Ruined FOREVER: The Magic 2010 Rules Changes by Zvi Mowshowitz
Will Price | June 10, 2009 | 3:03 pmMagic always has been, and always will be ruined forever. That’s part of what makes it such a great game. The cards and occasionally even the rules are constantly changing, presenting the players with new challenges. If Magic didn’t live on the edge where cards risk being broken and there are difficult trade-offs to be made between casual and hardcore, between Timmy, Johnny and Spike, between tradition and innovation, between online and offline then that means the decisions are tilted too far in one direction. That doesn’t mean that every change is for the better, as we shall see, but change is good and change is necessary. Change is Magic’s only constant.
Let’s go over the rules changes in order, with the details to be found here:
Change 1: Simultaneous Mulligans
Summary: Everyone mulligans at the same time.
Pros: It’s faster and only sticklers at tournaments waited around anyway.
Cons: A marginal decrease in dramatic tension. I had to stretch to come up with something.
This change is nothing more than common sense. Making the other players wait costs time and that time could be better spent playing Magic rather than waiting around for other players. This one is long overdue, a small but pure win with no real downside.
Change 2: Terminology Changes
When you play Terminology Changes, counter any number of target Old Terminologies that have been played, play with the new wordings and then put those wordings directly into play so that others can play with them. Old Terminologies can’t be played while playing. Or are we just playing with you?
Change 2A: Play is now The Battlefield.
Pros: New wording is flavorful, clearer and more precise.
Cons: Having to constantly use the word Battlefield, transition costs.
Magic, like love, is now a battlefield. My issue with this change is that battlefield is a mouthful and requires a definite article, which slows down speech and requires more text on cards. I agree that the word play was severely overloaded. We were using it for a zone and as the way cards are used, including multiple ways in which cards are used, which is confusing, and either change individually is pretty much a no brainer. Battle can be used as short for battlefield, and play has been reduced to one meaning.
Change 2B: You cast spells and activate abilities, but you still play lands.
Pros: New wording is flavorful, clearer, intuitive and more precise.
Cons: Transition costs, some cards will now have ugly wordings.
By unifying the playing of spells with the casting of spells, we were allowed to say “When you play X” or “When a player plays X” or “Players can’t play X” now all such things will need to say “play or cast” if they are to retain the same meaning. We also get gems like “Activated abilities can’t be activated” but that does make sense. There will be some awkwardness, but the long term result will be a strategic shift that is probably a wash. Besides, we were all saying we were casting spells anyway. That’s what makes them spells!
Change 2C: Removed-from-game is now the Exile zone.
Pros: Shorter, more flavorful and accurate.
Cons: When you wish upon a star.
The name is a great idea, but the functional change could have been mitigated. It’s not a huge point since such cards are rare and old but I think we can all agree that getting back removed cards this way is strategically interesting and fits the Rule of Cool so we should errata the Wishes and other such cards to retain their old functionality. There isn’t anything stopping us. This is a minor quibble in any case.
Change 2D: The end of turn step is the end step, and we now say “At the beginning of the end step” rather than “At end of turn.”
Pros: Players can now tell what the heck is going on.
Cons: Players can now tell what the heck is going on.
I weep for you rules lawyers who tried to trick your opponents with this one, I really do, but it is time to move on. Good change all around.
Change 3A: Mana Pools Emptying: Mana empties at the end of every step and phase.
Pros: Far easier to understand.
Cons: Takes away some cool strategic decisions.
While it was great fun deciding when to float or not float mana into your draw step it didn’t come up anywhere near often enough to justify how anti-intuitive this rule used to be. Now it makes sense, and that’s by far the most important thing.
Change 3B: No Mana Burn
Pros: Players can’t hurt themselves by accident, and there’s one less rule.
Cons: Loss of strategic depth.
This change saddens me but I understand why it was made. Before, taking mana into your mana pool when you might not need it required balancing the potential need for the mana and the risk that you would burn. This created especially interesting situations for combination decks, but it also came up when responding to various forms of mana denial and in other odd places. Now taking extra mana is risk free, and risk free decisions are not decisions. There’s also the loss of the ability to intentionally lower your life total, which comes up rarely but is almost always very cool when it happens. I’d also note that while Pulse of the Forge got worse, Pulse of the Fields got much better since many players will have no good way to dodge it. The bottom line is that we’d never consider introducing mana burn if it wasn’t already there, as it is rules complexity (and sometimes player demotivation) with only rare strategic benefit. Players like me will miss it but it was the right call.
Change 4: Tokens are now owned by whichever player controls them first.
Pros: That actually makes sense.
Cons: Some cool tricks don’t work anymore.
There will now be new cool tricks based on future cards to make up for the old ones, and the old ones were fun but let’s face it, they were never actually any good. In exchange we get to clear up some confusion, since the research indicated that players intuitively think the way the new rule works.
Change 6: Deathtouch: Deathtouch kills the same way lethal damage kills.
You’ll noticed I skipped number five. I’ll deal with that one last, because it’s the doozy.
Pros: Cleans up the rules, makes intuitive sense, saves time.
Cons: Will be covered under Change 5.
There’s no real reason for a deathtouch creature not to work this way. Deathtouch happens to turn into a convoluted mess of an ability in Magic 2010, but this change is not the reason why.
Change 7: Lifelink gives you life as you deal damage and does not stack.
Pros: Saves time, is intuitive to players who don’t know the rules.
Cons: Lack of strategic depth, deprecates stackable lifelinks.
I hate that this means you can no longer double up on lifelink abilities, but it’s not the kind of change that makes any practical difference because it almost never comes up. This also prevents players from gaining so much life the games slow down, which is some compensation for the lack of coolness. This also closes the chance for players to kill their opponent before lifelink can save them, which makes this a more powerful tool on blockers than it used to be especially for larger creatures. It is very cool to kill someone with their lifegain on the stack and it creates moments of high tension because you often sacrifice or risk a lot to make that happen.
Change 5: Combat damage does not use the stack. It just happens. Also, if you block with more than one creature they have to choose an order for them and then they can only damage creatures in that order and have to kill them each in turn. Unless there’s deathtouch involved, because that’s a protected class now so they can still do damage however they like.
This replaces: Combat damage works like every other ability in the game. You can assign damage however you like.
Pros: Word of God says that this is better.
Cons: Severely weakens entire classes of spells and abilities. Makes combat, Magic and decks in general less strategic and more straightforward. Makes the rules more complex rather than less complex in order to have them mimic intuitions.
This is the change that has the potential to do some serious damage to the game. The more I think about it, the more furious I am because this change makes no sense. The argument for it is that the change makes combat more intuitive to new players, because the stack is not intuitive. The problem with this is that the stack is still in the game! The stack is a confusing concept, but it’s something you have to understand in order to play Magic according to the rules under 6th Edition or under 2010.
The genius of the 6th Edition change was that combat worked like everything else, because combat damage was just another ability. This made combat harder to understand but it also meant that once you understood the stack you got combat for free. If you’re not going to understand the stack you can go ahead and play the whole game wrong in the meantime, so the rules work however you want them to. If you understand the stack, then how is combat damage using the stack unintuitive? Magic’s effects are consistant, or were: You say what you want to do and to what, and the other player gets a chance to do something about it.
Let us now divide this change into two scenarios for practical effect: Single blocking and double blocking.
Single blocking is the simpler case. Here, the change is that players are unable to assign damage and then cast spells and activate abilities (which is quite the mouthful compared to play spells and abilities or even simpler to play stuff) after assigning combat damage. This means that in order to do anything you need to expose yourself. For example, if I attack with a Chameleon Colossus and am blocked by a 4/4, I now must pump my Colossus before doing damage. If my opponent then uses that opportunity to kill the Colossus, they keep their creature, thus making pumping abilities much worse. Pump spells are even worse. If I cast Giant Growth, I have no choice but to expose myself to a 2-for-1. Then there is bounce. Before I could use a bounce spell to save my creature and kill yours. Now I cannot do this, making bounce far weaker in combat except when you’re given a gift because the opponent must pump before damage. Damage prevention has the same problem as well. There are special classes that become worthless – oh my god, they killed Morphling, you bastards – but individual cards can and will be replaced. Creatures with sacrifice effects are now crippled, which is the more common case, and we shall see if the plan is to make such cards stronger to compensate. In the meantime, the strategic depth of such cards will be lost.
The result of all this is clear. Spells that help me win combat and abilities that help me but require activation, especially if activating them makes me vulnerable, become much worse and thus much less interesting. Compensation via making them cheaper or bigger turns such spells into direct damage effects for pump spells, although it is potentially an option for other types. Creatures that involve sacrifice effects regularly used during combat are crippled and will need to become far stronger if they are to regain playability.
