I'm writing an essay for the main page called Why I'm Quitting Magic. I may not actually quit, but these rules are all stupid. And the one rule they SHOULD have fixed they didn't.

They whine and whine about flavor and stuff not being intuitive, you know what they should fix? The distinction between cast and successfully cast. Either a spell is cast or it's not. If it's countered, secondary abilities like Cascade and Storm should NOT trigger.

The creature type update was great. It didn't make any cards worse, all it did was make stuff better. I would argue Lord should perhaps still a creature type, since a Goblin King shouldn't be able to rally another Goblin King, but whatever. Goblin King is a better card than it was and that's fine with me.

In response to your other stuff, all future elaboration will be saved for my news blog rant.

Yeah, cast instead of play is the one thing they did I like.

Seriously, when is a new player ever going to deal with token ownership?

It's not a commonly used trick, and it's not even possible to exploit in Standard. It's one of the subtle nuances that makes the game fun.

UsaSatsui wrote:

You say "subtle nuance", I say "unintuitive and bizarre rule for experienced players to exploit that really makes no sense at all". In fact, that seems to be the whole point of these changes: getting rid of rules that fly in the face of the way the game should be logically played.

It is intracacies of the rules that make the game fun, especially draft and sealed. A large part of any draft or sealed tournament is pulling bomb rares. If you don't, you are at a severe disadvantage. But because the ruleshave complexities to them, pulling a bomb rare isn't always enough. I've been better people in draft who had better decks and better board positions by outsmarting and outplaying them. And that's what makes MTG fun, the mental aspect. Being in a bad situation and playing your way out of it.

And these rules changes strip away the cerebral aspect of MTG. They are basically dumbing things down and turning the game into Yu-Gi-Oh 2.0. R&D doesn't want you to be clever. They want to play either an aggro deck or some retarded combo deck that stalls for seven turns then takes a 15 minute eighth turn and wins on it. And they don't want you to have to design it yourself. They want the game to be so intuitive that you can copy someone else's $200 top 8 deck off the internet, build it, and be able to win with it out with only a mediocre grasp of the rules and without having read two pages of notes of how the deck works and when and what you should sideboard.

Well, fuck that. I've always considered Magic to be a CCG version of chess. Under the new changes, it's more like the card game War. Whoever topdecks the most wins.

Castling is completely unintuitive. So is en passant. We should just remove them from the rules to make the game easier to understand.

Oh, that flavor text is soooooooo clever.