This past weekend my good friend Al had some buddies over to “celebrate” his 40th birthday. I put the word celebrate in quotes because he wasn’t exactly keen on celebrating the event of turning 40, but he thought it would be a good excuse to have some friends over. He got some gag gifts, the funniest of which was this book entitled “Sex Over 40.” It was a hardbound volume, with an informative jacket and everything. Inside, the pages were blank.
For us geezers, we found it hysterical.
Another funny gag gift was a T-shirt with a dog skeleton on it. The caption said, “In Dog Years I’d Be Dead.” Al just recently had to put down his dog due to old age, so the gag was a bit cruel, but somehow still very funny in a way that only long time friends could get away with. At least, Al seemed to take it the right way, with minimal shoulder punching and profanity.
I’ve known Al since we were in 3rd grade, and when we were in middle school we were the only two geeks in school who had even heard of Dungeons & Dragons, so we were drawn together as gamers often are, and have been friends ever since. 28 years is an impressively long time to be friends, and I would say that our friendship has enriched our lives and those we’ve met along the way immensely. I still get together every other Monday night to play in his D&D campaign.
Anyway, back to the party. Al’s younger brother Dan brought a movie that he claimed was “the best B-grade Horror movie ever made. Period.” For fans of Evil Dead and From Dusk to Dawn, that’s a pretty bold claim. The name of the film was Feast, and I thought I had heard of it before but couldn’t put my finger on it. Dan mentioned the winner of Project Greenlight directed it, and then my inner movie/screenwriting geek kicked in – aha! I remember hearing about that… and I seemed to remember hearing that making this film was a complete and utter disaster. On the plus side, we had a case of Coronas to drink, so I braced myself with some cold ones and prepared for the worst.
You know what? Dan was right. Feast is indeed the best B-grade Horror movie ever made. It was cheesy, gory, gratuitous, not at all scary, it covered all the bases you want from B-grade Horror and yet had quite a few surprises that smashed your expectations all to hell. And it had some of the most hilarious moments I’d ever seen in a B-grade Horror flick. It’s the kind of movie that I could go on and on and on about for several paragraphs detailing the great moments, but I obviously don’t want to spoil it for you except for one tantalizing bit: Henry Rollins in pink sweats. That’s all I’ll say. If you’re a fan of the genre, queue it up on Netflix or run down to the Blockbusters and check it out.
It is serious good times. With or without a bunch of Coronas. If you’ve seen it, drop me a message and let me know your favorite parts of the movie other than the hotness of Honey Pie. That’s obvious good times!
Onward to Magic…
“It was very hard to get women the vote, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t worth fighting for.”
Talen Lee
I wanted to start with this quote; Talen was responding to Remie making a point in the forums of Jamie Wakefield‘s recent column that it was hard not to make Blue powerful because of Blue’s history, themes, and flavor. Now that the entirety of Time Spiral block is released I think it’s starting to sink in just how ridiculous they’ve made Blue… again. People are chatting about it in the forums and such, and I wanted to spend my time this week adding my two cents on the subject before we shift into Regionals high gear.
Imagine for a second if Teferi was Green… the cynical answer would be that they’d strip away Flash and add three generic mana to the casting cost because, you know, Green is the color of mana acceleration so it can afford to pay extra. But I mean imagine for a second that Green Teferi was exactly like Blue Teferi, but with Green mana instead of Blue.
Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
2GGG
Legendary Creature – Human Wizard
3/4
Flash (You may play this spell any time you could play an instant.) Creature cards you own that aren’t in play have flash. Each opponent can play spells only any time he or she could play a sorcery.
While Wizards’ creative group may argue that Teferi is supposed to be a Blue mage, I’m sure those guys could use their creativity to justify Teferi’s move to the Green – perhaps after phasing out his homeland, he became more in tune with the actual land itself. They’ve shifted colors of legends before (i.e. the flavors of Kamahl). I also think arguments could be made that this card is exactly in flavor with Green. Blue is green’s enemy, and nothing hoses blue quite as well as Teferi does. It’s like an improved City of Solitude that can beat down. Best of all, it makes all your creatures clever. Imagine how a Green Teferi would change the current Standard and block metagames?
I bet it never even occurred to anyone at R&D to make Teferi a color other than Blue, and I think that’s a fundamental problem. There’s a box there, a predisposition, a conventional wisdom that needs to be broken through. The assumption is that Blue is the clever color. More on that a little later on.