It is not obvious at first glance whether this adds or subtracts strategic depth from the combat itself, although it is almost certain at least in the short term to decrease the strategic depth of people’s decks and cards. There are clear scenarios it makes less interesting, and clear scenarios it makes more interesting but the ones where it gets more interesting it does so by disincentivising the player to have the cards in question in the first place because he no longer has a clean option available. Yes, as Aaron Forsythe has pointed out when you block with a Nantuko Husk and a Siege-Gang Commander you can change the situation from one where I have a clean option that wins me the combat into one where I have several options and it is not clear which one is best (technically that’s a double block but it’s the same idea). There will also be cases in which I used to have multiple good options and now have only one left. The problem is the most likely response to this is to not play with Nantuko Husk and Siege-Gang Commander. The deck in question is probably now unplayable.
Now on to double blocking. Here is where we see the cracks in the system at their most obvious. While we are not using “the stack” as such, we are using something else that must be separately explained and that is standing in for it, because otherwise the player dealing the damage has too big an edge. Rather than accept this as the way the game works now, a kludge has been introduced. Now I first sort of stack damage by announcing what order I will damage the creatures in, at which point we can do things before the damage is actually done. This plays remarkably like stacking damage, except that some of my choices are made later when the damage is dealt and some choices can’t ever be made.
For the attacking player, he is mostly in the same position as above. Anything he tries to do risks him not being able to deal his damage, which discourages him from trying anything. He can still remove blockers, which remains unchanged from before. The defending player has a few additional tricks he can now use, since the attacker is committed, although this comes at a cost. He can now pump up the initial target and not only save that creature but protect the others as well, which makes toughness pumping advantaged over damage prevention. The price he must pay is that now not only does protecting a creature risk having it not deal damage, it risks that creature not absorbing damage either and allowing your other creatures to be killed. Once again tricks get worse and brute force gets better.
To summarize the strategic implications, Magic will become strategically simpler and involve less skill. We will see more creatures with high power and high toughness and strong inherent always-on abilities. We will see less creatures with activated abilities such as regeneration, pumping abilities and especially sacrifice abilities. We will see more creature removal at the expense of pump spells, bounce spells and damage prevention. As cards rotate the cards may adjust to somewhat mitigate these effects.
To summarize the implications regarding ease of use, this change makes combat into a special case of the general case, with the general case being the stack that the rest of the game uses. All players must still learn the general case of how the stack works, but now must also learn the exception of how combat works. This makes the rules more complex, not less complex.
I believe that the error in both cases was to consider the new combat rules in isolation. This may be simpler (aside from the rules for double blocking, which are plenty confusing in their own right) for new players to understand, but the game overall is now harder to understand. The strategic complexity of combat may be the same or higher if players take the same cards into combat, but they won’t do that. New players will wonder why the stack isn’t being used in combat when it is used everywhere else and by all the new rules to make that happen, while old players will have to adjust to the new rules (sob, sob, I know) and deal with the loss of strategic complexity the game will suffer at least until new cards can rotate in.
The obvious disclaimer is that of course I have not played with the new rules or tried to explain them so all of this is speculative and could prove to be wrong. There are a lot of changes here that are good, and there’s no question the people who made these changes love the game and want it to succeed. I will try as much as I can to give them the benefit of the doubt on the last one, and hope that I am proven wrong.
Eloquent summary of the loss of damage on the stack and the strategic implications.
I for one will also miss damage on the stack. It is the one change I am genuinely reluctant to accept.
As a Judge of the game i find this entire change of how combat works to be completely unnecessary and makes me want to play magic less if at all.
in regard to change number 5…
i don’t intend this to be as harsh as it’s going to sound, but i am still waiting for an intelligent and objective argument as to why these changes are bad. it’s unlikely that the trolling masses would value my opinion so i won’t go point for point, but most of the examples and logic presented above are emotionally driven nonsense.
still though, keep writing and editorializing. it’s better that 99% of the forum chatter.
[...] Zvi Mowshowitz @ Top8Magic: [...]
I agree with your views. Rest in peace mogg fanatic…
This is a fantastic article. Its well-written and concise about the changes to the rules. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in understanding the changes (over the article posted on the Wizards site).
As someone who plays most often with his 7 and 9 year old kids….I’m all for the change. The stack is not an easy concept to understand, however the core concept “I do something to something, now you get to respond and the response happens before my effect fires” is reasonably intuitive. It can be a little messy, but it works. Combat was a mess though. There were just too many phases, timings to consider, etc. What ends up happening with less sophisticated players is they end up playing very close to how the new rule works: Defender chooses blockers, people play pumps/spells, then stuff dies. I think your arguement that now things are more complex is wrong. it just never made intuitive sense that damage works like an effect and goes onto the stack. My boys play without knowing what the stack is…they just know how spells and effects resolve. Damage is more of an end of phase thing that happens when combat spells and things are all done. That makes more sense to them.
I have a hard time believing that this change will significantly impact the number, or quality, of decisions made in the game. it simply changes the risks inherent in the decisions.
zvi i agree 100%
i came here expecting to see a rant, but you feel exactly how I do, all the rules except 5 are decent, but 5 is just a huge mess. If they wanted to make damage not use the stack there are so many better ways. This way is so 3rd edition. Confusing, hard to explain to beginners, weird, it makes combat the single exception to the game that has its own little rulebook. Why is deathtouch so exceptional? That beggars the imagination.
I think they will have to fix rule 5 in the next revision. Unfortunate that will not be until around 2015 if they keep doing major rules revisions only every 5 years.
I agree and this whole change makes me really angry.
One thing I’m wondering about…I was going to buy Duels of the Planeswalker, why are they even releasing this product when the rules are going to change 20 days after its released? I’d like to see them patch it with the new rules changes but I dont think they will.
Stupid descion all round ;/
@fatecreatr
What?
“but most of the examples and logic presented above are emotionally driven nonsense.”
None of it is nonsense as everything he said makes perfect sense. In an attempt to make the game less complex they are making it MORE complex, which is horrible.
They only had to make one rule change to get what they wanted and not fuck up the whole combat system:
“All damage from creatures not in play is reduced to 0″
Was that so hard?!
Removing the stack is outlandish.
A perfect summary of what’s happening to Magic: the Gathering.
I totally agree with the fact that change nbr 5 creates more problems than it solves. I’m afraid I will have problem to explain all that stuff to the players as a judge.
I hope Wizards will reconsider this mistake.
@fatecreatr:
Well, there are objectively fewer options now. The space of decisions is contracted. That’s (typically) a bad thing, especially if they are trying to push creatures and combat as the interesting part of the game. With so much less room for artistry of the combat step, it seems like a less compelling hook.
The question is really, what is the upside? As Zvi outlined, it does not appear to make anything simpler.
Less significantly, it also doesn’t make sense from a flavor perspective. Now the creature is damaged and instantly perishes? You mean Sakura-Tribe Elders can’t do whatever earth magic they do to go get a land after they’ve been sliced in the face by a Boggart Ram Gang? Or that you can’t nonlethally wound multiple enemies you’re engaging? Seems silly to me.
The short and the sweet of it is that #5 strips away a substantial amount of utility from combat interactions without adding enough value to justify the change. I think that Zvi and others have clearly illustrated this fairly well.
This from Wizards of the Coast Eric on their forums:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zinger314 View Post
IMPORTANT QUESTION
How will these rules changes affect Duels of the Planeswalkers?
If it uses the “old rules,” headaches will ensue.
No, Duels of the Planeswalkers actually mirrors M10 rules more closely than the old rules. There are still some differences, but combat damage as an example is closer to M10.
@AndrewPL Wasn’t Duels of the Planeswalker announced to have “dumbed down” rules? I think what that, in actuality, means, is that the rules align with this new rules change, no? I haven’t kept close enough of an eye on the Duels game, but this would make sense to me; Wizards has been planning these changes for a long time, I’m sure, and would obviously keep Duels in mind when making it.
@fatecreatr: I think even outside of “emotional” cases like Morphling and Mogg Fanatic there are valid objections to changing how combat works. Creating a whole new system just for combat does, in fact, create more complexity, not less. That’s the bottom line, and it’s not emotionally driven. If you disagree, you need to defend your position. Whether or not I “value” your opinion, I’m interested in hearing you defend it, because Wizards’ company line is always “trust us.”
I’m generally a proponent of defending the establishment, and I’ve often told people, “don’t worry, Wizards knows what it is doing” in regards to both Magic and DnD, but change 5 is just dumb.
i can see what Wizards was going for, which is to make it easier to understand to a wider audience, which, from an outsider’s point of view, is true. But, as soon as a player starts to play the game, and understands HOW the game is played, particularly how the stack works, there’s no reason not to be able to understand how combat damage worked. Now, it’s like they gave all combat damage Split Second.
