The WotC Situation

[Zinegata]

I'd rather not hunt down _all_ the articles where they compare Ravnica to more recent blocks such as Onslaught, but I do recall MR writing such comparisons in Making Magic .

I dunno about anyone else, but I'm not looking for sources. This isn't fucking Wikipedia. I just want to know what made Ravnica different from Kamigawa and Mirrodin and Onslaught.

Mark's basic thesis for Ravnica vs older blocks is basically this: Older blocks were planned and designed on a set-by-set basis. Ravnica onwards, design and planning was block-by-block.

[Crissa]

It's just, they said they were doing that before, up to the point of Ice Age, even.

I suppose it could be fair that they've been doing better.

-Crissa

[Username17]

I dunno about anyone else, but I'm not looking for sources. This isn't fucking Wikipedia. I just want to know what made Ravnica different from Kamigawa and Mirrodin and Onslaught.

Well, I really liked Mirrodin. Or rather, I really liked a bunch of cards in Mirrodin. It was, however, full of coasters:

But the mechano-zombie apocalypse thing they had going on was very thematic, and there were decent cards in there too. But it was full of coasters. Kamigawa was even worse about that. Terrible cards littered the world:

Personally, I never played Ravnica. But what I hear, the coaster problem is much attenuated. People talk about nifty cards, and even the ones they nominate for "worst" cards look like this:

And that's really probably it. A lot of people will probably buy packs until they get a pack filled entirely with cards they will not use, and then get discouraged and stop. So while the balance and playability of the commons has a huge impact on how much people want to play booster drafts, it is probably the uncommons that determine whether people buy whole boxes worth. After all, the commons will quickly hit saturation for players, where even if they are something awesome like Chittering Rats:

Players will get four of them and then just not fucking care any more. But people like don't have four of any particular uncommon. So it's just the question of what the chances of every single uncommon in pack being shitty. When you open a Ravnica pack, and one of the uncommons is something awesome like Devouring Light:

I would imagine that would make people want to buy more cards.

-Username17

[Zinegata]

It's just, they said they were doing that before, up to the point of Ice Age, even.

I suppose it could be fair that they've been doing better.

-Crissa

What they've been doing since Ice Age (although Ice Age itself was retconned into a block) was to make an overall theme for a block - which is two or three sets.

However, the planning and design didn't really go beyond mere themes and (very) general mechanics for the entire block until Ravnica.

Put it this way. In the Ice Age era, they'd decide "We'll have a block set in the Ice Age! Snow everywhere!". That's the entirety of their planning for the block. It's then up to the set designers to make cool cards and try to follow the theme. And in a lot of cases... the set designers fail to do so. Hence the "coaster" cards (More properly "Shit, we still need X more cards for the set!").

Ravnica by contrast started with a very comprehensive brief from the get-go ("We will have 10 guilds, each with 2 colors. Four guilds will be in set 1, 3 each in the last 2 sets"), and they more or less knew what each guild should have ("Each guild will have one keyword mechanic. Each will have one legendary leader.")

And, honestly, Ravnica couldn't have been pulled off if they hadn't done the bulk of the block design from the get-go.

It's a subtle difference. But it's an important difference.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

And that's really probably it. A lot of people will probably buy packs until they get a pack filled entirely with cards they will not use, and then get discouraged and stop.

I think that's what made me stop playing. 4e was a TERRIBLE card set, and all my friends would only play you in Ice Age if they were playing Ice Age because it was considered to be a "different game" and was "overpowered" for play. And no on played Ice Age. Most of the people I played with were hardcore old school, and had decks full of moxes and all sorts of other Alpha/Beta/Arabian Nights stuff.

[Jacob_Orlove]

Frank is basically spot on about the "good uncommons" thing. Ravnica had great cards in all rarities, but the uncommons in particular were a house. And the cards were just appealing; multicolor as a theme means that each individual card offers a lot of possibilities for deckbuilding, without encouraging you to put all the cards from the block in a pile and declare victory, the way you did with Onslaught's Goblins, or Mirrodin's Affinity for Artifacts. The multicolor theme plays well with the cards you already have, while encouraging you to keep looking for new cards to add, both of which make players happy AND get them to spend more.

Ravnica had a huge advantage that they've continued to exploit in recent sets, too: if a card is two (or more) colors, you can make it better for the same price, without upsetting game balance. That helped a lot with making the uncommons both useful and appealing, and you could include rares that were even better.

[Crissa]

Ice Age's theme was extinction, not just snow and ice. Hence the crappy Homelands set.