A quick side rant – One issue I do have though is that, whether it’s Blue or Green, Teferi as printed is just way over the top too powerful. The mistake here is the line: Each opponent can play spells only any time he or she could play a sorcery. While it hoses counterspells and limits the flexibility of instants, the biggest issue is that it incidentally hoses one of the major mechanics for the entire block! Suspend is a very interesting mechanic with a lot of great tension – do you invest a card and mana now that won’t have an impact on the game for several turns? You also have all the time-counter management spells and effects that help make Suspended cards tricky and clever if you’re willing to invest the deck-space for it.
All of that is completely screwed by Teferi. That just seems like an incredibly stupid move. Why would you print a card so good on its own its going to see play everywhere, and it just happens to invalidate the entirety of a block’s major theme? I can’t imagine development missed the fact that Teferi hoses Suspend, so I wish I knew why they thought it would be okay to print it as is.
It seems the problem could have been solved by simply making that last line read: Each opponent can play spells only during his or her turn. It would be the same flavor-wise, and be pretty close to the same functionally, and yet you could still pursue Suspend strategies.
Back to the forums discussions on the subject, generally, of Green versus Blue. Jeroen Remie said, “The thing is, there is always going to be a best color. Blue has been this through the years, and because of this it is hard to change all that because of all the cards and themes it has. It seems to me that a lot of people would be happy if Green was the best and Blue wasn’t, which just doesn’t make sense to me… People complaining about how they like fatties, but all the good ones are Blue, and they want to play Green… I just don’t understand why all of this is a problem.
"Magic is a game of balance, just not the one people would like to see for some reason. Blue is the best, White is the worst… that’s just the way it is and has been for years… I really do not think Magic would be better if Green got all these super-cards and Blue got nothing, it would just be people complaining about how good Green is and how bad Blue has become…”
Jamie Wakefield kind of kicked this discussion into the limelight by expressing his disappointment in the current crop of Green cards, and expressing some exasperation at the power level of Blue (and heck, he’s even conceded and played some Blue cards). As a fellow elder mage, I feel Jamie’s frustration because we’ve been dealing with Blue being “the best” color since the inception of the game. Jamie sets up the argument as Green versus Blue because Green is his favorite color, but in a way I think that distracts from the focus of the problem. Remie and others feel that some color has to be “the best” and why shouldn’t it be Blue?
Why should any color be “the best?”
In recent Wizards history, there have been some rumblings about trying to even out the power level of the colors, to balance the “color pie.” The good folks at Wizards recognized there was a problem in having one color – Blue – being way too good set after set after set. Many players gravitate towards a particular color or colors as a favorite to play, and if it’s not Blue there’s going to come a point where the player gets frustrated or worse. That’s obviously not good in terms of keeping a customer for life. The effort to balance the colors was appreciated – it was something that needed doing and I looked forward to seeing the fruits of that labor. For a while I thought we were seeing a permanent shift; Blue’s counterspells were made a bit worse overall, good card drawing was slowed down to sorcery speed. Other colors started getting pushed on power level.
With Time Spiral block though, I think some old habits started creeping back in.
I’d like to go back to 2002, when Chad Ellis wrote a great article right here on Star City, Bennie Smith Is 100% Right , Or: Why Clever Is Better Than Power. While the title certainly stroked my ego at the time (he was responding to my article Don’t Blink or You’ll Miss the Green Age of Magic), I thought he expanded on my points and built an indictment on Wizard’s course of action much better than I did. At the time it was brilliant, and I think as time has passed much of what he said is even prophetic. Here’s the core of what Chad said:
“Randy [Buehler] made mention of a ‘pie’ of abilities, and recognized that Blue has more than its share. R&D wants to correct that, and maybe they will. But I think they won’t, at least not for a while, unless they recognize an inherent bias in the way they think about the colors [emphasis added by me—Bennie]. Blue isn’t the color of flying, or of card drawing, or of instants, and Green isn’t the creature color. Blue is the clever color. Green isn’t…
“Clever things often happen at instant speed and bend or break the rules. It means that Blue isn’t just the color of card drawing or countering. It means that Blue is the color of broken things. Blue is the color of creature control (Aether Burst and Repulse tend to get played in preference to any Black removal in Psychatog decks), global removal (Upheaval), permission, card drawing, and too many other good things.
“As long as Wizards thinks of Blue as the clever color, two things will tend to happen. One is that Blue will tend to be overpowered. The clever mechanics are usually the best ones, so cards like Fact or Fiction are more likely to pop up than broken cards in other colors. All of the Alliances "free" spells have seen top-level constructed play, but only Force of Will consistently shows up in the majority of Extended decks. Blue may be the non-creature color – but Morphling, Tradewind Rider, and Ophidian are among the best creatures ever. Lots of other Blue spells didn’t look that amazing at first but have since proven to be extremely powerful: Gush, Donate, Intuition, Brainstorm, etc. Cleverness multiplies, so when you put a large number of spells together, the clever ones are the most likely to show that they are broken in combination with something else.