A previous poster, “Mike,” in defense of change 5, said the kids he plays with, “play without knowing what the stack is…they just know how spells and effects resolve,” which is telling in why this would be a favorable change for them. But that just means they don’t know what they’re doing. Unless they’re eliminating the stack altogether for this crowd, this change makes no sense.
“The other area that we could have changed in this way was the combat damage step. We could have split it into two steps – one for assigning damage and one for dealing it. But we didn’t, mainly because we didn’t want to take away the phrase “damage on the stack”(Here in R&D, we’re big fans of putting damage on the stack – for some people, it’s the highlight of their entire day.)”
Excerpt from an article about a couple 8th edition changes. We can only hope they will realize their folly and go back in a few years, but its highly unlikely.
I find that people in general are missing how the change in combat damage makes the game easier.
Simply put, it removes invisible information and replaces it with visible information.
Consider first the act of using the stack for spells and countermagic:
I play Wild Nacatl.
Opponent play Cancel targeting it.
I play Bant Charm targeting the Cancel.
We can play this out by literally stacking the cards (Nacatl on the bottom, then Cancel on it, then Bant Charm on it). The stack as an entity is visibly represented in the physical card state, if we want. From there, it’s conceptually reasonable to add in activated abilities.
Consider current-rules combat:
Cloudthresher attacks.
Opponent blocks with Wild Nacatl, Kitchen Finks, and Woolly Thoctar.
I assign 3 damage to Nacatl, 4 to Thoctar, and 0 to Finks.
Those assigned damage points are not represented anywhere, so that’s some added “mental load” to deal with. It’s also a frequent source of confusion for players, even at the PTQ level (anecdote, I know, but I’ve at least witnessed it). Now, this is also an opportunity for clever gameplay, but it’s still invisible game-state information that isn’t recorded anywhere, and that makes a mental burden on players.
Consider M2010 combat:
Cloudthresher attacks.
Opponent blocks with Wild Nacatl, Kitchen Finks, and Woolly Thoctar.
You line up blockers on the table in damage order, with Nacatl first, then Thoctar, then Finks.
In this way, we get to elegantly represent, on the board, how damage assignment is going to work. That makes the game approachable and very, very clean for new players and means they won’t find themselves screwing the game up horribly and having an awful time of it the first time they go to an FNM (because losing to the game rules sucks).
Yes, it removes some obvious “damage on, then sac” plays. Too bad. I liked doing this with my STEs, but it’s probably a more interesting strategic decision to have to sac for an effect without getting damage value as well.
Only one comment on the actual text:
“New players will wonder why the stack isn’t being used in combat when it is used everywhere else…”
I seriously doubt this. I wasn’t wondering why damage didn’t act like spells back when I started in 1993. Combat doesn’t work like other things in many RPGs. People are cool with that.
This will change the game, but I view it as a neutral change in terms of game play value for me, and a huge positive in terms of any kind of new or casual player (i.e. the people who are actually buying booster packs).
@Chez I love the fact that the rules have been changed so that creatures not in play (AKA on the battlefield!) don’t deal damage, but creatures that were blocked by creatures that are no longer in play are still blocked.
One of the most interesting points is that this reduces the strategic implications of existing creatures, while potentially increasing those of future cards. This is an important point Zvi brings up. I mean Mogg Fanatic and a potential neo-Fanatic:
Neo-fanatic R 1/1 Whenever neo-fanatic is put into the graveyard from the battlefield, it deals 1 damage to target creature or player 0:Sacrifice neo-fanatic
Are virtually identical. New cards with the rule change in mind will certainly bring back the strategic depth of combat. Also, I’m interested to see exactly how the strategic depth is really being decreased. I mean, this change forces players to make a real choice when it comes to pumping or sacrificing a creature during combat. Before, the choice to put damage on the stack, then use the ability was the correct choice way more often than not. Now that players have to choose, that adds more complexity to the combat step, not less.
Zvi:
I actually disagree with you regarding point five. My initial knee-jerk was similar (you killed self-bounce as a viable tactic, you bastards), but I think that on balance this is a positive change.
As a judge, both for sanctioned and casual events, I’ve taught the rules to more people than I can count. Damage on the stack was always one of the last things I introduced, because it is annoying. As Gifts Ungiven alluded to, new players grok the stack pretty fast when you represent it in terms of physical cardboard. Then you throw them a curveball when you start talking about assignation of damage. That subsection of the rules generally takes longer to explain than the rest of the stack (thank Wizards that APNAP is a pronounceable acronym). The new way? A lineup of blockers makes intuitive sense. Damage dealt as it’s assigned also makes sense. I’m currently lacking a newbie to test my rules pitch on, but my intuition says that this will make things easier.
In terms of strategic depth - I’m an economist by education, so the first thing that popped into my head was that what they have really done here is introduced opportunity cost to activated abilities, where previously you could eat your cake (combat damage) and have it too (activated abilities). None of that nonsense now. As Wobbles said, I predict we’ll see more on-death triggers, but it’s the activated abilities that remain that will be interesting, because those creatures are now riskier to send into combat.
I still wish pump and damage prevention abilities could retain gotcha flavor. But the nice thing about this change is that it shifts the balance of “skill” (whatever the hell that is) away from knowledge and towards evaluation. By that, I mean that combat tricks that benefited from on-the-stack shenanigans (the aforementioned, plus bounce) are weaker, while, as I mentioned before, the decision between using a creature’s ability or its damage carries more weight. This means a player unfamiliar with the specific environment but skillful in evaluating position and abilities will do better, which is a change I don’t mind making. Jedi mind tricks are great, but I think I prefer the skill balance weighted on evaluation.
The one thing I’m genuinely sad about is that, from my understanding of the rules change, Terry Soh’s epic bluff from four years ago would have never worked. And that is a damn shame.
I don’t even mind so much the combat damage no longer using the stack, it’s actualy simpler, and easier to understand for new players, wich is exacltly what wizard wants.
The thing I don’t like is what you say makes combat more complicated and counterintuitive, blocking with more than one creature.
There should be an easier way to make blocking less of a nightmare.
Even assuming that new/inexperienced players do not fully understand combat damage and the stack, what sort of mistakes do they make because of that misunderstanding?
In most of the examples I can think of (Mogg Fanatic tricks, etc) they are just making sub-optimal plays, as opposed to plays that are not allowable within the rules.
Compare this to confusion about timing in the declare attackers/blockers step. More specifically when they try to tap my creature to prevent it from attacking after I have already declared it as attacking. In a situation where neither player knows better, they have done something which isn’t allowed by the rules. I would argue that not only is this sort of mistake worse, that this particular example is more prevalent than the ones being addressed by these changes.
I totally agree with Zvi that needing to understand the stack for the rest of the game provides ample tools to understand the interactions of the stack and combat damage when a player is introduced to the concept.
Good or ill for the game as a whole, most of my favorite moments in Magic are prefaced by “Damage on the stack?”.
Pretty much exactly what I’ve been saying/thinking since I read the changes. Very good analysis.
@Gifts Ungiven
…
It’s conceptually reasonable to add in activated abilities? Triggered abilities? Copies?
But you can’t imagine damage on the stack? (Like points of a fireball that isn’t a spell so it can’t be countered).
Not hard. Sorry try again.
Now instead of the tried and true around-for-10-years previously loved-by-R&D:
Begin Combat. Both players gain priority.
Declare attackers. Both players gain priority.
Declare blockers. Both players gain priority.
Assign damage and put it on the stack (think of a fireball copy or whatever floats your boat). Both players gain priority.
Damage is dealt. Both players gain priority.
Which is fair and gives all players equal opportunity to cast spells and activate abilities, we now have some strange system that is different from the rules used everywhere else. Even if it was the same complexity and the same intuitiveness and the SAME level of strategy for the game, change for the sake of change in a strategy game is bad. Rules changes should have a clear benefit.
Combat DID NOT work like everything else. Combat damage was the only damage to go on the stack. If everything else worked like combat damage it would be like:
- I bolt you, (bolt spell goes on the stack, waiting for answer bla bla bla) OK?
- Yeah, no answers.
- Alright, bolt resolves, now bolt damage goes on the stack, answers?
- Yeah, I activate COP:R.
If you change “bolt” to “attack” and “answers” to “blocks”, that’s how we have combat until now.
Like I said, COMBAT DAMAGE WAS THE ONLY ONE PUT ON THE STACK. Spells and abilities are put on the stack, not the damage they cause. So now, just like you can answer the spells, you can answer the attack, not the damage.
Amazing how such a player can’t see that.
