Bonus Mini-Article To Not Interrupt The Dramatic Conclusion
We’re starting another drought period for me; to write about MTGO standard isn’t all that valuable, so I will be abstaining from too much speculative deck construction and simply work with what I play. I don’t post decklists I haven’t tested as the core of an article. Two main reasons for that; the first is that the Ferrett says it’s bad (and while other people who submitted during the era of free submissions might not be so scrupulous about it, I see the rules as worth following). So, rather than post speculative lists (well, okay, maybe one, but it’s about as obvious as they get), I’m going to just try and figure out something special to do in the final, intervening drought period. Any suggestions?
Wow. It’s one day and I’ve produced three full articles. These set review things really are amazingly dense on material for writers. It’s good, though – I’ve got a job now, so my time to futz around in the eleventh hour and give Craig a full article is reduced. This means that now, my budget decks will take more time to coagulate… and oh god, I still haven’t got half the stuff from Planar Chaos I wanted, and the market’s going to lock up again. Or maybe I’m just rubbish at finding cards I want. Anyway.
Remember, everyone, to hug a kitten (good), a puppy (better) or a ferret (best), to smell a flower, and to say something heart-felt and kind to a co-worker today. Life’s too short to be angry about things all the time, and whatever the basis of your morality, almost all people can agree: It’s better to be kind.
I now turn this article over to Angry Talen.
Hugs And Kisses
Nice Talen Lee
talen at dodo dot com dot au
Future Sight’s release prompted from me a flurry of writing. Rather than be completely disconnected from the realities of the game, I had to take a pause and wait on this article, because even now, it’s not going to be seen for another four weeks. This means that this article is written before Mark’s had a chance to trot out his rhetoric, explaining what Future Sight Is, or how it All Makes Sense, or why, exactly, the Promised Land looks an awful lot like Canberra.
So here we go.
I Can Do What I Want, I’m Mark F!*$ing Rosewater
One of the core problems with Future Sight, going in, is that "the future" isn’t just a vague theme, it’s a stupid theme. The future is unbound, featuring possibility all over the place… and they’re going to print cards that supposedly fit from these potential futures that offer us both a view of the future mechanically, and that give us a view of the future with flavor as well?
Now, to strip that down: It will be a block full of mechanics that have no connection to anything else, and no flavor that relates to anything we’ve seen before. That bears a strong resemblance to a set composed of "no theme at all." Going in, there was the very real possibility that, aside from some odd card names and wonky creature types, it’s just a block that doesn’t tie into the novel we don’t read.
Can anyone tell me what Silhana is? There are two cards that wear the title, and if you put the two of them together you get an untargetable mana elf that flies. There doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of cohesion, nor do either of them have keyword abilities. So the question is, what exactly does Silhana Starfletcher mean? It means he… uh… Starfletches. From Silhana. Or, he’s a Silhanan Elf. Or perhaps his fighting style was developed by the ancient bowyer Silhana. I mean, so much of the Magic environment doesn’t have much flavor at all, it hardly matters that we’re Not Getting the Silhana Elves of Ravnica or Not Getting the Patrician’s Spiteful Ghost. It’s no different.
So, unless flavor does its department really well (and it didn’t), the flavor of the set could just be accounted to a dozen or more odd cards. Worse, the "new" stuff from the future more or less has to be random in what it does. Worse, there were more than a few cards that did something new – the enchantments that tap, the colored artifact – and none of these cards are interesting. They do "new things." That’s a glimpse into the future, but it could just as easily be a glimpse into the present.
Tomorrow Looks Like Today
Wizards did have their work cut out for them; after all, they had to try and show us the future. So they did stuff to make sure the Future-Shifted cards were obvious. They recruited new artists, they used a card face, and they keyworded "new mechanics." Of those new mechanics, let’s do a quick run through of the "new" keyword mechanics introduced in the block:
Absorb 1 (Seen it; indeed, Lymph Sliver is a mechanically identical card to Daunting Defender, just the creature types are different.)
Aura Swap (That’s new.)
Delve (New, and hi, Noah!)
Fateseal (Kinda new.)
Thingcycling (Seen it.)
Gravestorm (That’s, uh, kinda new.)
Transfigure (That’s, um, pseudo-new.)
Frenzy (Seen it!)
Poisonous (Seeeeen it.)
Shroud (Seen it.)
Reach (Seen it.)
Deathtouch (Seen it.)
