Thread by @Ilvaldi

While I do enjoy some of the White cards previewed so far, it’s hard to take seriously WotC’s promise of “powerful white cards”, if “powerful” is just relative within the color and not compared to what other colors have also been doing:

For context, if anybody needs it, this was teased by WotC several months ago:

Whether @GavinVerhey or anyone else wants to say otherwise, yes a lot of White’s Stax mechanics originated as Blue cards, but the same could be said of cards like Prodigal Sorcerer and Psionic Blast:

Regardless of throwback or keeping with precedent, I’m confident in saying players now see White as the prime color for Stax. I don’t think these effects have a place in Blue anymore. For whatever reason, Mirrodin/Kamigawa shifted White, and it stuck.

WotC can spin the dials in White’s favor, but I worry with Op Agent and Hullbreacher, what worse creations you guys can create for White? I know White can be worse, but would players be happy? If I’m not wrong, isn’t creating a deadlock in a game a design faux pas?

I understand there was a reason why WotC strayed away from Armageddon and Cataclysm. But to that end, it has also made cards like Uro, Omnath, and Field of the Dead unchecked in past Standard cycles.

You don’t have to print Armageddon. You don’t have to print Humility, but this polarism in design of double-dipping into one color’s strength and not acknowledging another color’s makes it so that when the pendulum swings back the other way, it’s going to swing harder and worse.

If your solution is to make White some combo-oriented color like Teshar or Heliod, my concern is that it’ll make the game insular. Right now, I can’t think of any color that’s so meta-conscious as White what with Death and Taxes and Stax. You even made a playtest card as such:

Players clearly see White as the no-nonsense color, the anti-combo color that punishes players for being greedy with card draw, ramp, and tutor. It takes their opponent’s momentum and turns it against them. So why print better versions of these cards in other colors?