My biggest gripe with the combat changes is not the loss of “combat damage on the stack” but the weird “kludge” for multi-blocking that you mention. I can understand the argument for the stack changes, and the fact that this actually may make things more intuitive for new players (I don’t necessarily think it makes things less strategic, as you mention… since now you have more decisions to make regarding your creatures both before combat even begins and after blockers are assigned. Is it worth attacking with your Qasali Pridemage now to try and take out a 3/3 or is a particularly pesky Pacifism or whatever hurting you more? You can no longer take out both. Yeah, he’s a lot less powerful now, and while that sucks if you use him in your deck (which I do), it isn’t necessarily a negative change. It means you have to play differently. Obviously, if you play a deck which exploits these kinds of abilities, as you mention, you will probably need to make significant changes and build a different deck.
However, if the point of the changes was to make things more intuitive, their “kludge” for ordering blockers sucks. On its face it’s just far more complicated than simply allowing the attacker to assign where the damage should go, and the fact that they excepted Deathtouch damage from this rule almost gives away the fact that someone probably realized after they were pretty happy with the multiblock system that they completely broke Deathtouch with it, hence the exception. (And Lure abilities without Deathtouch are obviously much much weaker now as the blocker can play combat tricks on the first blocker to protect the rest). My question is, if the attacker is allowed to assign Deathtouch damage, why not just regular damage too? Clearly the “kludge” isn’t necessary and having different kinds of damage assignment systems (the “standard” versus the “Deathtouch”) doesn’t simplify things for the casual/new player, it complicates them. They should’ve just allowed a damage assignment step and a damage “dealt” step with no “timing” between (no instants or abilities allowed). This way they could keep “no stack” change without complicating the blocking system. After all, you have to do this anyway for Deathtouch now, seemingly. Not only that, I assume “Banding” would override the “Deathtouch” damage assignment ability, or no?
@Wobbles: I think Zvi does a good job of showing where the complexity is lost, this is whole classes of spells become much worse in combat, which is where they are intended to be used. Damage prevention and pump spells used defensively are big ones to me. In the example using Skyshroud Behemoth from Wizards’ site, under the current system the Bandage should be able to save a creature from dying. Under the new system the opponent knows it’s there already and is able to compensate for it by dealing more damage to that creature. Now in the new situation why would you even play the Bandage? What did it do for the player who cast it? It drew them a card. That’s it. It was not helpful at all in combat as the creature still died. Now most prevention spells don’t cantrip. Why woud we chose to play them? They may have the potential to save a creature in one on one combat but it loses its appeal in double blocks or trampling situations.
Somes up how I feel about the changes pretty well.
Mogg fanatic and such things I can kinda deal with being lost, there will be functional replacements eventually.
I just don’t like the idea of not being able to pile a few points of damage onto each blocker then post combat pyroclasm or some such. I realise its not much of a drop in power level for such cards at all but just seems… annoying at best. Part of the reason I enjoy this game is the tactical depth. and it really seems like change 5 sacrificed a lot of depth for little to no loss of complication. As has been pointed out by Zvi the stack is integral to the rest of the game, if you need to learn it to respond to spells then learn it to respond to combat damage… It’s not that hard.
Very good analysis, Zvi. I really enjoyed reading your take on the issue.
@Gifts Ungiven: This is definitely a polarizing issue, so I apologize for this in advance.
Are you retarded?! Are you literally mentally challenged? “Oh, sweet fancy Moses: sometimes memory is necessary to keep track of what’s going on!” Your point is actually pretty stupid, sir, and I question whether you’ve really taught people how to play Magic. The fact that everything used the stack was really helpful for me, explaining how the game works. This change is ricockulous, plain & simple.
(I just wrote a long comment, only to be hit by an “error” when i pressed the submit comment button. Below is a summary of what I can recall writing in the ‘failed’ comment)
I agree with your sentiments Zwi, but am abit irked by the a change that Change 2D implied. As shown in the Rakdos Guildmage example in your quoted article, I believe that the “next step” isn’t necessary since using the new term “beginning of your end step” already compensates for the ‘end of turn loop-hole’. While it may seem obvious to us seasoned players, I foresee new players getting into the game getting confused by the term “next step”.
Like “damage on the stack”, the ‘end of turn loophole” is a ‘trick’ in magic that is fun to learn, discover and play against/around.
It seems that the new combat system is totally unnecessary. As you said, the fact remains that the stack still exist. The new lifelink and deathtouch system could easily be implemented into the old (or should I say, current) combat system since they could already make wither work.
It also seems to me that, as you mention, the new combat system makes MtG less depth strategically… at least until the Shards of Alara rotates out. In Limited, which combat tricks play a big role in the depth of this format, would be somewhat weird. Call to Heel now sucks. Mogg Fanatic now “functions as intended” and Morphling isn’t really superman anymore (I didn’t realise this until you pointed it out!). Don’t get me started on Duergar Assailant…
The new changes does seem to narrow down the playing field of ’skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ players though. Also, as how someone puts it:
“The new rule changes were probably done to give MTGO programmers an easier life” - anonymous
On a personal level, I dislike losing mana burn - it was a big part of how I learned to be a better deckbuilder - and I like the stack-and-sac tricks in combat. In each case, I can see why they wanted to get rid of them, and can live with the changes.
The one thing I find hard to swallow about the changes is the new gang-blocking rules, which seem to be made of unintended consequences:
1) When I block your creature, you get to decide which order my blockers block your creature in. This is the one thing that I expect to trip up most people - even more than “enter the battlefield” having nothing to do with combat.
2) Under current rules, most of the time, an attacker would choose to assign lethal damage to selected blockers rather than non-lethal damage to all of them, which is what the new rules enforce, but there are a number of situations where you want to assign and deal non-lethal damage - for instance if you’re holding Pyroclasm or Infest, or if the attacker has Wither and the blockers have lower power than toughness, or Furnace of Rath is in play, or Deathtouch-style abilities. In each case, you no longer have the option of choosing the best damage distribution - except for Deathtouch itself.
3) Deathtouch itself gets special treatment, making it better against defensive tricks - you can always choose the undefended blocker(s).
4) Deathtouch gets an exception, making things more complex, while nothing else does, no matter how similar, making things less intuitive - “Deathtouch gets an exception because it would suck otherwise, but Death Pits of Rath just gets to suck”
5) Regeneration now has to be activated before creatures even assign damage - increasing the number of people who think that it stops creatures from dealing combat damage because it removes them from combat…
The main complaint I have is that if Wizards are trying to attract newer players then they are losing a lot from die hard player. Casual players are the ones who buy boosters here and there. Die hard players are the ones who study rules( a la the stack during combat), attend tourneys, and purchase Magic for a long period of time. Ultimately, Wizards has made a big mistake.
“New players will wonder why the stack isn’t being used in combat when it is used everywhere else…”
I have had a friend lose a game at an extended PTQ where the judge ruled that the /damage/ from an incinerate used the stack after the spell resolved, giving his opponent the chance to save his creature after he had allowed the spell to resolve. Because his opponent claimed that all damage used the stack. Yes, the judge apologized to my friend after the round that he had made a mistake. Not everything uses the stack, especially when multiple things are naturally tied together. Like multiple abilities of the same spell, or blocking and damage. This makes blocking act like most other other activities using the stack: opportunity to do things before blocks, after blocks, but once blocking “happens” and is allowed to stand with all the modifiers, damage is dealt and it’s over.
“I’m not going to sit here and proclaim that these changes will force me to quit, I was already on the way out due to waning interest. But it now feels like Magic 2010 has closed the door behind me. I feel like I’m no longer welcome at this party.”
This is part of what I posted at the WotC boards. As far as i’m concerned, I don’t particularly want to try and rekindle my fire for the game anymore…After Nationals (which I am only attending because I’ve already paid for flights and acocm) This is pretty much me done for.
I think the fact that this will help someone’s 7-year-old understand the rules, but make the game less deep for everyone else tells us everything we need to know about the plans Wizards have for Magic in the future.
Aaron made a point (quite intentionally) that people claimed Magic was doomed when 6th Edition introduced the stack, so we should be dismissed for thinking these new changes will hurt Magic. The difference is, the stack made the game more strategic and deep, and just required time to get used to. These new changes make the game more shallow-yet-complicated (complicated and complex are not the same things) which is why players object to them. Just because people are resistant to change and are occasionally wrong does NOT mean that they are always wrong and overreacting.
This is another aspect of Wizards’ “Player Acquisition” push, making the game simpler(allegedly) for new players to understand, while just assuming that older players will stay despite the dumbing down of their favorite game. We’ll see if they miscalculated.
One more thing Zvi touched on; this helps blocking a LOT. Remember, many players have described combat as “Attack-go” because blocking just didn’t yield good results. Now, Wizards has both pushed defensive combat by making walls great again (Plumeveil and the new 0/8 Shroud) and now huge innate advantages for blockers. This is supposed to make combat more interesting. But if you de-incentivize players from attacking because it’s not profitable, that will make combat even LESS interesting, not more, because people just won’t want to risk that many cards in such a hostile rules environment. Why would you attack when your opponent holds all the advantages in that situation? The end-result will, I think, make combat less frequent.
