Strong Sauce posted:

HootTheOwl posted:

There;s some Commander Balder's Gate spoilers up.

Aranan posted:

Or he got hit in the head.

AngryBooch posted:

You all see this blurb about "Customize them [your commander? your legendaries? your deck?] with new and powerful Background cards."

I hope this isn't another Companion debacle. Maybe only certain Legendary creatures get access to Background cards so they are more flexible and customizable as your Commander.

edit: This may also be why the Precons are listed as only having 98 cards.

Froghammer posted:

Patrick Sullivan talked about it a bit on Resleevables (RIP), but Companion as a mechanic is an incredibly deep design space that's now off-limits for R&D due to them completely loving up the initial launch. I can understand the desire to go back to it.

Froghammer posted:

Patrick Sullivan talked about it a bit on Resleevables (RIP), but Companion as a mechanic is an incredibly deep design space that's now off-limits for R&D due to them completely loving up the initial launch. I can understand the desire to go back to it.

AngryBooch posted:

It's an incredibly deep design space that's continually being explored in this format called Commander, where singleton, deck size, and multiplayer features lead to more variations in games than they would in 4 copy 60 card competitive constructed formats.

HootTheOwl posted:

Oh, maybe it's like Partners with but where only the background has a requirement.

Or they're like conspiracies?

Macdeo Lurjtux posted:

I wonder if it'll be the sets version of Prismatic Piper. Mainly a mechanic to smooth out the deck restrictions in the draft format.

Though 2-3 years ago there was a Game Knights where they all drafted Brandon Sanderson's Commander Cube and he had a custom feature that sounds similar to help the color restriction. After you drafted you could choose an ability to attach to your commander. Mainly stuff like adding a color to your commanders identity or letting you play one minion a turn that gains your commanders creature type. Maybe they used that for inspiration.

Tom Clancy is Dead posted:

Obviously it can't be judged on the same Standard since it's a Commander card, but WTF that card.

Froghammer posted:

Patrick Sullivan talked about it a bit on Resleevables (RIP), but Companion as a mechanic is an incredibly deep design space that's now off-limits for R&D due to them completely loving up the initial launch. I can understand the desire to go back to it.

fadam posted:

I forget if it was Rosewater or Forsythe but I think one of them said the biggest problem with Companion right now is coming up with conditions that work.

big cummers ONLY posted:

I wasn't around for companions, how did they gently caress them up?

Goa Tse-tung posted:

Brass Dragon is the wrong name. Either give it another color (hello everything about them is red!!!) and ability or just name it some crystal variant or whatever. It's exactly like making the two White Dragons in AFR actually white dragons.

Froghammer posted:

I think the actual biggest problem with Companion is that they hosed up the initial batch of cards so badly that the fanbase never wants to see the mechanic come back ever again

Pablo Nergigante posted:

Also originally you could put your companion in your hand for free which is insane

quote:

quote:

Hey Marko, Just curious why Plains is the only basic land that is plural? I’ve always been a logophile and it creates an itch that has to be scratched. I have to know! Lol

I decided to go straight to the source and asked Richard Garfield. Here’s the answer he gave:

“I struggled with 2 land types - islands and plains. Struggled is overstating it - thought a lot about. Islands were coast at one point (perhaps before magic), because I didn’t want disconnected land. It was also simply Ocean. Plains - what I really wanted was farmland but that sounded silly. Countryside also sounded strange, pasture, etc. Prairie sounded too US centric (which apparently, to a lesser extent, plains is also, I didn’t know that in pre internet days). Steppe sounded too Russian.

Anyway I settled on Plains and never really considered plain. There are some reasons for it - which probably I never consciously considered -

Plains is weird among the other land types. If you search for Mountains or Forests in dictionaries there are no separate entry for them, Plains is different, sometimes it refers to the Great Plains, sometimes it is called out as a called out plural, like - this means a collection of plains - but mountains is never called out - there is mountains (mountains plural) The dictionaries treat it differently because I think people do. A forest beast has a clear meaning and sounds right. A plain beast does not. A >plains< beast does. At least that is true to my ear. This might be because of disambiguation with ‘unadorned beast’, but I think it is more than that - and my small effort in researching it has suggested that plains as a plural is a different thing, at least slightly different, than mountains, islands, forests, and swamps.”

Toph Bei Fong posted:

Some land trivia

https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/679721472534659072/hey-marko-just-curious-why-plains-is-the-only

Froghammer posted:

Patrick Sullivan talked about it a bit on Resleevables (RIP), but Companion as a mechanic is an incredibly deep design space that's now off-limits for R&D due to them completely loving up the initial launch. I can understand the desire to go back to it.

Froghammer posted:

I think the actual biggest problem with Companion is that they hosed up the initial batch of cards so badly that the fanbase never wants to see the mechanic come back ever again

Dysgenesis posted:

I do like hearing stories about Magic during its inception. Richard Garfield every time he is invited back it produces a banger of a set (OG ravnica, OG innistrad and dominaria) it would be great if he came back for the brothers war.

Also AFAIK he created sagas in dominaria which have proved to be great design.

Macdeo Lurjtux posted:

another crack at Licids.

Strong Sauce posted:

Froghammer posted:

Patrick Sullivan talked about it a bit on Resleevables (RIP), but Companion as a mechanic is an incredibly deep design space that's now off-limits for R&D due to them completely loving up the initial launch. I can understand the desire to go back to it.

Katana Gomai posted:

I didn't listen to the podcast but how exactly is an extra card in your starting hand "incredibly deep design space" and how can it not be completely hosed up? It breaks two of the game's most fundamental rules (random starting hand, starting hand size) in a way that can hardly be overcome by your opponent unless they also have one.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

One design space that hasn't been properly utilized in Magic, while being routinely explored in other TCGs, is "A sideboard you can access during regular game play"

Magic has a few cards which do this (cards like Wish, Fae of Wishes, Living Wish, and Spawnsire of Ulamog which bring a card(s) in from "outside the game" for example), but there have been other games which utilize this sort of "extra deck" as a core or prominent design element (Yu-Gi-Oh's Extra Deck, Bleach's Side Deck, Raw Deal's Backlash decks with their Pre-game and Mid-match cards, Q's Tent in the Star Trek CCG, for example).

Unfortunately, Companion was a bust, and one of the most ill-received mechanics of all time, so they're unlikely to revise and revisit it anytime soon, the way they replaced Embalm with Eternalize, or Fear with Intimidate.

flatluigi posted:

i don't think that's specifically what they want to revisit about it, since they just had the entire learn mechanic in strixhaven