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This isn't even free for WotC though. That's the thing. It's just loving incompetence. They paid a marketing house for that poo poo photo lmao, and no one looked at it.
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Jan 7, 2024 20:38
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Dexo posted:
No, they looked at it after the community backlash and decided to double down on defending it 
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Jan 7, 2024 20:43
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Didn’t the head of art production for this kind of stuff (promo, box art etc) just get laid off?
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Jan 7, 2024 20:45
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ShutteredIn posted:Didn’t the head of art production for this kind of stuff (promo, box art etc) just get laid off? This seems like it didn't come from the internal WotC art process and was a marketing joint? But yes. So this will probably start happening a bunch more on card art and D&D art.
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Jan 7, 2024 20:52
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Dexo posted:This seems like it didn't come from the internal WotC art process and was a marketing joint? I think that's the point they're making. Firing the internal staff that would do and manage this and just hiring it out with no oversight gave them junk
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Jan 7, 2024 20:54
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Bottom Liner posted:I think that's the point they're making. Firing the internal staff that would do and manage this and just hiring it out with no oversight gave them junk I don't know how WotC is structured. So yeah this might be true. I don't know if historically Marketing planned art buys work with the people who handle art for the actual products. That was more the distinction I was making. Dexo fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Jan 7, 2024 |
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Jan 7, 2024 20:56
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From checking for the D&D team the Art Manager is gone, but they still have a number of artist directors around. I don't know what the difference in the jobs are.
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Jan 7, 2024 21:00
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Without knowing the structure of the company it's hard to say, but let's be realistic here: whoever had the power to hire a vendor to produce this lovely AI art isn't the same person who posts marketing stuff to the MtG Twitter account. That's probably some poorly paid employee with "Social Media Marketing Manager" as a job title who has precisely no people below them on the Ops chart. When the "MtG AI art" stuff spread, either the Twitter peon asked a superior and was told to deny any AI was involved, or a superior instructed the peon to post to that effect. Either the superior in question was the same one who commissioned the art and was either clueless or lying, or the superior had nothing to do with that part of the process and just figured "we're on record as not using AI art, so we don't". In the former case, when the lie was exposed or the cluelessness corrected, that superior had an "oh, crap" moment and either told peon to spin/explain or did it himself. Or, in the latter case, the peon posted a denial and the next meeting between their superior and whatever person commissioned the vendor for the art featured a conversation that went something like "Hey, there's a big Internet fuss over the promotion art being AI generated, but we denied it." "I commissioned a vendor to do the work and they could have used AI." "poo poo!" What's clear is that the marketing people needed art for this campaign and didn't talk to any of the MtG art people about it. That's believable--marketing is either very involved in what's going on, or completely disinterested and often not even in the same building/zip code--but when WotC keeps saying "No AI art ever" and then keeps making these sorts of easily-avoidable errors, it says either that there's a leadership vacuum or a great deal of incompetence/laziness (or both).
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Jan 8, 2024 01:52
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The AI art they got from their third party marketing firm is the biggest deal here, and it's funny how even after it was cleaned up it had issues like that hosed up dial with extra dashes running over the numbers. However, I also find it amusing that the image was hyping up the reprint of the shock lands (the Ravnica lands that make you pay 2 life to put the land into play untapped) on the retro card frames, and then two of the lands in the dumb image weren't even the iconic shock lands. You made a "shocking" pun and everything and you hosed it up!!
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Jan 8, 2024 06:00
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Lurks With Wolves posted:I also want to push back against the idea that AI art like this will inevitably become better over time. AI art and text generation have had a boatload of money poured into them by companies like Google, and they aren't doing that to replace the humble minimum wage RPG artist. They're doing it so they can make something that works for the kind of high-risk high-reward use case that could possibly make them a profit at some point in this decade, and the uses that actually affect this industry are kind of just eye-catching spillover. If they can't get any of those expensive use cases going (and imo it's increasingly looking like they can't), funding will stop flowing in and the kind of AI generation that's relevant to this thread will reach its high water mark. There's also the existing problem that the sources of art that they steal to feed the algorithms have been flooded overwhelmingly with garbage AI art from day one to the point where they're mostly trained on AI art as it is.
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Jan 8, 2024 06:10
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The utter incompetence and arrogance of Hasbro in this debacle shows how weak D&D and WotC is if there was a new challenger. Blockbuster and Netflix, Yahoo and Google (twice!), Kodak etc. Hell, D&D with TSR, and Pathfinder and WoTC once already. But I fear Google is also the other example - arrogant and incompetent but such a domineering player they can't be dethroned anyway, despite their decay and corruption. Perhaps Hasbro fired everyone at WoTC who saw what happened to the TSR empire. Or perhaps just anyone whp knows the history of empires.