/agreed
Thanks for sharing your opinion Zvi!
When I first read this rules change, my knee jerk response was very similar to Zvi’s, and in many ways it still is. However, I don’t think this is making combat damage into a special case at all, just bringing it in line with the other parts of combat. Declaring attackers and declaring blockers don’t use the stack. I have had to explain to a very large number of players that they function different from combat damage, and many don’t grok why for a long time. They get spells going on the stack, they get abilities, but not combat damage, for whatever reason. That is not enough reason in and of itself to make this change, but saying that it makes combat damage an exception when it is brings it in line with the two other unique actions in combat that also confuse players is a little disingenuous.
Good analytic article.
Save the mogg fanatic!
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/give-stacked-combat-damage-a-chance
So, suppose that the combat rules change does lower skill in Limited by, say, 20%. How would one go about measuring that effect? Would Pros do less well at GPs? Would the variance of Limited ratings be reduced (everyone would move towards 1600)?
Discuss.
This is not a slight to the man who plays Magic with his kids. However, why should you care how it works, you obviously played the game before and liked it. IMO Wizards is going to make a ton of people angry for no reason.
Heya Zvi remember the old days when you used to burn out 40-50 players at once with your crazy mana engines in 50 player chaos games? Those were the days eh? We have come a long way since then. Nicely written article. Eloquent and to the point with to my mind an intelligent thought behind it despite what certain detractors have said in the following comments. It echoes what I said in my posts on wizards’ forums but with perhaps more words. Sadly change is inevitable and yet gladly we should face such changes head on and perhaps in the long run we will embrace the changes and laugh at the outrage we now endure. Thanks for writing!
PEL
I have no major problem with combat damage not using the stack. I mean that new cards will be designed, hopefully to accomodate the change.
What i really don’t undertand though and it really puts me off is why the heck i have to line up my defenders in a row and the attacker must roll over them…. I see no reason why to have multiple blockers work this way. It doesn’t make sense even for flavor reasons….
The mana-burn is harsh.
I lost an extenced ptq to mana-burn not 2 months ago.
however i felt that wizards love to lose money and to kill off magic ,they will carry on this changes regardless how much you complaint.sorry i am so frustrated to this changes, the only way is only showing them is by boycotting their product and tournament for demanding change back to normal.
Long time reader, first time commenter. This was not in the main article, but blink effects also become weaker, since they are related to bounce effects. Pump and bounce usually aren’t constructed playable, but solar flare and blink-riders, etc. showed that blinking was a tournament worthy mechanic. The inability to blink with damage on the stack completely eliminates an area of interaction for this deck. I don’t feel like I lost a card or two. I feel like wizards did a gather search, and all unsummon and blink efffects just got some small power level errata. Sure come cards will die, and R&D will create new cards that interact positively with the new rules. However, decreasing the level of interaction for multiple classes of mechanics/abilities that already exist is a huge change for such a small payoff. To paraphrase Swori (nice quote btw), stacking damage is one of the highlights of the game. Magic just got a little less fun.
Mandatory lethal damage for the case of multiple blockers actually angers me more than the loss of stacking damage. There’s just not as much to say about it. It’s a kludge, aka it’s inelegant. It weakens Furnace of Rath, and all sorcery speed toughness-based creature removal. Worst of all, unlike the stack, lethal damage has never been mandatory in 16 years. The situation where this is relevant doesn’t happen 99% of the time, but when it does, you the player aren’t allowed to make a decision - it’s mandatory.
Less decision making and less interaction are two of the highest prices you can pay in game design. They have a direct correlation to less fun. M2010 has small trade-offs, but trade-offs of this nature cannot be taken lightly. Taking a step in the direction of goldfishing had better be worth it.
Currently ALL SOURCES OF DAMAGE use the stack. I keep hearing the argument that no damage other than combat damage uses the stack, but thats just willful ignorance.
If I cast flame javelin, targeting you, it goes on the stack. All the card does, is do 4 damage. That ‘4 damage’ is now on the stack. You can respond to the ‘4 damage’. Then, after you do (or dont), that ‘4 damage’ resolves, causing you to lose 4 life. If it had to use the stack twice, once as a spell, and once as damage, that would be redundant.
Why have the flame javelin AND the damage it causes BOTH use the stack?
In the new rules however, EVERY SINGLE source of damage EXCEPT combat damage uses the stack.
This however is not the biggest problem with the new rules change. The biggest problem is the retarded new damage assignment system, which is completely UNFLAVOURABLE and very limiting to your strategic options. Why am I now unable to to split my damage between two creatures?
The funny thing is, this is the best option to deal with combat that doesn’t use the stack. The two changes go hand in hand. There is no way they would have all these ridiculous rules for conga-line blocking, and deathtouch getting a special exception, if it wasn’t for the way that a lack of combat damage using the stack would neuter EVERY combat trick, from bounce to prevent damage.
It is quite simply more complicated, and more unintuitive, than the older system. Some of you seem to find it more intuitive, but you have closed your minds to alternatives. How is conga-line combat more intuitive? Do you spend your life living in a bad action movie?
Why cant my dying mogg fanatic, in one last act of defiance, pull the pin on his grenade? Why can’t I, as an all powerful planeswalker, save my knight of the white orchid, dying on the battlefield below me, from his mortal wounds by unsummoning him?
I’m not saying this as some pro player who likes to ‘trick’ newbies with combat damage on the stack tricks (whatever that means). I’m saying this as someone who has played the game both ways. I was there for the chaos of pre-6th, when NOTHING used the stack, and as such, NONE of the rules actually worked. I remember coming back to the game after 6th, and discovering the stack, and discovering how it worked, and thinking, “Damn thats cool.”
I remember when 8th edition came out and they changed the draw step to not using the stack. I also remember them saying they considered changing combat from using the stack. But they decided not to, because they felt it was a bad idea.
I wondered what has changed, since 6th edition, and since 8th edition, that suddenly made this a good idea.
I can’t wait for the M11 rules changes, when they backtrack, and make combat go on the stack again. Unfortunately, that means a year of this ridiculousness for all us players.
Luckily, the ‘casual players’ they appear to be making this change for, will never notice, and keep on enjoying the game as they always have.
A concerned magic fan,
DS_McWerp
“But the nice thing about this change is that it shifts the balance of “skill” (whatever the hell that is) away from knowledge and towards evaluation.”
You don’t know what skill is? =/
Also, it doesn’t shift the balance towards evaluation. It only makes the correct play to not pay off more often than it used to.
I completely agree with each and every single point.
We really need to show WotC that it is OUR game. It’s the game WE play and buy, so we should have a word in this!
Make yourself heard:
http://www.pro-dots.com
And spread it!!
Personally I like the new rules changes.
For many years I’ve had some kind of pseudo-addiction to the game and now they’ve managed to do something that kills any interest in buying any further products for the game.
Thank you wizards for helping me save my money.
Players should just not play or buy any magic for a week in protest. See if that gets WOTC’s attention.
If they made these changes for the average player (the person who doesn’t play in events and is “casual”) then why do this? There was no issue with these rules for most people.
I would think professional and competitive players spend more money on the game and keep the wheels turning over there. Not someone who buys a few packs of cards and then puts them in a shoebox a few months later.
Hmm, change 5 is defenitely a big change, and one I really don’t appreciate. But I can find a few other reasons why they would do that (I don’t say they are all good reasons..):
Flavor! : Yeap, now my defending wall makes a lot of sense. If I block your 3/3 with a wall first and three soldiers then my wall take the damages and I get the opportunity to get my soldiers kill the 3/3 while being protected. Seems like it makes a lot of sense to me.
New cards!: As said by many others people, most of the tricks we loved can be regained by making new cards that mimics them. Full benefit for WOTC… plus, it makes the mechanics complex on the card instead of the rules, so they have to make the cards rare because they are complex, etc,etc…
New mechanics!: Now they can create new capabilities like ‘Dodge’ for instance that would allow an attacking creature to avoid a creature assigned to block him (hmm, on second thought maybe this one sucks..). Or ‘Combat sense’ that would allow your creature to distribute his damages as he chooses to.
I’ve been playing Magic for some years now and I can clearly state that rule 5 will make Magic less fun for me to play. Simple as that.
Here’s an idea I had.
Instead of -
Begin Combat. Both players gain priority.
Declare attackers. Both players gain priority.
Declare blockers. Both players gain priority.
Assign damage and put it on the stack. Both players gain priority.
Damage is dealt. Both players gain priority.
You can do -
Begin Combat. Both players gain priority.
Declare attackers. Both players gain priority.
Declare blockers. Both players gain priority.
‘Declare’ damage. Both players gain priority.
Damage is dealt. Both players gain priority.
Where instead of assigning it point by point and then loading it onto the stack, you instead assign it point by point and then both players gain priority, with the damage ‘choice’ or ‘declaration’ locked in.
