i genuinely don't know what i want or expect to hear from wotc about these walking dead cards.
four days later i'm just not sure what i feel about this. i value their ability to experiment and test new things and do wildly unexpected things, but i also am incredibly frustrated that they'd just unilaterally decide the legality of cards that are not universally available
i also just super hate the notion of mechanically unique cards with limited availability
the walking dead is *not* magic adjacent. it has fucking guns.
the one argument i've heard so far that i'm sympathetic to is that by focusing these cards at casual commander play, they're hitting an audience that doesn't need card availability parity, because there's no meta or need to play any given card.
i hate walking dead, and have no desire to ever get these cards or use them, and there's no competitive pressure for me to bother getting them. but the flip side is that by making them mechanically unique, now if i DO like what the card does, i am stuck
is this banworthy in edh? I don't know. EDH is not in the business of banning cards that are hard to get. Banning punishes the folks who do buy the cards and do want to play with them, but it also sends a message saying yo, we don't want this in our game and don't like it
i think my bottom line comes back to this- i'm just really mad that wizards put this on us to deal with rather than stopping to think it through themselves first.
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i swear to god, some of you people are acting like rule 0 is some weird woke ideology forcing you to play with bumper guards while bowling and give everyone a participation trophy
and some of you are acting like rule 0 is the only thing stopping you from beating each other to death with hammers like some lord of the flies nonsense.
it's literally just those damn signs at a magic con that say 'casual' and 'competitive' and tell you where to sit. calm down.
the thing causing folks to yell at you because you brought a 4 to a table of 9s or you brought your geddon/dingus egg to a table of ladies looking left? that's not the ban list's fault. that's you being an asshole and not reading the room. Rule 0? that's how you read the room.
Rakshasa being cats is basically something Gygax made up for d&d when he was plundering Hinduism for source material, and he was incredibly patronizing and a huge dick about it, and it has no bearing on authentic Dharmic traditions
Some of you are asking what a Rattlesnake card is, so i thought it'd be cool to do a refresher. The great @anthonyaalongi created this animal classification system for multiplayer casual cards a generation ago and it still holds up
First, as mentioned, the rattlesnake. a card that sits on the table and uses threat of activation to stop you from messing with them. Classic examples are like Nev's Disk or Seal of Doom- political cards that direct your attention to softer targets.
next, the Spider, a card that waits patiently for you to spring its trap and get blown out.
in what is almost certainly not a coincidence, the forthcoming innistrad: midnight hunt set comes out almost 10 years to the day that og innistrad came out.
this is notable for a few reasons. In many ways, OG innistrad represents the real beginning of Magic's explosive growth period, and is also widely considered to be one of the top 2 or 3 limited environments of all time
2009 saw the release of the original Duels of the Planeswalkers digital game on xbox, which made it to the PS3 in 2010. This game doesn't get the respect i think it deserves for what it did to really launch magic to a broader audience
a lot of folks have asked me how to downtune their decks to make them more 'casual friendly' for whatever that means, and while it is really hard to just tell you what to do (as it is more a mindset than strict card swaps) i do have one tip- swap in arcane denial for counterspell
(or for you grognards like me, the proper versions)
they both do the same thing- hard counter a spell that is either going to wreck you or win the game- but arcane denial softens the blow in a more interesting way, and gives the countered player the feeling that they didn't just get completely stuffed.
Our story starts back in 1976, with the 3rd supplement to the original D&D rules, Eldritch Wizardry by Brian Blume. (the first three books were men & magic, monsters and treasure, and underworld & wilderness adventures, followed by greyhawk and blackmoor)
(Eldritch wizardry also introduced psionics to D&D but called it Yoga, lol)