-Crissa

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I gotta say though, Magic seems a completely different game these days. Back when I played, people who had access to earlier sets beat those with no access (People with Beta usually stomped me playing Revised, while I had the upper hand against people who played 4th edition), and people with more money usually won against people with less money (On kid had lots of portal/4th ed/ chronicles stuff, but he also had multiples of all sets and could pick and choose, and tended to beat me more often than not until I designed my black/blue unstable mutation deck. Probably an old idea but it made use of crap I did accumulate a lot of, like Hasran Ogresses. I seriously got 3 of the pieces of crap in one Chronicles booster pack one time.)

[Red_Rob]

Put it this way. In the Ice Age era, they'd decide "We'll have a block set in the Ice Age! Snow everywhere!". That's the entirety of their planning for the block. It's then up to the set designers to make cool cards and try to follow the theme. And in a lot of cases... the set designers fail to do so. Hence the "coaster" cards (More properly "Shit, we still need X more cards for the set!")

From the wiki:

"The Philadelphia Playtest Group, consisting of Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, and Dave Pettey, that had helped Richard Garfield with the original Alpha set of Magic decided that they could create a "more interesting" set. They were quickly asked by Richard Garfield to create a Magic expansion, and Chris Page was assigned to join the team. At the time designers were given the freedom to either compose their sets entirely out of new cards or to use the commons from Alpha Edition and create only new uncommons and rares. The Ice Age group, who saw themselves as improving on Alpha Edition, chose to reuse many staple cards. The design goals are best described by Skaff Elias himself: "We wanted a set where flying was special, not just an extra word tacked on to every played creature. We wanted a set where the idea that a color was short on creatures meant something. We wanted a set where the 'allied' colors were played more often with each other than enemy colors were. We wanted strategy in simple creature combat as well as flashy enchantments that gave you cards for life. We wanted games to last longer (when we started the design of the set, the Magic environment was too fast due to unlimited card restrictions) and have more turnabouts.""

Whilst I agree with you block design has advanced significantly, I think you are doing a disservice to the designers of the original sets. Its easy to look at the past and assume the people then didn't know what they were doing, but there were clear design goals at work.

[Jacob_Orlove]

Hasran Ogress was fine, 3 power for 2 mana with a drawback. Better than probably 80% of creatures at the time. But yeah, back then they were just trying to winnow out the most broken cards to get the game towards some semblance of fairness. Incidentally, 4th edition decks would stomp all over 5th, they get Balance and Mind Twist and all that. 5th->6th is probably where the base set power level stopped falling dramatically, although they have raised it considerably for 10th edition.

Their new model is that new cards are sometimes better, but mostly just different. They make huge piles of cash from people playing sealed deck and draft events, so they make sure every set and every block plays well for those formats, and that the cards hang together to make a new experience each time so that people come back.

As far as building decks, someone who has access to enough rare lands will have a mana base advantage (either more stable mana, or running more colors at less cost), but that's always been true. There's some advantage when you have access to more cards, but there's huge diminishing returns on that, so might not be a bad game to stick with if you want to play casually.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Hasran Ogress was fine, 3 power for 2 mana with a drawback. Better than probably 80% of creatures at the time.

That's what I learned. It's kind of crappy, but throw an Unstable Mutation on nearly anything on the first 2-3 rounds and you tend to get an early advantage. Keep in mind that the state of the art at the time was to not use any creatures at all, they were considered inferior. I actually got 3 unstable mutations for free because most people were throwing them out when they received them.

The deck I remember most fondly was blue-black. It was based around getting creatures out quickly then buffing them quickly. Didn't matter how crappy the creatures were, if they cost 3 or less mana they were in. Especially if they flew. My first win with the deck was thanks to an Ornithopter with Unstable Mutation plus Unholy Strength on it. Having a 5/3 creature on Turn 2 that flew that was immune to terror was something a lot of decks back in my community didn't have an answer to.

Another time I went around and told the group "Give me any cards you don't want anymore" right at the beginning of the Weatherlight expansion. When I had 40, I added lands and stomped them in the dirt (except for the rich kid that beat me most of the time).

[Zinegata]

Whilst I agree with you block design has advanced significantly, I think you are doing a disservice to the designers of the original sets. Its easy to look at the past and assume the people then didn't know what they were doing, but there were clear design goals at work.

Again though, before Ravnica the focus and leeway was on designing and making sure each individual set is fun and unique. Ravnica onwards the design and planning happened more on the block level.

All of the specific design stuff mentioned in the article was aimed towards one set - Ice Age. The block concept hadn't even been fully realized yet at the time, nor were different formats.

That doesn't mean the Ice Age people were bad designers. It only means that they were designing for a very small subset of the entire Magic card pool.

Put it this way, during the Ice Age period each team just focused on making a bunch of individual splat books with not much regard for anything else. So you've got one team making "Codzila made easy" while another team makes "Cities of Faerun".

By the time Ravnica came along, the planning revolved around making a series of splatbooks. So instead of one team making individual splatbooks, they took three teams and told them "We're gonna make the Complete series for PCs. Now let's plan which book should be in the series".