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Spring Break!
Hey Magic players! It has been a few weeks since I posted anything, and that’s mostly because I was in Ontario for a family wedding! What a great time! Kudos to everyone who made it possible, made it happen, and made it so wonderful!
While I was away, I was reacquainted with some of the tabletop games I’d dabbled with as a teenager. I played some Warhammer 40k, and a few similar games. These days, however, my family is into Blood Bowl.
The game combines strategic tabletop combat using cool models, which Warhammer is famous for, with football. American football, pretty much, with some rugby elements. It was around when I was a teen, and apparently has changed very little.
I watched a game, and even as a noob spectator, it was pretty entertaining. I’m going to have to try it. I could get a copy of the base game, but it’s not cheap. I could download rules, and buy a team or two, but again, not that cheap.
So instead I’m going to try and put something together in Lego. We have the plates to do a field, and more than enough figures for teams. I’ll probably post the results, and there’s even some stop-motion potential, so watch out for that!
New Cards… Always New Cards
Of course, while I was away, I picked up a new Magic card. It was Windswift Slice, something that’s in and out of my LGS so fast, it has been tough to land a copy. It’s for my Battlebox/Cube.
The Cube (easier to say/type than whatever else, and is much more of a Battlebox, but hey, sometimes nicknames stick) is something I’m probably going to be talking about in the coming months.
Magic is getting more and more complicated. There is no end to the flow of new cards. The cards themselves are very complicated. The possible interactions, especially in formats like Commander, are endless. Understanding the game and how you can interact with it is getting tough, and I would often prefer to play a version that’s simpler in a lot of ways.
The Cube is my answer. Like all Cubes/Battleboxes, it’s a curated format. That means I chose the cards that are in it. Most Cubes are curated for power level, and while mine is also that, it’s curated for simplicity.
Not long ago, I wrote a post about simplifying our Magic games. I’ve applied that thinking to the Cube. Only so many types of tokens. Only one type of counter. No cards with upkeep triggers, so no need for upkeep. A substitute for lands. All designed to make the boardstates nice and manageable. Magic is complicated enough already.
The West is Still Wild
Ontario was nice, but it’s great to be back in BC. While I was away, Outlaws of Thunder Junction officially released. I picked up a few cheap singles, as well as a complete set of the Bounty cards, from the Commander decks.
These are add-ons to a casual game, along the lines of Planechase or something similar. They feature an Outlaw character, as well as the conditions required to fulfill the bounty, like damaging all opponents during your turn.
While there is a prescribed way to use the Bounty cards, I think there are plenty of other ways that would be just as good or better. I’ve already got a small deck of ‘reward’ cards to pair with the Bounties, and will be testing them out soon.
Quick Draw Reactions
Thunder Junction has some new mechanics and some old. Here’s a six-shooter’s worth of thoughts.
1 – The classic Desert typed land has expanded again, this time into multicolours and a supporting suite of utility lands. While this is neat, and provides the option to play a deck of all Desert lands, there isn’t a great reason yet to do that other than flavour.
Some of these lands are great, but the rest are filler, or variations on things we’ve seen before. I think design is moving too fast, and pumping out so many new lands, that even the best new stuff seems unremarkable. Especially in the face of a new Modern Horizons set looming.
2 – The Mount/Saddle mechanic seems like a big miss to me overall. I don’t know if any of the cards are in demand (prices tell me they are not) but there are a lot of hoops to jump through to make them work, and the cards are often worded in a confusing way.
What’s worst about Mount is that it fails to capture the feeling of mounting a mount. Tapping the rider feels backwards, even though it aligns with how vehicles work. We’ve seen dozens of mounted characters in Magic, and the character on the mount has the abilities, not the mount itself. Black Knight is a classic example. There’s a horse in there somewhere, but card is human knight type, and we sort of understand that First Strike is kind of how the mounted aspect plays out.
I think the mercenary tokens in the set, which add a bonus when tapped, should have been the Mount aspect. They could be several different Mounts. The basic one being the +1/+0. Others could add better stats, evasion, etc. They could be a mix of tokens (ie. common breeds) and actual cards, up to Legendaries.
3 – Spree cards are great. Hard to argue with flexibility like that. I myself tend to glaze at them a little, because like so many newer cards, they are dense with text and possible interactions. In a way, they’re sort of automatic staple cards, ie. ones you’d consider for any deck that can cast them. But also, like the Confluence cycle, Command cycle, and all the assorted Charm cards can teach us, there’s only so many slots in a deck. Don’t spend too much on these cards unless every mode is amazing for your specific plan.