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Jan 8, 2024 13:18
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Comstar posted:The utter incompetence and arrogance of Hasbro in this debacle shows how weak D&D and WotC is if there was a new challenger. Blockbuster and Netflix, Yahoo and Google (twice!), Kodak etc. Hell, D&D with TSR, and Pathfinder and WoTC once already. We like talking about the AI, but this has been a pretty rough first week of the year for WotC. The AI debacle sucks, yes. But a player also got DQ'd in a Magic tournament for having three cards that were too curled in an all-foil deck; those cards were legitimate and cost $800. Each. The quality control on WotC luxury cardboard is so bad you can't use said luxury cardboard in the specific situation you'd most love to use it, a competitive in-person event. Also sounds like a slew of players got DQ'd from some events for having counterfeit cards, and they apparently have the receipts that shows they thought they were genuine and they paid a lot of money for them. (I'm not quite as up on this story.) Moral outrage is fun but making a bad product has also contributed to the end of some companies, too. But maybe not this time?
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Jan 8, 2024 14:40
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CitizenKeen posted:Also sounds like a slew of players got DQ'd from some events for having counterfeit cards, and they apparently have the receipts that shows they thought they were genuine and they paid a lot of money for them. (I'm not quite as up on this story.) Do you have a link to this? I'm curious about anything involving proxies, because I spent a couple years working at a large MtG marketplace website and learned a whole lot about them in the process.
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Jan 8, 2024 15:05
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people getting DQ'ed for for curled foils is unacceptable. The DQs for real cards is pretty poo poo too. In what world is the judge living where taking cards out of a sleeve to check that poo poo is okay?
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Jan 8, 2024 15:14
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Back when Nexus of fate was standard legal and it's only printing was foil, high REL tournaments had tables set up specifically to get judge proxies for your nexuses.
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Jan 8, 2024 15:15
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poop chute posted:Do you have a link to this? I'm curious about anything involving proxies, because I spent a couple years working at a large MtG marketplace website and learned a whole lot about them in the process. I'll see if I can find it in the algo; it wasn't from people I follow so it may be lost to the aether. Here's the $2300 foil thread: https://nitter.net/bashmcalister/status/1744168792387723353
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Jan 8, 2024 15:39
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Also worth noting that WOTC also announced that Secret Lairs are moving from a print on demand model to a "We'll eyeball what we think we're gonna need before hand so people aren't waiting on shipping and once we're out we're out" model which means that now scalpers are going to be incentivized to just buy up their entire stock. Also i don't think they've improved their website since the last time they did a limited run product where people were being kicked out of line with product in their cart.
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Jan 8, 2024 15:44
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ilmucche posted:people getting DQ'ed for for curled foils is unacceptable. The DQs for real cards is pretty poo poo too. In what world is the judge living where taking cards out of a sleeve to check that poo poo is okay? It's literally allowed, exactly because it's how you identify counterfeits.
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Jan 8, 2024 15:45
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Reveilled posted:Personally I like alignment just fine, I don’t particularly care about the PCs’ alignments since they’re mortals with deeper, more complex characters, but I enjoy having cosmic forces aligned with moral outlooks as a feature of my games. The fact that objective Good in the medieval fantasy setting doesn’t fully line up with modern views on what is “good” is for me a feature rather than a bug. Obviously some stuff is vetoed (e.g. I’m extremely not interested in RPing medieval people’s views on gender or homosexuality), but a little bit of friction between “is this *right* (by our players’ modern moral codes)” and “is this Good (by the moral codes of cosmic forces in the setting” is nice, as long as you restrict it to things like planar adventures where those questions are a main focus. “Can a devil ever be good, and if so what would happen?” Sounds like a fun and interesting question to find the answer to, while “is it morally correct to kill goblin babies” is not going to lead anywhere anyone wants to go. That's basically how I've been using it since the 1990's. Supernatural entities have alignment that matters. People are people, unless they've intentionally aligned themselves with supernatural entities and taken on some of their power like high-level Clerics and Paladins.
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Jan 8, 2024 16:05
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VikingofRock posted:It's simple: good vs. evil is about how you treat people below you in the social hierarchy, and law vs. chaos is about how you treat people above you It's this Good vs Evil is how much you tip service workers Law vs Chaos is how much of a kiss-rear end you are
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Jan 8, 2024 16:15
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Asterite34 posted:It's this Robin Hood is presented as the archtypical Chaotic Good - but while he 'gives to the poor', he both fights against King John but carries a Torch for King Richard. Does that make him Neutral Good?
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Jan 8, 2024 16:36
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Whaddaya mean these rebels call themselves "The Alliance to Restore the Republic?"
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Jan 8, 2024 16:39
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Saw was right 
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Jan 8, 2024 16:45
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Dexo posted:Saw was right Yes but also I literally watched that man punt a baby.
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Jan 8, 2024 16:56
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poop chute posted:Do you have a link to this? I'm curious about anything involving proxies, because I spent a couple years working at a large MtG marketplace website and learned a whole lot about them in the process. https://vxtwitter.com/bashmcalister/status/1744098403359801806?t=l5qJMGarOcaOys2ZjxPVQw&s=19 this is one of the people who got a game loss for a deck check. Unfortunately this seems to mostly be one judge on a power trip, ironically not even a wotc fuckup because they basically washed their hands of competitive magic judging to not have to pay people. Capitalism!