“The other problem with Blue being the clever color is that Wizards misses chances to make other colors better and more fun. To make Green and Red better now, you are almost entirely restricted to upping their raw power. That leads to fast games and quick kills, rather than skill-based competition.
“It sounds like Wizards recognizes the problem, but may be heading in the wrong direction for a solution. Blue’s card-drawing spells becoming Sorceries is a notable example. This will certainly make things harder for Blue (Counterspell and Concentrate have a lot less synergy than Counterspell and Fact or Fiction), but I don’t think the best answer is to make Blue less clever. Instead, let’s make the other colors more clever.
“Put another way, Wizards doesn’t need to make Blue share the wealth in terms of number of mechanics. It needs to make Blue share the cleverness.”
Sorry to have such a huge block of quoted text, but I really couldn’t say it much better than Chad did back in 2002. The problem then, and now, is that Wizards still views Blue as the Clever Color. If a card or mechanic seems best done at instant speed, there is a bias to make it Blue, or at least to make the Blue cards with that feature better. In a lot of ways it’s understandable, given Blue’s history. Veterans of the game – and Wizards R&D is chock full of them – have that bias deep down in their bones. It’s easy to fall back into those habits, to go with the gut, to go with your instincts. But Magic deserves better than the easy answer; Magic players deserve better. R&D needs to buckled down and do the heavy lifting required to balance the colors in terms of being clever.
They have certainly made some progress in this; Sulfur Elemental is an ingenious bit of non-Blue cleverness that has really caught on both in Block Constructed and Standard. Sadly though, Sulfur Elemental didn’t come out of any particular desire to make Red clever, it came out of R&D’s desire to hose a perceived problem in the upcoming metagame, a life-gaining combo deck built around Martyr of Sands and Proclamation of Rebirth.
In the forums Orbifold pointed this out: “Scryb Ranger was created in development, and Spectral Force was originally Spectral Boars. (Note that two of the three Green Boars in the game have been 4/4’s for five mana. Whee.)
”Here we see that Troll Ascetic and Kodama of the North Tree were created outright by development teams to fill various holes. Similarly for Loxodon Hierarch, here.
”Here we see that Eternal Witness came out of design as a 2/2 for six mana. Six. It was improved in development after development decided that Green… you know, the color of the sun that the entire set was named after… wasn’t impressive for Constructed.
”And finally, here we see that Arashi originally had the same cost and P/T as Jiwari the Earth Aflame until development pumped up Arashi (and took Jiwari down a notch).
”I have no problem with Magic developers. Designers, however, may need a wee kick in the pants.”
I bring this up because Orbifold suggests that some bias exists on the conceptual side of R&D and brings up Green cards as an example. Developers swooped in here and rescued these specific cards by increasing their potency, but I think this illustrates an opportunity for improving Green – and other non-Blue cards – by improving their cleverness. Let me go back to Talen Lee on this point:
“I am annoyed at the lack of potency and poor design in Green and White not because they’re my favorite colors; while I like things that fall into their domain, that doesn’t mean that my motivation for demanding a fix is based on favoritism. Indeed, it’s kinda insulting to have it inferred that I’m only up about this issue because my favorite toy isn’t good enough. If any color was grotesquely in need of help, I’d like to think I’d champion it. Hell, right now, power-wise, Green DOESN’T need help. Green needs a serious shot in the development arm, where someone can stand up and holler at design and development and show them that 4/4s for five are not that exciting at all.”
More importantly than that though, is that somehow the word needs to get into design and development that they’re falling down on the job as far as injecting Clever Things into all the colors. Sure, we can point to individual cards and say “this color got Card X and it’s certainly clever,” but you need to look at the overall… I’ll call it the Cleverness Spectrum. Blue has dominated that spectrum since the dawn of Magic, and it’s why the pros tend to favor that color. Clever cards often translate into being more powerful, but at their core they give you opportunity to outplay your opponent. Green and White tend to leave little opportunity to outplay your opponent. While some people may shrug and say “well, that’s just the way their themes are realized in the game,” I think that’s the easy way out. Just because it may be difficult to make Green or White or other colors as clever as Blue, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting for.