4 – Committing a Crime is a decent enough mechanic. It’s simple enough to understand, though some players will get a much-needed crash course in targeting. Some cards aren’t obvious, and a slight difference in wording can be huge. But overall, this is easy to understand, has a wide-range of applications, and is real-world identifiable.
That being said, there are some weird aspects to Committing a Crime, because all it takes is targeting an opponent or their cards. Giving opponents resources and targeting them with beneficial effects counts as Crimes, which is strange. Creatures that are embodiments of good, purity and lawfulness can use their well-intentioned targeted abilities, but they are now crimes if they target another player’s territory. Even in kindness.
It’s also a bit of a head-scratcher why a Crime-based mechanic wasn’t in Capenna, or even Karlov Manor. Done right, this could have been a unifying mechanic across the past few years of releases. Hindsight, though. Since that targets you, the reader, it’s a Crime.
5 – The Vault Spoils cards, or Big Scores, or Non-Token Treasures, or Loot, the Key to Everythings, or whatever conflicting report you trust, are just a bunch of randos, which would have been right on brand had they done a repeat of Aftermath with them. Sure, some of them fit into Thunder Junction’s themes and motifs, but they could have easily been part of the Fallout universe. Maybe they were extras from OTJ and Fallout’s design process. Cards that didn’t really fit.
I’m not against them packing that stuff up and selling it, like a recording artist might release a b-sides collection or something, but being transparent with what the cards are and where they came from would go a long way. If they’re powerful things, deliberately withheld from their original design sandbox to sell some peripheral product, I’m much less on board.
Hopefully Wizards learned here, because they spent time and money making those designs, then had to shoehorn them into another set to try and move the actual cards. That’s not a wise financial strategy going forward.
The Loot creature itself seems… forced. Like it has a toy line, and an educational computer game, and a not-so-educational mobile game, etc. all lined up and ready to go. It has mad Poochie vibes.
I feel like Loot is going to be the star of a couple stories and then sort of peace out. Somehow not the face of Magic going forward. Maybe I’m wrong.
6 – Plot as an ability seems broken. It’s a free spell thing, and they just can’t make a free spell thing that doesn’t cause problems somewhere. To attempt to balance that out, Plot is very limited, and is mostly on cards that are allowed to Plot themselves. Most of those cards are ‘designed for limited’ and will never impact constructed Magic. Probably.
There are also very few cards that allow you to Plot other cards. Jace Reawakened and a couple others do, but other than the 5-mana Make Your Own Luck, they’re limited in what they can Plot by mana cost. So no free early game Griselbrand. Wait, it’s 2024, and that’s not good enough anyway? Yikes.
I was a little concerned about Plot during spoiler season, because the card Galvanic Relay is a thing, and Plot looks like it would play like that. Explosive turns that end the game. Galvanic Relay can be found in Legacy Storm decks, and that’s not nothing. A little unexpectedly, Standard is feeling some Plot dominance right now, with Slickshot Show-Off running the tables. But Standard could use a shakeup. Probably.
Overall, I’m not so worried about Plot. They seem to have if successfully nerfed, which begs the question: if you have to go to so much trouble to make a mechanic balanced, why use that mechanic at all? Are we at the point where a certain amount of free spells are required to make some cards playable?
Kapow!
Conclusion
So Magic finally did a Western set, and it did okay. The gun aspect was not really a factor, and the light-shooter dealies are good and forgettable. Maybe the biggest reason for the set’s success was following on the heels of the Fallout Commander decks, which is basically a Western environment already. Between the two, there’s enough ground to cover that even people who dislike a lot of the set or sets can find something to dig into.
That’s me. I like the environment, and the feel of the Wild West. I played Red Dead Redemption 2 recently, and really enjoyed it. But the Oko/Kellan storyline for OTJ, and the Loot reveal with Jace and Vraska make me cringe a little, and some other things make me cringe a lot. I think Mount/Saddle is a flavour fail, and that’s just too bad.
Luckily, there are lots of ways to avoid the cringey parts of Magic, including playing other games like Blood Bowl, and curating a balanced environment, like a Cube.
This weekend is another Commander Challenge at my LGS, The Connection Games & Hobbies. These are very popular again, so if you’re planning to go to the next one, reserve your ticket in advance! I’m planning on going, and bringing a unique take on Sauron, The Dark Lord. Hope to see you there!
Thanks for reading!
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