Yes. It’s exactly the $%@& same as “damage on the stack” but it’s not. If a new player can understand how to choose an attacker or how to choose a blocker, I would hope he can decide to choose where damage goes.
If anything we should go to the pre-6th rules which is just the new rules except the attacker needs not assign an order of blockers or lethal, he can just assign points as he chooses, with no priority given to the defender. This is how it was in the past. The stack was what we have now. Why can’t we have either?
If this is about making the game better for the defender, so be it. If this is about removing late combat tricks like dealing damage and also sac’ing, to bring it in line with the old original way combat was meant to be, so be it. I disagree with both reasons, but at least Aaron has a reason.
However those WEREN’T his reasons. He did it because it was “unintuitive.” Despite all the parts of the game that are unintuitive which were left unchanged, and despite combat damage which is just how combat is done in Magic the Gathering has been done for an entire decade, with cards and concepts designed around this rule through the entire stretch, Aaron decided to just change it.
To quote someone a forum, what the new rules failed to preserve:
1. Deathtouch. Yes, it failed to preserve deathtouch. They had to add more complexity to the game in order to it work right (the extra reminder text rules).
2. Any card that is worded like the old deathtouch. Nope, they all fail. ex. Mirri the Cursed, Mercurial Kite, kamigawa snakes.
3. Wither. Yes. No longer can you weaken multiple blockers that wanted to take you down. You are forced to kill them.
4. Damage Prevention and pump effects. The attacker has such a huge advantage here, since they can choose to deal precisely enough damage to finish off your creature after it has its prevention on, instead of the tricky-ness involved in trying to stack the appropriate amount just in case.
5. You can’t play Giant Growth to save your 2/2 from that 6/6, since it was at the top of the lethal order.
6. You can’t play Giant Growth on your 2/2 after stacking in order to save both creatures
7. You can’t have your 2/2 deal 1 each of the two 1/3’s blocking it and then play pyroclasm after combat.
8. Saving creatures with pump or damage prevention from a Trampling creature. No, damage prevention still won’t work here, since they have to kill your creature before they get to you.
9. Say you’re attacking. After declairing blockers, your opponent plays a pump spell, putting that creature outside of your killable range. No, you can’t kill those measly 1/1’s since that pumped creature was at the top of your attack order. Why would your creature try to kill something that it obviously can’t dent rather than finish off some chumps?
10. Doubling effects. Yes, that’s right. You can’t assign 1 damage to each of those 2/2’s while you have Furnace of Rath out. Aren’t you sad now?
11. Unsummon and Mogg Fanatic. ‘Nuff said, although if you want more, there are HUNDREDS of similar cards that lose a TON of functionality with this rule. This complaint alone is really big enough to stop all this non-stacking shenanigans.
12. Deathtouch and trample on the same creature? Not intuitive at all!
If intuitiveness is Aaron’s reason, it’s a bad reason. If returning the game to old functionality was his ulterior reason, it was a bad reason and was unnecessary, but at least I can get my *mind* around such a change.
Cards like Wydwen are clearly meant to be used with the current rules in mind. Flash her in, stack damage, bounce her.
6 mana and 1 life to destroy target attacking creature with 3 or fewer toughness.
Under the new rules she just eats 1/1s and 2/2s or chumps, since you can’t save her.
If you drop her on the board, and your opponent pumps his guy to ~3/3, you have to bring her back without dealing any damage if you want to keep her.
There are other cards designed in a similar fashion. I’m not sure if Morphling was initially intended to pump power, stack damage, then toughness, but they went and designed Pemmin’s Aura, Torhcling, and Thornling /CERTAINLY/ counting on this rule being in place. All sac effects ever designed after 6th edition or a few years later were probably designed with stacking damage in mind.
To completely dismiss 10 years of Magic evolution and design? That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard.
My point in discussing playing with my sons was not to say “Great, now Magic is much simpler so 5 year olds can play!!”, but rather to reinforce Wizards’ statement that this change will make the rules line up better with how new(ish) players intuitively play the game. A very, very small percentage of players will sit down and read the monstrous comprehensive rulebook. Players learn the complicated interactions from playing against higher level players and getting spanked by the unintuitive “tricks.” Some of them will learn and become better players (or at least ones that know the rules better). Others will quit because they feel cheated. This is why they are making the change. They want Magic at all play levels to come into closer alignment. This is no way means that Magic is getting dumbed down. It means that some cards in existence have had their power level reduced. Like many have already stated, magic designers can now mimic the damage stacking, but do it with special creature abilities or spell effects.
I can’t believe how so many reasonably intelligent people are so vehemently against this change when their arguement against it basically boils down to “I used to be able to do X, and now I can’t do X, this totally sucks.” Well, pretty soon you’ll be able to do Y, Z, A, and sorta X again.
@above:
Damage on the stack is explained in the thin basic rulebook. It’s something that takes less than half a page to explain.
I don’t mind most of the changes , even the no more damage stack tricks …… but the basic fairness of when a 5/5 attacks and a 2/2 with a 3/4 blocks…Besides using tricks, which you won’t be able to soon, the fair/ right thing to happen would be for the 2/2 to be the only creature left, it evens out the playing field ….. why would it be any other way.. Kids like big creatures , now they are going to hate them cuz they all will suck ( what I only killed a 2/2 with my 5/5 and they both die, what )…… That doesn’t promote anything for a new player at all……. Not being able to assign damage where you want and having blocking order is horrible…. I never wanted to quit magic in my 15 years of playing and no matter how hard R and D made it to get new players in… Now I’m thinking about it… Its always the older ones who have spent a lot of time and money in a game get screwed. I”m sorry but this part of magic should not have been changed…….dumb just dumb…
Pretty much a joke all around, great job wizards.
Good review Zvi
My interest in Magic had waned slightly this year, after Alara block (you failed to draw the swamp required to support your inevitable complicated manabase, so attack you on turn 4 with a 5/4, a 3/2 and a hasty 3/2, gg) and Lorwyn block (no one else at the table was drafting Kithkin, so attack you on turn 4 with 7 little dudes that you have no means of racing, gg). Add this to the fact that power creep has resulted in many, many rares so absurd that they basically all read “target opponent must have an answer to this as it is being cast or you win the game” and… I was more than a little bit tired of it all. Adrenaline rush != a great game. When I was a youngster, “turn 5 kill” was a holy grail, not a standard occurrence.
This rules update restores my faith a little bit though, because it does imply that Wizards cares about flavour and cares about comprehensibility instead of just POWER, POWER, POWER. So a lot of your favourite cards and strategies are gonna be neutered power-wise by M10 rules. Boo hoo! It’s not like we haven’t been seeing the most overpowered blow-out plays in Magic history as a matter of course in recent years.
Yes, some of the changes seem weird, like having to deal with one blocker at once instead of having at all of them in a grand melee, but it’s not counter-intuitive is it, just different. And more manageable for the beginners, the people who don’t have 10+ years of accreted Magic knowhow burned into their brains, who we might want to care about if this game is going to last for another 20 years.
Also, as a parting shot, anything who thinks the removal of damage-on-the-stack tricks will narrow the gap between themselves and a 7-year old with his Craw Wurm.dec can’t have been a very strong player, if that esoteric (but frankly not all that skill-intensive) knowledge was all he was relying on to pwn the noobs.
I just wonder why u left Wizards. With u in the company “Damage on Stack” probably wouldn’t be gone.
Good Statement anyway.
*sign
hey will, we posted a round-table discussion today. thought your readers might like to take a peak.
http://power9pro.com/blog/2009/06/rules-magic-gathering-team-discussion/
I’d think anyone with any experience in game design would agree that speculation without any playtesting is inherently ignorant.
I’ll definitely be interested in hearing ZM’s opinion after he has played with the new rules. But at this point, would he recant on a published opinion?
@Jay.
Bravo! This is exactly what I would have posted if you hadn’t already.
I’d like to expand on your, “Cards like Wydwen are clearly meant to be used with the current rules in mind. Flash her in, stack damage, bounce her.
6 mana and 1 life to destroy target attacking creature with 3 or fewer toughness.
Under the new rules she just eats 1/1s and 2/2s or chumps, since you can’t save her.
If you drop her on the board, and your opponent pumps his guy to ~3/3, you have to bring her back without dealing any damage if you want to keep her.” , however.
Your opponent attacks with a 1/1. You flash in Wydwen to block. Your opponent pumps the 1/1 to a 3/3. You bounce Wydwen back to your hand yet the attacker is still considered “blocked”. As a new player this would confuse the hell out of me. Why can’t I have my 3/3 assign damage to the defending player? To a new player, how is something like this intuitive. I’m sure the reason of “well you see, there is now an imaginary 0/0 blocker there that you have to assign all your damage too since your creature does not have trample” wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense.