So of that, we have Gravestorm, Fateseal, Transfigure, Delve, and Aura Swap. Five new mechanics, and I honestly only see one of them being deep enough to actually be block mechanics in the first place. The rest are just cruft, singleton cards that were keyworded, and given a new cardframe to be from the future! Did it work? Well, I suppose it did. It’s just that it doesn’t prompt me to raise an eyebrow and say "Oh, man, I want to see some more of that…"
Sure, I’m a picky git, but I don’t think I’m alone in this. When they say we’ll see "new stuff," then the vast majority of that new stuff is just old stuff in new skirts, it has me wondering what Wizards are thinking. Surely this isn’t how things are, is it? There are enough people who are seriously against the idea of this common keywording (indeed, I don’t think these cards need keywording in any case, though sure, you could make a case for Shroud, I suppose) that if you want to glimpse the future, wouldn’t it be better to actually show us future mechanics? You’re not about to make Absorb a set mechanic, for god’s sake – it’s a mechanic heavily owned by White, and generally boring as hell once it’s been used.
The Future Shifted frame is just an excuse to say "Nuh-uh" when they realize people hate the keyword, right? Without the tenuous connection to the future, these cards are just cards that have no practical effect. Worse, most, if not all of them, are underpowered! There’s the Delve Demon that people are fussing about (I’m with Bennie Smith), and the rest of the cards are just mediocre. A Deathtouch, Reach, two-drop! Oh my god! So much more playable than Stinkweed Imp, eh what? Fateseal? Well, it’s on nothing that costs three or less, so it’s clearly going to get a lot of play, amirite?
Then there are the Future-Shifted cards that make sense not only as present cards, but make almost no sense as the cards they are: Deepcavern Imp? What the hell does this guy have to do with the Future? Black rebels, playing with echo costs… that sounds like right now. Grave Scrabbler? Madness, no flavor text, and, uh… Future-Shifted card frame. What an exotic and interesting glimpse into the future: There will be sh** cards in the future too!
You could make the case – weakly – that these things are "new" and "exciting" because well, they’ve never done off-color or non-mana echo costs before. The problem with that is, they were as obvious as the nose on your face the second you saw Time Spiral’s errata to echo! If Future Sight had had an actual theme, and not just the theme of, you know, no theme, then we’d have expected to see those cards anyway, because they’re the obvious and logical conclusion of variable echo costs! I mean, the first time echo came around, it was a simple price reduction, then it got tricky and put on creatures you wanted to die, and then it got trickier and got on creatures who gave you a spell and if you paid the echo cost, a dude with haste. That was a pretty sweet deal. This time around, the permutation is pretty damn obvious – to palm off The Present as The Future is weak indeed.
On Aurochs
Hot on the heels of One With Nothing, Wizards tried to see if it could produce an even more embarrassing rare. You know who I’m talking about. Yes, who else is excited at the prospect of buying a Future Sight Booster? You could get the double whammy – two rares! You could get Force of Savagery and a Steamflogger Boss!
Let’s talk about Steamflogger Boss.
Four mana, 3/3, no abilities. Rare.
Wizards… when you want to print a card that will excite us, intrigue us about the new mechanic, and perhaps make us whet at the whistle, why not make it a card that actually has the goddamn mechanic? When you printed Spike Drone, while it was not exciting, it was at least a Spike. This guy is not only not exciting without Contraptions and Riggers, he’s utterly unexciting in his best-case scenario. If you draw all four of them, and bomb them onto the table on turns 3, 4, 5, and 6, you have four 6/3s with haste. That is your best-case scenario, and you spent sixteen mana and a god draw to get it! If you’d drawn, say, four Chars, you wouldn’t be being foiled by your opponent’s creatures and you wouldn’t have spent sixteen mana.
The thing is, I don’t want to see riggers, now. I don’t want to see the riggers in my Future Sight boosters, and I don’t want to see them in my Lorwyn boosters. This card, on its own, has generated an enormous amount of ill-will. Sure, one day, it might be sex on a cake, but right now, it’s crap, and it will invariably never be good in Standard because otherwise, Lorwyn has to feature the mechanics that will make him good… and I sure as hell don’t want to see them.
Wizards, by the way? You have three Eighth Edition lords that cost three mana. None of them are heavily played in Standard. A four mana lord isn’t going to do much either.
Thus we have the final vanity of Future Sight. You have at least one example of a parasitic card, and that card has no hosts. It’s Aurochs. Worse than Aurochs, it’s an Aurochs that’s rare. Now, you’d think that, with Coldsnap on the books, Wizards would have peeked at Ice Age. Then they’d possibly learn something from that. Junk rares are to be avoided. Oh, yes, there are going to be "bad rares." Wizards showed with Time Spiral block that they have the means and the skill to produce a block where the rares have specific lures, not cards that have no value. Candles of Leng is a house in Singleton. Endrek Sahr tickles Johnnies and Vorthoses.
