#mtg discourse

[kiefbowl]

I bet if I met post malone, I could get him to concede on a couple of feminist points. this would benefit no one, but it would be a fun for me and I'd make posts about it on tumblr and get in trouble :)

[tower-of-hana]

no fr you guys any day now these trans women nazis who definitely make up 99.9% of the population will rise up and overthrow the government or become a voting block or do anything other then post online. This isn't just some weird stereotype that we like to use to paint trans women as bad because calling them predators would be too on the nose. Just trust me this isn't some weird conspiracy just keep giving me updoots and the TRUTH will be revealed by TRUE PATRIOTS

[fivetrillionelves]

Something I find interesting about the response to the commander bans is that no one is acknowledging that you and your playgroup can just elect to keep playing the cards. No one from wotc or the rc is going to bust through the wall and start hitting you with sticks if your friends are fine with crypt and lotus.

The only context I can see it being an issue in is playing with randos at a card shop, but if you're bringing optimized multi thousand dollar decks to drop in events it explains why you don't have a regular group.

Obviously this doesn't get into the financial side of things, (although if someone did treat commander singles as investments they got what they deserve,) but like... commander was made to be a more casual, more social format. If cedh players want to make their own format with their own ban list, hookers, and blow they should.

And everyone who took their ire out on the rc should be ashamed. They're just trying to keep the format healthy, whatever wack stuff wotc did once they learned the cards would be banned isn't the rc's fault.

[disbarredgoose0]

The more I encounter discourse in the Magic community, the more I want to return to my prior state of bliss of having not encountered it. By no means am I immune to discourse, but man. There's something about the lack of cognitive dissonance people seem to have when talking the way they do about a trading card game that gets to me.

[oops-prow-did-it-again]

screenshotting this bc I guess I got blocked

me:

them:

also, for the record: it IS terfy to talk about feminism and act like trans people are the enemy of it when we talk about the issues we face. :) Sorry you have to learn this way.

[joekabox]

I think I might be the only person in the Magic community who deeply dislikes Garruk as a character and doesn't really understand why others like him.

Dude is effectively a big game hunter that rejects the concepts of society and modern comfort, except where it pleases him (like his giant weapons and armor), and wished nothing more than to kill a woman that effectively defended herself from one of his beasts trying to kill her. Did that woman turn out to be on the plane for misguided reasons and ultimately did horrible things, both to him and others? Sure, but he didn't know that at first.

I really dislike Garruk. If he was alive today, he'd be one of those survivalist doomsday prepper guys that has a house filled with animal trophies.

I don't like him.

[greenouillee]

I hate having an idea for an essay or something similar in my mind but knowing that if I started it, I would demand a level of quality and research that would take a simply unachievable amount of time and effort and so I never make the essay

[fluffybunny35]

Many magic the gathering players ask the question: does P equal NP?

[gcu-sovereign]

The best thing I can say of the ban announcements today is that no one seems bothered by Nadu.

Cephallid Breakfast the Commander Deck was a true mistake. I wasn't particularly upset by the wotc communication re: the Bird, and lots of people were really uncharitable about it.

Dockside, I thought had selected itself into the competitive tables a while ago. So seeing a ban [apparently on the back of its casual appearances] for it is surprising.

[goblincow]

Hey would you look at that

they did it again! (again(again(again)))

Phenomenal. Unsurprising. Just a little bit vindicating. Existentially depressing? Sure, why not (we'll get there, keep reading).

It's almost like when Hasbro, who own WotC, announce that they're firing ONE THOUSAND AND NINETY NINE of their ≈6,400 employees – that's just short of 1/5 for those playing along at home – two weeks before Christmas (the 1100th was Mike Mearls, who has appropriately earned hinself a reputation for actively supporting abuse and fomenting general toxicity from his position atop the D&D 5e design team, so you won't be surprised to learn that I don't much give a shit about that one), including a confirmed (but unknown total) amount from within the D&D and MTG teams – after having previously fired 800 people in January while CEO Chris Cocks """earned""" $9.4million in 2022 from their exploited labour – you lose about 2198 eyes, a single pair of which could have caught the "error" that they initally tried to claim wasn't an image created by machine learning tools built on uncompensated art scraped from creators who did not consent to their work being stolen for the commercial profit of industry executives hellbent on firing the human beings whose labour they exploit and replacing them with algorithms that produce exponentially uncreative replicas for the low low price of destroying those people's livelihoods and stunting the transcendent human capacity to create art & culture while they're at it.

