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The setting was fine but the actual cards were full of parasitic mechanics and ranged in quality from "Worse than literally not having a card in your deck at all." to "Hilariously broken beyond belief."
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Oct 26, 2019 06:58
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Toshimo posted:Reminds me of when Magic: The Gathering kept getting feedback that people were down with a Japanese setting. And they got one and it was rad as all hell. But the players all hated it because what they really wanted was an anime setting. So, it sold like poo poo and the setting got shoved to last in line to ever revisit. That setting was trash for more reasons than a focus on folklore. The one that still makes me sad is the general plan to never visit the Lorwyn/Mirrordin block again. That setting was awesome. Fairies and hobbits and terror in the woods and no humans at all.
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Oct 26, 2019 06:58
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theironjef posted:That setting was trash for more reasons than a focus on folklore. can I ask for an elaboration on this? I'm only very shallowly into MTG so I'd like to hear your take
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Oct 26, 2019 07:55
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i thought kamigawa was neat
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Oct 26, 2019 08:40
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Toshimo posted:Reminds me of when Magic: The Gathering kept getting feedback that people were down with a Japanese setting. And they got one and it was rad as all hell. But the players all hated it because what they really wanted was an anime setting. So, it sold like poo poo and the setting got shoved to last in line to ever revisit.
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Oct 26, 2019 09:47
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Terrible Opinions posted:This is wrong. It sold like poo poo because Mirrodin was still in standard at the time and it was the intentionally powered down compared to the mess that was Mirrodin. Same way that Ixilan suffered for the sins of Kaladesh. I'm pretty sure that Mark Rosewater has said the setting was a big factor and is why they will never do another Kamigawa set even with different mechanics.
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Oct 26, 2019 11:08
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Terrible Opinions posted:This is wrong. It sold like poo poo because Mirrodin was still in standard at the time and it was the intentionally powered down compared to the mess that was Mirrodin. Same way that Ixilan suffered for the sins of Kaladesh. Nope
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Oct 26, 2019 12:39
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Terrible Opinions posted:This is wrong. It sold like poo poo because Mirrodin was still in standard at the time and it was the intentionally powered down compared to the mess that was Mirrodin. Same way that Ixilan suffered for the sins of Kaladesh. Excellent username/post combo, but as MaRo is quick to remind us at every opportunity, the majority of Magic sales is to casuals playing at home on the kitchen table with their homies, not tournament players. Those players get turned on/off by setting/design/aesthetics much more than competitive players ever will.
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Oct 26, 2019 14:05
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They may very well be true but I'd take MaRo's statements on stuff like this with a grain of salt. He's not exactly impartial. I feel like the guy who is basically a public face of the company would be more likely to say "well we designed this cool setting but it wasn't as popular as we would have hoped" rather than "the cards sucked rear end lol"
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Oct 26, 2019 15:35
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Glagha posted:They may very well be true but I'd take MaRo's statements on stuff like this with a grain of salt. He's not exactly impartial. I feel like the guy who is basically a public face of the company would be more likely to say "well we designed this cool setting but it wasn't as popular as we would have hoped" rather than "the cards sucked rear end lol" He hasn't been evasive about the card quality. A stated design goal was to make weaker cards that block. He's not shy about that. He's also been candid about how a number of mechanics in the block fell flat. But, he's also been clear that negative feedback about the setting was deafening.
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Oct 26, 2019 15:56
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Glagha posted:They may very well be true but I'd take MaRo's statements on stuff like this with a grain of salt. He's not exactly impartial. I feel like the guy who is basically a public face of the company would be more likely to say "well we designed this cool setting but it wasn't as popular as we would have hoped" rather than "the cards sucked rear end lol" He is more likely to be evasive about recent sets, but for stuff in the past he can be a harsh critic. Especially when he was responsible since he doesn't like to throw people under the bus. Kamigawa's setting problems are something he has backed up repeatedly with anecdotes about how it affected design for later sets. In Amonkhet they deliberately avoided a deep dive into obscure Egyptian culture because they didn't want to deviate from audience expectations about mummies and pyramids.