Steamflogger Boss’ appeal is far more narrow. More narrow than even One With Nothing, which put itself proudly on a pedestal as a terrible freaking card. Steamflogger Boss is Hill Giant. It’s not unprintable. It’s not totally worthless. It’s just a complete let-down. Fortunately, Future Sight is thin on these cards… and yet, they’re there. There are lurking cards that sit in the wings and murmur “You know, I might suck, but wait until you see my pals.”
It doesn’t so much build anticipation as much as it makes you wonder why the hell the bad cards of the future sets decided to show up. Can we skip the cruddy cards and move on to the, you know, the good cards from those future sets?
There’s a school of thought that says these cards are good because they "encourage strong feelings." They do. I stopped buying boosters when I got a foil One With Nothing in my first Saviors of Kamigawa booster. I didn’t buy a single non-drafting booster after that point, and I didn’t buy any more Saviors… and now, consider the flip side.
How many kids do you see who open a One With Nothing – this supposedly hard-core, die-hard, must-have group of Johnnies who see OWN as a challenge, – and pump the fist triumphantly, crying aloud, “This is the best set EVER!”? I imagine you don’t. Because those Johnnies who see it as a challenge go to the people who draft, and the people who buy boxes, and the people who have One With Nothings as the price of doing business, and they say “Hey, can I have this?” and the response tends to be “Just get it away from me.”
I can’t imagine how in the world these "strong feeling" cards could increase sales of boosters. They’d just increase resentment and irritation and those people who are happy to see the cards are able to see them in the binders of people who already bought more of the set than they’re happy with, because they have crap like this.
Aside:
Since writing this article, Aaron basically came out and said "Oh, by the way, Steamflogger is a joke hah hah hah hah."
You know what, Aaron? Screw you. You do this so often. Squire was a joke! Hah hah hah hah! And One With Nothing’s a bad boy who needs to be printed! Hah hah hah hah! Will you kindly get knotted? I mean, I actually spend money on boosters, and I don’t like it when my six dollars turns into a whoopee cushion for the designers of the game to laugh over. A practical joke’s only funny if the person it’s played on laughs as well, and that’s not likely to happen when he has to pay money to participate in the joke.
Revenge of Greater Mossdog
Imagine, if you will, that Wizards of the Coast had opted to show us Greater Mossdog as the spoiler card for Dredge. What if, instead of showcasing Grave-Shell Scarab, Shambling Shell, and Nightmare Void, Wizards had decided to show us Greater Mossdog? I’ll bet you the hits for the site wouldn’t have been quite so impressive.
So why did Maro choose to show us a "Greater Mossdog" as the Future Sight preview? We got Venser and… Uh, Fleshwrither. Fleshwrither is the single most simplistic execution of his mechanic you can get. He’s a French Vanilla creature! Someone went into this set’s design with the wrong attitude.
This was not a chance for you to clear the cruft out of the development folder, Mark. This was a chance for you to make a whole set of preview cards. Write up a list of ridiculous cards, like your infamous "two mana angel," then make that into a set. What the hell are you doing, giving us Hill Giants with non-abilities, or sorcery speed Transmutes. What’s with Aura Swap?
If you want us, as a marketing sample, to voice our opinions on what you we do and don’t like, don’t ask us to choose between Lay’s Plain Chips and Lay’s Plain Chips and, oh, wait, what about Lay’s Plain Chips? You don’t find strong opinions just waffling around the middle. Why didn’t you make Fleshwrither cool as a creature?
Well… we couldn’t make the ability instant-speed, or it’d lose the reference to Transmute. Oh.
And we couldn’t make the creature any more complex because, well, Transfigure has a lot of card text. Oh.
Aura Swap? Same deal? Can’t make it complicated, can’t make it cool?
You ever played a game of Constructed magic with a deck of draft commons? Now imagine a set like that.
Future Sight is a set that, if you actually presented it without the funky frames to a new player, and asked them to discern the theme, they’d probably be completely lost. With the funky frames, they’d probably guess that some other game was, in fact, invading Magic, and that other game wasn’t all that special. The three sets taken as a whole have the theme, but you have to already be acquainted with the colors of the past, the way the color pie does work, and of course, Mark Rosewater writing. As far as approachability goes, this set is ghastly. I started playing in Scourge, and I’m stunned that I have seen so little in this set that really evokes the past to me. There’s some neat stuff, but there’s so much laziness, so much cruft. So much of the Easy Way Out, using Nostalgia as the backdoor to escape all criticism.
Planar Chaos shook me out of my general dislike of Time Spiral block. It prompted me to shake off the shell and buy boosters, because damnit, that set had cool stuff in it. Future Sight has left me with a washed-out, bored feeling. The future looks an awful lot like Saviors of Kamigawa.
Bite Me,
Angry Talen Lee
talen at dodo dot com dot au