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Jan 8, 2024 17:03
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https://twitter.com/tirentu/status/1744165381734867404 Apparently some judges (maybe this one on the power trip) are saying that Cards off of The List are "Proxies".
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Jan 8, 2024 17:06
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I remain glad I don't give a poo poo about Magic, but I am compelled to ask what "foils too curled" means. Like, the edges or the whole card are bent? And this would affect…card counting sort of like card marking? Or…?
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Jan 8, 2024 17:18
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Comstar posted:The utter incompetence and arrogance of Hasbro in this debacle shows how weak D&D and WotC is if there was a new challenger. Blockbuster and Netflix, Yahoo and Google (twice!), Kodak etc. Hell, D&D with TSR, and Pathfinder and WoTC once already. Paizo is right there with a similar (possibly higher quality) product, but don't seem able to siphon off much of the customer base.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:22
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That Old Tree posted:I remain glad I don't give a poo poo about Magic, but I am compelled to ask what "foils too curled" means. Like, the edges or the whole card are bent? And this would affect…card counting sort of like card marking? Or…? It means something like this:  If you only had specific cards curled then yes, you could use them as marked cards. But it's entirely because of WotC's poo poo manufacturing.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:27
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That Old Tree posted:I remain glad I don't give a poo poo about Magic, but I am compelled to ask what "foils too curled" means. Like, the edges or the whole card are bent? And this would affect…card counting sort of like card marking? Or…? You ever see a pringle? Kind of like looks that. It counts as a marked card, or can, because you could theoretically tell what a given card is while shuffling.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:28
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That Old Tree posted:I remain glad I don't give a poo poo about Magic, but I am compelled to ask what "foils too curled" means. Like, the edges or the whole card are bent? And this would affect…card counting sort of like card marking? Or…? Imagine a Pringle. Now imagine that shape on a piece of cardboard for wizard poker. Now imagine that happens the instant you open the pack the card was in. That’s what he got disqualified for - Wizard’s awful print quality of foil cards. It’s had its ups and downs over the years but somehow it never was “fixed”. Near as I can tell the material providing the foiling is pulling the weaker cardboard under it into a curled shape.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:31
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It's also worth noting this was less of a problem in the past and is absurdly bad now.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:34
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And the main solution from a consumer perspective is keeping them at approximately the same humidity as where they were manufactured, so a humidor and some weights can technically fix it temporarily but it's still a giant pain in the rear end for what should be the premium version of the card.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:37
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senrath posted:It means something like this: Forgive me for what's definitely a stupid question, but I don't play card games: are there card sleeves that are rigid enough to keep a curled card straight, without being thick enough to cause problems for shuffling, and/or without being illegal in tournaments? It's the band-aid that came to mind immediately, so I'm sure there's a reason it doesn't work.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:43
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A humidor for your trading cards? Gotta keep the riff-raff outta the hobby, I guess. I would simply not spend $2,300 on shiny paper wafers.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:46
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Magic is definitely on my death watchlist, but I'm really not psychic enough to know if it's going to be a year, or 10. Hasbro does not give a poo poo about its longevity, and it seems to be sliding into the realm of Funko pops more everytime I look at it. As per usual, the 1 thing it has going for it is that it's everywhere, and rich nerds are happy to throw money at it. I played a stack of magic as a kid, and would get my kids into it if the business model weren't such a cash grab. Maybe I'll just proxy a big cube one day w00tmonger fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Jan 8, 2024 |
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Jan 8, 2024 17:48
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SkyeAuroline posted:Forgive me for what's definitely a stupid question, but I don't play card games: are there card sleeves that are rigid enough to keep a curled card straight, without being thick enough to cause problems for shuffling, and/or without being illegal in tournaments? It's the band-aid that came to mind immediately, so I'm sure there's a reason it doesn't work. "Hard inner sleeves", which aren't great.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:53
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Magic isn't going to die anytime soon. The Lord of the Rings set sold better than any other set in the game's existence.
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Jan 8, 2024 17:53
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w00tmonger posted:Magic is definitely on my death watchlist, but I'm really not psychic enough to know if it's going to be a year, or 10. People are emotionally invested, it is hard to give that up even when you know management is awful. It feels like loss. Remember when Lowtax was getting sketchier every year and we didn't all move enmasse to a different discussion forum?
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Jan 8, 2024 18:00
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| # ? May 27, 2024 17:37 |
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I think it's a consequence of them scaling up their manufacture so heavily over the last 10 years or so: they're printing cards in places that are much more humid than where they are generally going to be played. Basically, the foil part of the card does not expand or contract as much as the cardboard does due to humidity, so while it is flat when it's manufactured near the equator, once you move said card to the US or Europe, it turns into a pringle. There's some other weirdness, too: I've been drafting a decent amount recently, and there are at least two distinct manufacturers of LCI with cards that feel insanely different. One is super glossy and the cards look great, while the other are incredibly matte and almost sticky, with a pretty noticeable drop in print quality. The wrappers even look different: the glossy cards come in boosters with brighter and shinier packaging!
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Jan 8, 2024 18:04
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