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Oct 26, 2019 16:09
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Kamigawa was dialed down but it was also designed to be self-contained and has a lot of standalone mechanics that the game has never revisited, as far as I remember. It means there's not much synergy between cards in that bloc and anything else Modern-legal so you don't see a lot of them in play. You could also examine how it kind of feeds into some tabletop stereotypes about an inscrutable, inaccessible land with special "Eastern" magic (Arcane spells) with its mechanics, but overall it's not bad just hamstrung by a lot of factors. Also TK_Nyarlathotep posted:So regarding my posts in Cthulhu Thread, I know Tenkar sucks a bunch of cocks, but his article actually provides context and the link to the Podcast with Matt Dawkins defending his Pedo VtM Pregen and mentioning his games frequently touch on pedophilia: https://www.tenkarstavern.com/2017/06/what-hell-is-going-on-with-new-vampire.html Wow this is gross. Remember when the devs were trying to downplay how that sample PC was totally not a coded pedophile? Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Oct 26, 2019 |
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Oct 26, 2019 16:24
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Nuns with Guns posted:Wow this is gross. Remember when the devs were trying to downplay how that sample PC was totally not a coded pedophile? Yeah apparently said PC is not in the rules now or something, but I wish I remembered less about the VtM5 launch. I was in the former-OPP rabblerouser crowd at the time so I got the second-by-second playback, with an added side of guilting people.
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Oct 26, 2019 16:37
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Toshimo posted:Excellent username/post combo, but as MaRo is quick to remind us at every opportunity, the majority of Magic sales is to casuals playing at home on the kitchen table with their homies, not tournament players. Those players get turned on/off by setting/design/aesthetics much more than competitive players ever will. Even if you are playing kitchen table magic, a bunch of the stuff from Kamigawa is unfun. Ninjitsu is cool and clunky, but the rest are just plain bad. Combine with the power reduction (the same thing that hurt Ixalan as mentioned above, but was even more famous with Masques following Urza) and you have something that won't sell. But I'm also someone who likes the aesthetics of both Kamigawa and Lorwyn, so I'm a bit biased. I do think there's zero chance of Kamigawa showing up again for the same reason as Ixalan (poor sales and a unique setting)
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Oct 26, 2019 16:52
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:Yeah apparently said PC is not in the rules now or something, but I wish I remembered less about the VtM5 launch. I was in the former-OPP rabblerouser crowd at the time so I got the second-by-second playback, with an added side of guilting people. Dawkins was also the guy who created the "Dude what shoots eggs out his dick and if you eat the eggs you also shoot eggs out your dick until you tear your dick off." in that one Beast supplement, which was apparently something that was rejected from a Cthulu Mythos book... so hearing he works for Chaosium now makes a whole lot of sense.
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Oct 26, 2019 17:06
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Kurieg posted:Dawkins was also the guy who created the "Dude what shoots eggs out his dick and if you eat the eggs you also shoot eggs out your dick until you tear your dick off." in that one Beast supplement, which was apparently something that was rejected from a Cthulu Mythos book... so hearing he works for Chaosium now makes a whole lot of sense. Jengus Christler.
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Oct 26, 2019 18:32
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Sailor Viy posted:I'm pretty sure that Mark Rosewater has said the setting was a big factor and is why they will never do another Kamigawa set even with different mechanics. Toshimo posted:Excellent username/post combo, but as MaRo is quick to remind us at every opportunity, the majority of Magic sales is to casuals playing at home on the kitchen table with their homies, not tournament players. Those players get turned on/off by setting/design/aesthetics much more than competitive players ever will.
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Oct 26, 2019 18:59
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gradenko_2000 posted:can I ask for an elaboration on this? I'm only very shallowly into MTG so I'd like to hear your take I wasn't really active at the time but from what I gather it introduced a lot of mechanics that were too insular (like Arcane), and I think one of the smaller mistakes was that some of the other mechanics introduced in the set were called things like Bushido and Ninjitsu, which felt doomed to not becoming evergreen mechanics by dint of their Japan-specific language. (similar to if the Roman Mythology themed Theros block had has mechanics called Monstrum and Ornaverunt Fanum instead of Monstrosity and Bestow). Plus while some of the art was amazing, some of the layout work was horrible. There's these "flip cards" that have a creature on the top and can be rotated 180 degrees to become the creature at the bottom and there was just no room for the art to look good or like anything (check out Budoka Gardener for an example). Anyway, I'm not a competition player, I just make tribal commander decks, so I'm probably a lot closer to that "uninformed kitchen table magic buyer" that was referenced above.
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Oct 26, 2019 19:15
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You can add Kaladesh into Amonkhet into Ixalan as another data point of 'broken artifact set into weak parasitic set', but Amonkhet was fine if relatively uninspired mechanically (a sideways graveyard-cycle set with some No Untap mechanics), compared to Ix that had the shame of having it's one good mechanic stolen (monarch) and a really dumb proof-of-concept (can a 80% color pair supporting set work?). One of the real lessons learned from was to go to the Big Block Every Quarter model, even more so than the return and now-evergreen nature of colored artifacts.