We all know that the game considers the 3/3 “blocked” since Wydwen was in play to block the creature, and since the creature didn’t have trample it can’t get anything past the imaginary 0/0 that is in play. But as a visual representation the 3/3 isn’t blocked when it’s time to deal damage. I’m sure this scenario alone has confused a few newer players over the years.
Maybe we should expose wizards for what they really are: Sellouts.
For what it is worth, new combat system scared me the most to, but upon further reflection, I think it will work out fine. My primary concern was with loss of strategic depth, but it actually does open up strategic depth in other areas, it is not just a simplification. It rewards attackers that can correctly anticipate the trick the defender has and uses this information to order blockers accordingly and it rewards defenders that can correctly predict how the attacker will order blockers and exploit this information.
It remains to be seen if this is better or worse for the game, but I believe the people who work on improving this game full time have demonstrated that they are not prone to wrecklessness witht he rules and besides, they are some pretty smart people and I say we give them the benefit of the doubt. Just remember, whatever people say now, it was all said 10 years ago, the last time WotC changed the rules and killed Magic.
It is comical to see how outraged people are over damage not stacking, as these would be the same people outraged when they announced that damage would stack 10 years ago. Can you imagine what people said when they got rid of interrupts??
The sky is not falling, not remotely and these changes will prove good for the game, in my opinion.
Regarding the article, I speculated upon seeing the title that Zvi had lost his mind, but was pleased upon reading the article to see that not only had I been tricked by a classic headline to grab attention, but that Zvi is still a truly epic writer and Magic is lucky to have him a part of it. I agree with everything here, even that which I don’t, lol, if that makes sense.
Good article! Having done a little testing (both constructed and as close to limited as I could muster with supplies on hand) your fears about the new combat system are spot on. I’m glad someone was willing to call out Wizards on this unnecessary change.
[...] an uproar over the announced M10 rules changes. A lot of famous Magic people like Randy Beuhler and Zvi Mowshowitz have chimed in with their opinions and in general a lot of forum posters are whining about the most [...]
All you write down here is true!
thy should have asked some magic gurus lke you before they made such weird changes.
beside the loss of a good combat system, i´m also really sad about devaluing many good cards. it is like a good old freind beeing shot in the back dying in my arms. asking why? …why?
ok, exxagerating a bit… but i´m already missing you dudes
PLEASE GIVE ME BACK MY OLD COMBAT SYSTEM!!!
@Mike: “They want Magic at all play levels to come into closer alignment. This is no way means that Magic is getting dumbed down.”
….. explain to me how the reduction in space between a ‘high level’ player and a ‘low level’ player (relatively speaking) is anything other than ‘dumbing down.’ What you’re trying to say is that WotC is trying to level the playing field, so to speak.
But M:tG at its highest levels is a competitive game. Stratification has to exist, be it by card pools (which can be mitigated) or skill level (which cannot so easily be removed). You and many proponents for the new changes might claim that ‘knowing the rules’ somehow constitutes a detriment, but as some people have pointed out, that’s akin to not knowing how to castle or not knowing how to hotkey in Starcraft.
Think about this another. All of the stuff you can do and all the ‘design space’ (barring ‘let’s revert to old rules’ keywording and the like) can be done with the old system. In terms of number of possibilities, the new system inherently has less. One can argue whether all choices would be played or not but fundamentally, the new system presents less choices. Less choices correlates with less strategic possibilities, which correlates to less things one can do. In fact, designing cards around ‘dmg on the stack from this source has split-second’ type motifs would be smarter, because it allows for BOTH interactions to occur without drastically changing the system and we get to see cool interplays. ‘Oh crap, I shouldn’t have blocked that creature because my trick is now useless, QQ’ but Mogg Fanatic is still highly competitive.
This is what I don’t understand. While I get that ‘bluffing’ and ‘mental play’ gets more important with the new system (along with Zvi’s elegant analysis on cards-that-are-now-trash and Timmy-creatures-are-awesome), that portion has always been part of Magic ever since ‘Counterspell.’ This shift in focus at the cost of yes, dumbing down combat and placing complex rule interactions where a simple unified system was in place baffles me completely. I’m on the fence currently about whether I’ll personally continue playing, but suffice it to say that I’ll be watching the Proscene closely, particularly the Limited format.
Zvi, amazing analysis again. A pleasure to read.
Ultimately the removal of damage on the stack doesn’t bother me so much as the fact that you no longer have ultimate control over what your creature does.
They say that these new combat rules are intuitive however when was the last time you got into a fight with multiple people, lined them up, and made sure not to move onto the next person before making sure the first person was dead? How is that intuitive? If a 4/7 gets into a fight with 4 1/1’s, then, the first 1/1 suddenly becomes a 4/4 why wouldn’t the 4/7 kill the 3 little guys first?
They say that this is a flavorful new change. I completely disagree with that. In magic you’re supposed to be a powerful planeswalker who slings spells and summons monsters to do your bidding. Under the new rules you’re not so mighty. No longer can you command your 5/5 to split up non-lethal damage among the creatures blocking it. From a the other side of the coin, as a defender, I block with five creatures. Now, instead of me telling my creatures how I want them to fight the attacker it’s the attacker telling me how his beast is going to fight my guys. Attackers have tunnel vision and defenders are subject to the attackers will. This is both less flavorful and less intuitive in my opinion.
If you want to change the rules in order to shake the game up because you think the rules have stagnated, fine. If you want to change the rules in order change the design space future cards, fine. But don’t sit there and give me the line that these new combat rules are more intuitive and flavorful. To do so not only insults me but the entire existing player base.
Making the rules align with how new players intuitively play the game is not “dumbing down” the game. New/casual players were essentially playing a slightly different game (oftentimes, not because they were incapable of learning the proper way to play, but more because the correct way was unintuitive to them) and when they mixed with the more hardcore crowd there was a clash of understanding. It’s not a question of complexity or level of strategy or anything like that. It’s simply that Wizards wants the rules to more closely align to how newish players feel like the game “should” play. I’ve seen it first hand, and it sounds like the foiks at Wizards have too (in focus groups, etc.).
Now you might argue that the change forces a loss of strategic depth, but that is a totally different argument.. It might.. Personally I think it just just shifts the decision points around a bit.
You’re so brilliant for pointing out that the stack remains part of the game and that the rule change is only removing the stack from combat. After I read that I didn’t have to read anything else because it was clear that you get it.
Another thing to notice regarding changes 5-6.
Attacking player will have to choose the blocking order to allow defending player use his damage prevention/regeneration tricks by having a little idea about how the damage will be dealt.
But Deattouch allows attacking player to distribute damage by ignoring this rule!
Hence, a Deattouch creature renders damage prevention/regeneration effects awkward and almost worthless because the damage will be dealt AFTER the fast effect has been decided, granting the attacking player a big advantage.
In other words, the defending player has to decide how prevent the damage without having any clue at how the damage would be dealt!
That’s another huge blow to the damage prevention effects who already got bashed in 1999.
In fact one could even argue that a damage prevention effect now is worse than a +0/+X effect… A Giant Growth on the “first in line” blocker is WAY better than a 3 damage prevention in any case (except, of course, when there are no creatures as it can target players too).
I also disagree strongly with changing how combat works. Both rules as we have them now leave players with a great variety of choices that effect the outcome of combat.
The new system take away alot of the option you have now. I cannot find it intuitive to line up blockers. Alone the fact they had to introduce this new rule so combat works at all with the new rule shows this can’t be the best way.
I have set up a petition website two days ago to make WotC take back the changes in combat rules:
http://www.pro-dots.com/
Pro Damage on the Stack!
I agree with everything Zvi said in his article. The combat damage change is a big mistake, i hate it.
But the main, and secret reason for the combat damage change is that they are desperate for design space. They took a shorcut from creativity: “change the rules so we can make a lot of new cards, with little effort”.
They are running out of ideas, and this change was a desperate act. They should put only one or two sets per year, but they choose to milk the cow until it dies.
I agree with Zvi.
We’re going to see more dumb vanilla creatures and less interesting ones in competitive play. Awesome change, Wizards. On top of that because of your change to damage on the stack we now have this hideously un-intuitive system for multiple blockers and deathtouch.
“This will change the game, but I view it as a neutral change in terms of game play value for me, and a huge positive in terms of any kind of new or casual player (i.e. the people who are actually buying booster packs).”
As someone who plays competitively at a large store (FNM is generally 40+ in attendance), PTQs, other large, sanctioned events (just got home from the SCG 5k), AND at a small store on Saturdays (with a much more casual customer base), I can say with some conviction that the above statement is not true. I see “casual” players come in to the small store all the time, and they maybe buy one or two packs at a time, occasionally a fat pack or some bulk cards out of a box. However, I also see competitive players at the large store drafting two nights a week, with about 10-12 drafts a night (that’s 240-288 packs, not including payout). I see other competitive players buying anywhere from a booster box to a case or more when sets release, while newer and more casual players are hesitant to spend money on new cards. Just this past weekend, I spoke to other players at the 5k, who, like myself, drove from various parts of the country to play in the tournament, and the majority opinion was that Wizards was throwing them under the bus to recruit new players.
