The End of the Arenacraft Podcast

Wow, that was sudden. I just learnt that a longtime podcast I have been listening to just stopped dead outta nowhere. Arenacraft podcast just dropped its last episode and listening to it last night, I had some thoughts of my own.

Is Magic Still A Good Game?

Arenacraft dropping the podcast really boiled down to Magic Arena being really sacky and terrible. It could have been a great way to play Magic online, but a whole slew of mistakes and general stinginess on Wizard's part in terms of earning cards just killed it.

Magic is probably still a good game as long as they keep their balance in their pants, but Arena has not beena  good game for a long time. Wildcards were a great innovation at that time, when the deck I picked up needed about twelve rares, a whole slew of uncommons and a set of Hazorets to go. Now, the best decks cost ~40-50 rare wildcards, you are pretty much locked in to it with no recourse.

Reality really struck me after I saved up 100k gold for Kamigawa release. I used it all to buy Kamigawa packs as I don't like draft, thinking I could build at LEAST some archetypical decks in full. NOPE! You're still going to be missing rares here and there, need to use wildcards to patch up the wholes, and I STILL didn't get a single copy of the white sweeper, Sayanora, which was key to building control decks in white. After a while, it was really Sayanora for me, because 100k gold is equivalent to saving gold and NOT BUYING PACKS FOR 100 DAYS, and it STILL won't get you a full set.

Coincidentally, I was playing Master Duels as well at this time, and just messing around with Toons, Eyes-Restrict, Gravekeepers and having fun, and still have gems left over. The choice was really clear.

Life After Rotation

I felt that. I stopped playing Arena after the end of Kamigawa release, although I have been out of it for a long time. I find it interesting that the host of Arenacraft podcast, Arjuna's journey paralleled mine, he started at around a rotation, got into a deck and playstyle that was supported that standard, and dropped the game once that playstyle was no longer supported.

For Arjuna, that was green ramp, and there was a LOT of support around the Return to Return to Ravnica standard that it was mindboggling. It's a little hard to agree there due to my personal bias, but I pretty much cooled on Arena a lot after Hazoret rotated out, at around the same time that the praises of the new format came in.

I am reminded of the days where I was really happy playing Magic, which was when mono-red was around, the decks were cheap, easy to understand, and played with hasty creatures like Yu Gi Oh. Plus you had definite boss monsters in Hazoret, so the deck was pretty on theme.

For me, that standard wasn't a really good time, especially around Return to Theros, where that was when the VARUS hit. Coincidentally, that was also when I started really writing /Conspiracy/ Girls.

Balance

I especially didn't like the balancing in Magic as of recent years. Small Teferi should never have been released. Neither Uro, Oko or any slew of banned cards. I think there was a deliberate push to get Magic to become more like YGO with all it's brokenness, but it's a really losing battle.

The people that like combo style gameplay and big flashy moments are not going to look at Magic, and go "wow" for their flashiest combos, because their combos really just amount to putting (i.e cheating) one big card out after cheating on mana, with their opponent having little to no recourse. Makes for really bad gameplay . (see Fires of Invention) It would be a different story if EVERY deck was cheating out cool awesome stuff in archetype, but Magic essentially boiled down to cheating out the biggest and baddest of the bunch, so the decklists sort of consolidated into a goodstuff pile.

What I really also hated were extra turn cards. Oh boy, I hate long turns in YGO, but imagine extending your turn forever! Talk about demoralizing. Again, another one of those, there are no proper counters for a normal deck kind of cards. I find that to be really horrible to balance. Either you run blue to counter (omninegate) it, or then die, as Wuflu-Borat says.

Hand of Blackrock

I have no idea why everything is happening to a game I liked so much, but I blame ol' Larry anyway. (it wouldn't be Delarouxposting if I didn't start shouting IT'S A CONSPIRACY outta nowhere) The art has gotten uglier and postmodern (have you seen Faithless looting?), there's enough virtue signaling for days, and there really aren't any cute girls in Magic anymore.

I look to my left, and just as Master Duel came out and I got tired of waiting a full minute, most times far far far more, for the queue to resolve, I just jumped ship. If I was looking for anime aesthetics in my cardgame, why not just go play the actual anime card game? Wizards just made it easier by making the game so intolerable bad these past few years.

Last Word

These days, Magic has morphed into something I can't quite recognize. I would say they got Eldrazied sometime the last couple of years and replaced with a shapeshifting worm, but as an old business consultant, I get it. It's money. It's always about the money. I still think that Magic at its core is really great, but you have to dig really deep through all the really messed up modern stuff to get there. Will I ever return to Magic? Maybe, when waifus outnumber the goblinas in game art, but that is not something that will happen soon.

P.S: After going to back to YGO I realized that Mutate was a ripoff of XYZ. Erm. You wut, Wizards?