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Oct 26, 2019 19:16
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Everything Jef said was right.
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Oct 26, 2019 19:21
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i choose to believe nerds were mad something wasn't anime enough
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Oct 26, 2019 19:31
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i got into magic around the time kamigawa came out and i still have a soft spot for it. the cards were, in retrospect, not great, but the art and aesthetics owned. however i'm a total casual so at the time i was happy to show up for fnm, draft and go home with cool-looking cards to play with against people in my class
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Oct 26, 2019 19:40
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exactly kamigawa was all ninja and samurai and poo poo they didn't "go too deep" or whatever
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Oct 26, 2019 19:47
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Serf posted:i got into magic around the time kamigawa came out and i still have a soft spot for it. the cards were, in retrospect, not great, but the art and aesthetics owned. however i'm a total casual so at the time i was happy to show up for fnm, draft and go home with cool-looking cards to play with against people in my class One of the things that bothers me about Kamigawa's art style is that maybe two of the Kitsunes look sort of like kitsunes, but most look like someone had the vague idea of what a fox looks like described to them once in a dream, and some of them look like alien kangaroos.
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Oct 26, 2019 19:54
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Cat Face Joe posted:i choose to believe nerds were mad something wasn't anime enough
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Oct 26, 2019 19:58
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I hate Kiki-Jiki, Mirrorbreaker with my life. It doesnot leave the cards alone.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:02
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All that aside, my own personal reason for disliking Kamigawa was the introduction of the worst card ever for flow of play at a Commander Table, Umezawa's Jitte. There is nothing more boring than 3 players in a row Jitte'ing in response to other people Jitte'ing.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:02
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theironjef posted:All that aside, my own personal reason for disliking Kamigawa was the introduction of the worst card ever for flow of play at a Commander Table, Umezawa's Jitte. There is nothing more boring than 3 players in a row Jitte'ing in response to other people Jitte'ing. You keep writing Jitte when you really mean Top.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:03
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Toshimo posted:You keep writing Jitte when you really mean Top. Aw poo poo you're right. Sensei's Divining Top. Haven't played in a while.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:04
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Top is an affront to all that is good in this world. Also the argument that magic fans only want generic medieval fantasy is pretty funny, given that the most popular sets ever are ones set in a big weird version of Prague (Ravnica), Gothic novel crossover-land (Innistrad), and literally an MMO the setting (Zendikar).
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Oct 26, 2019 20:07
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I don't understand why you keep doubling down to toss away all evidence and throw down against invented arguments that nobody made.
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Oct 26, 2019 20:27
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Terrible Opinions posted:Top is an affront to all that is good in this world. Zendikar has its own versions of the Lovecraftian Great Old Ones, so it was guaranteed to be a perennial success. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Oct 26, 2019 |
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Oct 26, 2019 20:28
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Creatures with double digit power and toughness, hell yeah, now we're talking
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Oct 26, 2019 21:02
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Toshimo posted:I don't understand why you keep doubling down to toss away all evidence and throw down against invented arguments that nobody made. Toshimo posted:Reminds me of when Magic: The Gathering kept getting feedback that people were down with a Japanese setting. And they got one and it was rad as all hell. But the players all hated it because what they really wanted was an anime setting. So, it sold like poo poo and the setting got shoved to last in line to ever revisit. Add onto this that it's an often repeated mistake by MtG design to blame poor performance on flavor when the actual problem is bad mechanical design.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:10
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dwarf74 posted:I mean, you can make the same argument for Forgotten Realms and yet it sells like hot cakes. Golarion, too. Golarion differentiates itself a little by being gonzo genre-blending generic rather than all-high-fantasy generic, which puts it in a relatively small niche with Mystara, Eberron, and Spelljammer, all of which Wizards has barely touched for a long time.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:13
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Terrible Opinions posted:Sorry your argument here is Everyone agrees Kamigawa had bad mechanical design. MaRo's argument is that they don't return to it with better mechanical design because the flavor is also disliked by all the metrics they have. The idea that he wants to blame other people for his team's failure in Kamigawa doesn't hold up because neither he nor anyone else is saying Kamigawa was well-designed. While I don't have access to WOTC's internal data, I have been a WPN professional for over a decade, and while Kamigawa has supporters, his statement that its flavor is not wildly popular compared to its contemporaries matches my personal experience.