Let’s take a look at the Card Counts of the Top 50 Decks from the recent Block Constructed Pro Tour, and specifically the maindeck totals. Let’s ignore lands and mana producers, fundamental parts of the game but generally “unclever.” We have Cancel topping the list, proving that even a “bad” counterspell is still good. I actually don’t have a problem with Cancel per se, but it’s still a little disheartening to see it at the top of the list. Next we have the incredible Sulfur Elemental, a hole-filler that is actually quite clever. Then we have Damnation… and of course you expect a Wrath of God to place high. Next up – Aeon Chronicler. This is a perfect example of the Blue bias when you look at the cycle of Suspend critters that do things when you remove a time counter. Aeon Chronicler is incredibly good all the way around; Detritivore is situationally good, and yet you also have to be careful or you could end up nuking your own lands. The White one is okay, but once he hits play the odds are pretty good he’s not going to be a big presence on the board unless your opponent has zero creature removal. The Green and Black ones are just positively wretched. Now, I’m not saying that Wizards should have nerfed Aeon Chronicler, and made it change the color of a permanent each time you remove a time counter or something lame like that. But couldn’t we have made the others in the cycle equally as clever? Make Detritivore’s land-nuking ability a “may.” Make Benalish Commander have an ability “all your creatures gain the ‘Soldier’ type” to improve his board presence once he unsuspends. Tie Fungal Behemoth into Saprolings and Thallids a little more tightly. Roiling Horror? I have no idea, but that’s where the heavy lifting comes in.
Continuing down the list, we have Blood Knight, filling a preemptive strike role against the White Weenie metagame menace leading up to the tournament. Then we have Mystical Teachings! Ah, Mystical Teachings, the latest instant Blue card selector / card advantage machine. I think it’s safe to say at least half of each Teachings played stood as a virtual Teferi, so if you had half the copies of Mystical Teachings to the number of Teferis played, Teferi jumps up the list breathing right behind Damnation.
I’ve already ranted plenty about Teferi, so let’s move on.
Next up we have Harmonize, a card that many people will point to and say “Look, card drawing for Green! See, there’s no color balance issues.” Raw card drawing is a welcome addition to a color that has seen very little of that in the history of the game, but raw card drawing, especially at sorcery speed, isn’t at all clever. Powerful, yes. Clever, no. What about a Mystical Teachings-type card for creatures for 3G, with a White flashback? Sure, it would be a lot like Chord of Calling, but it wouldn’t require you necessarily have a bunch of creatures or lands in play to be effective.
Next up (after Search for Tomorrow for mana) is Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. Urborg is actually quite clever, so thumbs up for that. It does a lot of things very nicely, turbo-charging all of Black’s swamp-centric spells and abilities so you can use non-swamp lands, and it can even give your Swampwalkers maindeck potential. It’s so clever in what it does that some players bucked conventional wisdom of running 1-2 copies to the point of running up to 4 in their deck to maximize the chance of finding it, determining the risk of drawing multiples to be worth it.
Next is Dead / Gone, which is pretty good creature removal. Shifting bounce to Red was certainly a clever move for Planar Chaos, but sadly that’s just a one set deal.
Next up, Vesuvan Shapeshifter. Here’s another interesting question for you – what if Vesuvan Shapeshifter was Green? Sure, Blue is the color of copying, but why shouldn’t Green be able to copy creatures? Has anyone in R&D even broached that notion?
Speaking of Shapeshifter, I’ve been wondering about his partner in crime, Brine Elemental. Why isn’t Brine Elemental White (and renamed of course)? I know Blue has had the “don’t untap” thing going in the past, but White has taken over recently on the ability to take away of change rules of the game. Yosei and Dust Drinker are two recent “don’t untap next time” examples. Why decide to take it back to Blue for this set?
Next up is Teferi, so I’ll go ahead and end things there. The point of all this is that Wizards needs to make sure that a particular color doesn’t have the lion’s share of “clever cards,” regardless of whether a particular color’s flavor, themes, or color pie assignations make cleverness easy or difficult to design. Clever cards tend to be good cards, and a critical mass of them in a particular color tends to leave a very bad taste in a lot of player’s mouths. At the highest levels of play, the pros simply identify the power and clever cards and play them where they find them; but further down the scale, where people game for fun and flavor, it’s disheartening to keep going to a Friday Night Magic tournament and seeing Blue decks constantly winning the tournament and dominating the top tables if you don’t necessarily enjoy playing Blue. Magic – the game and its players – deserve the design and development hard work and heavy lifting necessary to strip out the bias and distribute cleverness across all the colors.
Next week, thoughts on Regionals playtesting so far…
Until then!
Bennie