You will not be shocked to learn that they backpedalled pretty quick and started apologising, as though that's worth anything.

Ah, capitalism, you truly never fail to disappoint while you make us all violently sick in pursuit of exponential power in your suffering-&-abuse-speedrun, on our merry little way to becoming just another cold, dead rock in a cold, dead universe. Hubris, and folly, and blood for the blood machine. What else is new.

And on that note:

(I can guarantee that this, at least, will be evergreen)

WOTC shit the bed (again(again(again))),

because they can't help but commission AI art, which is now apparently being reworked because - rightly - everyone is very pissed about it.

so I made this, I have a feeling we'll get a lot of use out of it:

[bitflare]

Okay, a bit late to the show, but I've finally gotten around to reading the new booster pack announcement.

I have two overwhelming reactions: I'm incredibly annoyed, and this is almost exactly what I want to see.

The Good:

- Merging Set Boosters & Draft Boosters. This was always frustrating and I've wanted to see this for awhile.

- Putting more exciting stuff to open in limited

The Bad

- Raising the price of booster boxes to at or above set boosters (Adjusted per pack booster box price, play packs will be able $0.33 more expensive than draft packs, if they stick to the $120 price tag). This will raise the price of drafts, possibly more than wizards expected (stores know these packs have more good stuff in them than draft boosters & without the MSRP can raise the price to match. I wouldn't be surprised to see drafts going up by about $3 a draft). And I don't know about you, but while I like opening cool cards, my decision point for going to draft regularly is the price to play, not my rares/dollar rate.

- No formal place for Enchanting Tales/Retro Artifacts/Mystical Archives & Dilution of the list. These special types of showcases were awesome, cool art of reprints for limited & eternal formats that were thematic for the set. And on top of that, they were guaranteed one per pack. Drafting with these in the set was a blast, because you'd always get something cool. The list on the other hand is a sometimes slot in set boosters that covers a group of dubiously selected reprints from magic's past. It was good that it existed as a source of reprints, though it could be significantly better, but it doesn't really have any cool factor and is mostly just kind of confusing. And the fact that thematic reprints, without a special art, will be locked behind a percentage of a percentage chance is infuriating. I really would have preferred to ditch the list altogether, give the special type of showcases a name, or even just call them expeditions, and give them a formal slot in the pack (hell, replace one of the wildcard slots with it).

(To anyone who says we can't do the expedition type card every set because people would get bored of it, we're doing showcases, extended art, alternative art, etc. Every set now, why should this be any different. If you want booster fun, they're it)

The Indifferent

- 14 Cards per pack. I'm fine with this. I prefer 15 playable cards as a value proposition, but if draft actually works better at 14 than fine.

- I'd prefer to see art cards in every pack, ideally replacing the ad entirely (as opposed to a separate slot), but understand wizards won't give up the waste of paper and ink unless it's pulled from their cold dead hands (Just print normal backed tokens!).

This is all really close to what I'd want to see, but it's far enough away that I think it's made it worse.

[arcums-astrolabe]

i have always had the headcanon that chandra uses melanin to cast her fire magic cuz she does not look like her parents at all and she as pale as snow reflecting moonlight.

whos goddamn white baby is that? She's a fire cracker.

CHANDRA FANS AND KINNIES DNI 🚫🔥

[i-swear-it-wasnt-memes]

Off of two seconds of googling I found this image on a Reddit thread for celebrities who are quote unquote “unconventionally attractive”

With that said, and this ain’t necessarily a bad thing, but some of y’all spend wayyyyy more time in communities where the ideas of what is attractive is not the same as society at large. Calling Elesh Norn conventionally attractive is insane.

Alright fine, let's do this

(based on this post)

[transcendingirl]

The discourse surrounding MtG is genuinely awful. There's this insistence on positivity and consumerism.

Videos celebrate each new release while even the people making them admit to exhaustion.

At the same time, no one wants to address the elephant in the room: the direction MtG is headed is simply bad, and has been bad for years. Yet everyone pretends "that's just the way it is" and that you are free to stop anytime if you don't like "progress".

(Obvious nonsense; the game has addiction built in and everyone knows it)

So, like. I'm gonna build a cube, steal a Dandan deck, and be done with this awful part of my life.

[xantchaslegacy]

on the edge of my seat for WotC to drop the Jiang Yanggu Bloomburrow skin and unleash hitherto unfathomable levels of mtg discourse :3