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Oct 26, 2019 21:32
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Ultiville posted:The idea that he wants to blame other people for his team's failure in Kamigawa doesn't hold up because neither he nor anyone else is saying Kamigawa was well-designed
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Oct 26, 2019 21:47
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Roadie posted:Golarion differentiates itself a little by being gonzo genre-blending generic rather than all-high-fantasy generic, which puts it in a relatively small niche with Mystara, Eberron, and Spelljammer, all of which Wizards has barely touched for a long time. Eh, no, I think dwarf74 is completely right to call Golarion generic. I've read the Golarion sourcebooks, and I wouldn't say it's any more "gonzo" or "genre-blending" than, say, the Forgotten Realms. Sure, there are a few places that have something about them that's mildly unique or interesting, and there are some aspects of the setting that make it slightly different from other fantasy settings (the backstory about the disappearance of Aroden, for example), but that's true of pretty much every fantasy setting that's had any significant level of development; settings like the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk have some interesting locales or distinctive backstory elements too, and some locations that feature different elements from the typical medieval-European fantasy. I don't really see Golarion as being any more interesting or innovative than those settings are. Granted, I think that genericness was mostly by design, since a big point of the original pitch for Pathfinder was that DMs could still use all their 3.XE material with it, so it couldn't deviate too far from standard 3E trappings and assumptions. (Heck, with Ustalav Paizo even shoehorned in a place for the DM to adapt Ravenloft adventures.) But yeah, as far as how much the setting pushes against generic fantasy trappings, I'd put Golarion at about the same level as the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk. There's really nothing all that special about it. e: For clarification, to avoid hyperbole, when I say I've "read the Golarion sourcebooks", I don't of course mean that I've actually read cover-to-cover every single Pathfinder Chronicles sourcebook Paizo has released. I have, however, read the books that give an overview of the setting (the Pathfinder Chronicles Gazetteer, Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting, and Inner Sea World Guide), and I've read many, though not all, of the books focusing on specific nations or regions. I can't claim to be an expert on Golarion and couldn't list every nation in the world off the top of my head, but I know enough about it to form an educated opinion. Jerik fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Oct 26, 2019 |
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Oct 26, 2019 23:03
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theironjef posted:I wasn't really active at the time but from what I gather it introduced a lot of mechanics that were too insular (like Arcane), and I think one of the smaller mistakes was that some of the other mechanics introduced in the set were called things like Bushido and Ninjitsu, which felt doomed to not becoming evergreen mechanics by dint of their Japan-specific language. (similar to if the Roman Mythology themed Theros block had has mechanics called Monstrum and Ornaverunt Fanum instead of Monstrosity and Bestow). Plus while some of the art was amazing, some of the layout work was horrible. There's these "flip cards" that have a creature on the top and can be rotated 180 degrees to become the creature at the bottom and there was just no room for the art to look good or like anything (check out Budoka Gardener for an example). Anyway, I'm not a competition player, I just make tribal commander decks, so I'm probably a lot closer to that "uninformed kitchen table magic buyer" that was referenced above. To go into a bit more detail: Kamigawa introduced three major keywords- Splice, Bushido, and Soulshift. The middle expansion added a fourth, Ninjutsu. Splice could only be used with spells with the secondary type Arcane, which was only used on cards from this block. Soulshift required creatures with the type Spirit, which was very rare outside this block. Bushido and Ninjutsu were technically type-agnostic but all creatures that had these abilities had the creature type Samurai and Ninja respectively, which were exclusive to this block. Along the same lines, the non-human creature types included goblins and demons, which are evergreen types, but also a lot of things like foxes, snakes, and moonfolk, which again did not appear outside the block. As a result very little was usable outside the block for basically anything that cared about tribal, which was particularly notable because the block that rotated out of standard because of Kamigawa was Onslaught, which was the first block to really make tribal into a main design pillar.
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Oct 26, 2019 23:44
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Terrible Opinions posted:Top is an affront to all that is good in this world. It's not so much that they want generic medieval fantasy, it's that they want pop culture tropes instead of original settings. The general trend with the newer sets is to focus on stuff that people will instantly recognise (pirates! vampires! greek gods! Cthulhu!) culminating in the latest set where they have cards based on fuckin' Goldilocks and the Billy Goats Gruff. Is that actually what Magic players want? I'd prefer to think not, since I loved Kamigawa, but at the end of the day WotC has years of data being analysed by marketing professionals, so they problem know better than me.
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Oct 27, 2019 03:06
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