
These changes should be, are, MUST be a response to serious polling data that DEMANDS change. Can anyone seriously suppose that Aaron and friends sit around trying to work out how to get rid of the most number of players in one stroke? ‘Hey, this should really energise the forums!’
As it happens, I’m either completely neutral or actively positive about most of the changes. There’s one I’m moderately certain I dislike, don’t understand, and it will cost me multiple games while I work out how to play with it correctly, cursing all the while.
Aaron Forsythe, the Sarek of Seattle, says in his article that he’s ‘prepared to defend all these decisions,’ and if you’ve met the man, you better believe he means it. Just like the changes to Organized Play — the last time The Sky Is Falling Society got to exercise their vocal muscles — although plenty in the game has changed, nothing has really Changed. This game is still one of the ultimate gaming challenges out there. It’s still packed full of more interactions than we can possibly quantify. It’s still packed full of millions of tiny edges that allow us to outfight, and outthink, and outplay our opponents. The fact is, with reference to those earlier changes that apparently were harbingers of the end of the line, this game Still Isn’t Star Trek, and, thankfully for the long-term wellbeing of the game we all love, the needs of the many continue to outweigh the needs of the few.
‘Or the one.’
Alright Nimoy, you’re outta here, new franchise or no.
As ever, thanks for reading,
R.