It's amazing to think that 2/3 for 3 in white used to be pretty good. Now you'd have to make it a 4/4 with flying and trample for 3 or no one would bother to play it. Creatures have gotten out of control.
Carnophage_4ever
★★☆☆☆ (2.9/5.0)(5 votes)
@ Guest
I couldn't agree more with you. It's like a Coup d'État was staged at WoTC and we're living under a fundamentalist Timmy dictatorship. A 2/3 fr 3? Souds like 3 stars to me.
Regal Unicorn still is pretty good, actually! This article doesn't directly say it, but I grokked in the first two paragraphs looking at its examples that, basically, MAGIC Players for the most part from 1993 to 1998 (or, until about 6th Edition? Right before they made the first big Rules Book Update?), judging from the comments on Gatherer and the stories I see in online articles aboutthe game, seem to have for the majority been playing either what we would now call "Vintage" (All the broken Bad Designs of color-pie breaking and Bad Developments of mana-curve breaking or just plain Should Not Exist broken effects in one absurd combo deck) or "Limited" (Mostly Commons and Uncommons, with few people actually collecting the game enough to have Playsets of the Rares that were actually properly made. Most of the Rares being not-properly made added to how seriously uncommon a reasonable Constructed Deck was to find until at least post-Urza's Block, but the flavor of super-iconic just FUN to Look At cards like Shivan Dragon and Serra Angel and Lord of the Pit really carried the game and people didn't notice, didn't have enough meta-logic of the game to see it, or just didn't care that the commons and the rares were at horrendous disparity to each other compared to today.
OK, MYTHIC Rares have brought us a Return to STUPID disparity between cards....because people reported they liked Broken Power in their OWN decks, just not in OTHER people's decks. Of course they did. And MYTHIC Rare actually is fairly Fair in Comparison to Rare. It may be a huge leap from uncommon to Mythic, but it's less huge a leap from Rare to Mythic, and the Rares compared to the Uncommons really are Fair as well, and the Classic Rares from years goneby are still holding their own against weaker uncommons and most of the commons of today. That probably is as elegant an explanation as any for why Mythic Rares are simply not going anywhere. Hang on, I need to get back to talking about Pearled and Regal Unicorn.
Fistly, A3Kitsune, I think both Unicorns have great Flavor Text, and I wish I could steal the Lewis Carrol flavor text for a new common Unicorn today, but Regal Unicorn is apparently a good candidate for getting another Core Set reprint judging by the article I linked at the beginning's explanation of where WOTC Development likes to rate cards for Limited. "Bad" cards for Constructed are more than passable cards for Limited, and while specifically Dark Banishing itself is probably not quite strong enough to actually be offered to us in a Modern set, *some kind of a* 3-cost Common Black removal spell could be seen for Limited.
While it's true that Dark Banishing, Seraph of Dawn, Blind Phantasm, and even up to Mahamoti Djinn just don't make the cut for today's Standard standard, they ARE still perfectly valid cards to pick up in Limited as mid-pack picks. in fact, if they weren't at least good enough to see -some- Draft play, I'd say Limited was getting way overpowered.
We should rate Rares and especially Mythic Rares more on their useability for Constructed formats like Standard, Cube, and Commander. We should actually not expect too many cards per set to be "Clearly really good in Modern", in order to keep Standard and Limited fair; and for the Commons, it's just not right to compare them outside of the context of Limited, because Commons are Designed FOR Limited now, which is why we actually still see, in sets as recently as Avacyn Restored, cards that are functional reprints of Alpha Common Creatures.
The main difference between MAGIC today and MAGIC back then is not so much in the cards themselves, but in what percent of people's decks are Rare and Mythic nowadays as compared to before, because the Internet and Tournament Magic have exploded the card economy into a clear pecking order, and the Rares that aren't Spike enough for Pro Tour MAGIC are way way easier to acquire than the similar-ranked Rares were- the ones much much better than all the commons but not good enough for the Big League at all- back then.
Comments (6)
I couldn't agree more with you. It's like a Coup d'État was staged at WoTC and we're living under a fundamentalist Timmy dictatorship. A 2/3 fr 3? Souds like 3 stars to me.
Regal Unicorn still is pretty good, actually! This article doesn't directly say it, but I grokked in the first two paragraphs looking at its examples that, basically, MAGIC Players for the most part from 1993 to 1998 (or, until about 6th Edition? Right before they made the first big Rules Book Update?), judging from the comments on Gatherer and the stories I see in online articles aboutthe game, seem to have for the majority been playing either what we would now call "Vintage" (All the broken Bad Designs of color-pie breaking and Bad Developments of mana-curve breaking or just plain Should Not Exist broken effects in one absurd combo deck) or "Limited" (Mostly Commons and Uncommons, with few people actually collecting the game enough to have Playsets of the Rares that were actually properly made. Most of the Rares being not-properly made added to how seriously uncommon a reasonable Constructed Deck was to find until at least post-Urza's Block, but the flavor of super-iconic just FUN to Look At cards like Shivan Dragon and Serra Angel and Lord of the Pit really carried the game and people didn't notice, didn't have enough meta-logic of the game to see it, or just didn't care that the commons and the rares were at horrendous disparity to each other compared to today.
OK, MYTHIC Rares have brought us a Return to STUPID disparity between cards....because people reported they liked Broken Power in their OWN decks, just not in OTHER people's decks. Of course they did. And MYTHIC Rare actually is fairly Fair in Comparison to Rare. It may be a huge leap from uncommon to Mythic, but it's less huge a leap from Rare to Mythic, and the Rares compared to the Uncommons really are Fair as well, and the Classic Rares from years goneby are still holding their own against weaker uncommons and most of the commons of today. That probably is as elegant an explanation as any for why Mythic Rares are simply not going anywhere. Hang on, I need to get back to talking about Pearled and Regal Unicorn.
Fistly, A3Kitsune, I think both Unicorns have great Flavor Text, and I wish I could steal the Lewis Carrol flavor text for a new common Unicorn today, but Regal Unicorn is apparently a good candidate for getting another Core Set reprint judging by the article I linked at the beginning's explanation of where WOTC Development likes to rate cards for Limited. "Bad" cards for Constructed are more than passable cards for Limited, and while specifically Dark Banishing itself is probably not quite strong enough to actually be offered to us in a Modern set, *some kind of a* 3-cost Common Black removal spell could be seen for Limited.
While it's true that Dark Banishing, Seraph of Dawn, Blind Phantasm, and even up to Mahamoti Djinn just don't make the cut for today's Standard standard, they ARE still perfectly valid cards to pick up in Limited as mid-pack picks. in fact, if they weren't at least good enough to see -some- Draft play, I'd say Limited was getting way overpowered.
We should rate Rares and especially Mythic Rares more on their useability for Constructed formats like Standard, Cube, and Commander. We should actually not expect too many cards per set to be "Clearly really good in Modern", in order to keep Standard and Limited fair; and for the Commons, it's just not right to compare them outside of the context of Limited, because Commons are Designed FOR Limited now, which is why we actually still see, in sets as recently as Avacyn Restored, cards that are functional reprints of Alpha Common Creatures.
The main difference between MAGIC today and MAGIC back then is not so much in the cards themselves, but in what percent of people's decks are Rare and Mythic nowadays as compared to before, because the Internet and Tournament Magic have exploded the card economy into a clear pecking order, and the Rares that aren't Spike enough for Pro Tour MAGIC are way way easier to acquire than the similar-ranked Rares were- the ones much much better than all the commons but not good enough for the Big League at all- back then.