Now, taking my small store as an example, the average casual player typically spends $5-$20 dollars on packs, singles, etc, where as I, like many others, spent over $250 just to TRAVEL to a Magic tournament, wherein I easily spent another ~$75 on singles, drafts, and packs (not including entry fees). It would seem logical to me that Magic cater to the competitive community, since we are spending so much more of our money AND our time on the game.
Also, I personally have no sympathy for new players who find the game difficult to learn. As someone who had to learn the rules during Ice Age (obviously before 6th Edition) playing against Necropotence over and over again, it shouldn’t be hard for them to understand that my Mogg Fanatic kills their Grizzly Bears. If Wizards thinks this is too hard, then how the hell do they explain ‘Banding’?
[...] but some good examples and discussion to be found here. You can also read thoughts from Zvi Mowshowitz on Top 8 Magic, Randy Buehler, Power 9 Pro. We have also seen the new M10 dual lands and a few new cards (yeah [...]
Don’t worry, you will be proven wrong.
Players of the future will wonder what all the big fuss was about and look back at everyone running around like headless chickens and laugh, like people do now about the 6th Edition players.
In my opinion declaring attackers should use the stack:
They should be special actions sort of like laying a land, that can be played at sorcery speed onto the stack and initiate the next phase. That way people can respond to “I declare attackers” and “I end my turn”. This is how we always play, and it should be implemented in the rules. This would require one change: the post-combat main phase would cease to exist, instead just going back to the main phase after combat. This way someone cannot wait for the combat phase, it may not exist. Instead they have to see whether a player will choose to declare attackers or just end their turn, initiating the end step.
And declaring blockers? Well as that is not a phase change, I would treat it like upkeep; it’s just what inevitably follows untap, no-one chose it. The fact that someone chooses to attack or not is what requires it to be treated differently. I’d therefore allow both players to respond to steps too, producing the following effect:
“declare attackers”
“in response”
“declare blockers”
“in response” <– the old “declare attackers step”
“declare combat damage”
“in response” <– buff window before you decide what damage to do
“damage, cleanup and back to the main phase”
“in response” <– sac or toughness boost window
with what you are responding to marking out the steps. So the sequence then rolls on triggering itself, with responses by either player possible.
This same principle would govern all steps, with both players having an option to respond to untapping, to upkeep and to the draw step, as well as to anything that triggers off them. This does slightly shift when spells can be played; allowing you to play stuff in someone’s turn before they even untap, which I suspect I might cut out as it allows the most annoying use of orims chant ever! That very possibility stands as justification for the exception!
So in that world, the duel between steps and the stack is resolutely resolved in favour of the stack, allowing people to play as they expect once they get the mtg rhythm.
I suspect this is how most people play, and putting it in the rules like this would just codify that.
Zvi has done a great job with this subject.The only chance i ever had to play against Zvi was at the 1st boston gran prix when i was playing my hatred deck which i finished 20th with. With these new rules i think that deck would not be an option. i agree the better players will be hurt the most and more games will be determined by luck.
There’s so much ignorance and speculation in these comments, it’s nauseating. Take a deep breath and give the rules a chance before talking about how you’re quitting Magic or how Wizards is dumbing down the game.
@Will: STFU. Any changes that REMOVE decisions and interaction rather than adding them to a game are bad game design.
@ LOL, in my games I did not see any decisions or interactions lost. I have seen one or two obvious “Damage on the stack, sacrifice/blink” situations but nothing I would call “deep strategy”.
If anything, the game was more fluid and reminded me more of the old days.
I think Wizards made a HUGE mistake with these changes. The only one that is acceptable is the mulligan rule. It’s acceptable because it’s truly logical. The rest, not so much.
Deathtouch in particular seems like the kludgiest of kludgest to my mind. Why waste all this verbiage on defining how it divides damage? They could have had the assign-damage rule be “An attacking creature must assign at least lethal damage to the first remaining blocker, then the next, etc.,” (you get the idea - I’m no templating whiz), and then just have Deathtouch’s reminder text simply be, “Any damage from this creature is considered lethal damage.”
Then you wouldn’t need the multiblocker deathtouch “patch” rule - it would use the same system as everything else. The defender would block, and if there were multiple creatures, you’d line them up. Then, you’d assign one damage to the first one. Whoops - that’s lethal! Now, one for the next one. No special funky different assignment, just “Any damage from this creature is considered lethal damage.”
I don’t understand why this wasn’t done. The trample interaction? Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t know of a trample deathtouch creature, unless you count Cairn Wanderer.
If someone went to the trouble of getting trample and deathtouch onto the same guy, I think they deserve to do the trick.
Game actions, such as untapping, drawing, declaring attackers/blockers, and discarding DON’T use the stack.
Damage was the only game action to use the stack, and thus functioned as a spell/ability rather than a game action.
In light of this, the argument that damage using the stack makes sense from a rules perspective is somewhat void, particularly as the other two combat actions don’t use it.
As for the loss in complexity, it is just a matter of getting used to it.
If declaring attackers/blockers used the stack (and were assigned individually) there would be additional degrees of complexity and additional cool things an experienced player could do.
However, I have seen no one complain that declaring attackers/blockers should use the stack - people are just used to the fact that they don’t.
We’ll miss stacking damage because we were used to it, but if some card lose power, others will surely gain it. It is up to the more experienced players to find out which those are.
A better player will still be able to outwit a less experienced player. The fact that understanding the subtlety of the rules is less involved in the process, is IMO a better thing. Better players will be better essentially because they come up with better solutions for each situation, not because they know something their opponents don’t about the rules.
Frankly, I’ve never been one to enjoy handicapped matches.
Recalling back to my earliest days of playing magic by intuition instead of rules, I didn’t understand the stack, I didn’t understand that damage from creatures in combat went on the stack, blah blah blah. All those reasons why wizards decided to change it.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t need to. It made perfect intuitive sense to me that I could respond to anything except a declaration (including a declaration of paying a cost to cast or activate something) or a normal game action. I could respond to spells that had been cast. I could respond to activated or triggered abilities. I could respond to attacking creatures. I could respond to damage being delt (technically assigned, but I didn’t understand that nuance) to a creature.
I could not respond to untapping, because that was something that just happened in the game. I couldn’t respond to drawing, because that just happened. If someone declared an attacker, I couldn’t prevent that declaration, which had the cost of tapping that creature unless otherwise noted. If someone declared a blocker, intuitively I didn’t see any reason why my ability to respond to that should be any different than my ability to respond to them declaring an attacker. Once it was declared, the creatures were in combat, and intuitively it made sense that you had an opportunity to play a spell to pump them up or deflate them a bit or prevent damage. Yes, I missed the details of when exactly players had priority and when the damage was locked in, and you clearly couldn’t go about changing what you were doing in combat every time the othe person changed what they were doing, but we all thought the same thing seemed intuitive: Damage was assigned as it became available, unassigned as it was no longer available, and you could respond to lethal damage by sacking. You could give a creature +2/+2, you could then use that +2 power to assign two damage in any legal manner (but not reassign the damage it had already assigned), and if one of those creatures later got -1/-0, you would remove any one damage that had been assigned by that creature. As long as you couldn’t arbitrarily change damage assignments from a creature beyond the change in the creature’s power, it worked out well enough. Apart from being less well ordered, the ultimate effect was very similar to what we have now.
Even with no clue what the stack was, all that was necessary was a concept that you can respond to anything except a declaration. Because honestly, there are some things that it just doesen’t make sense to respond to. I’d happily put the drawing effect on the stack, if you could convince me that there was something that it would make sense for one to do in response, but since there’s not, why bother? In what reasonable manner do you propose to respond to a declaration of attackers? Is there honestly anything you need to do between the time an attacker is tapped and the time it becomes “attacking”? Then why write that in? (Seriously, if you can come up with some good ideas, I’ll be all for it, but I know I don’t have any) Is there a way you can reasonably respond to damage being assigned? Then why take that out?
The sixth edition combat rules were at least close to what my intuition said, and it took me minutes to learn where my intuition was wrong, whereas I’m still not convinced I fully understand the M10 rules after 3 readthroughs, and they don’t relate to anything I would have come up with on my own. I don’t know how they’ll play since I haven’t played them yet (or even seen the actual rules text, which I hope is clearer than the article), so I can’t pass final judgment on them from that standpoint, but if anyone’s intuitive assumptions of how combat works actually reflected the M10 rules, I’m more concerned about their sanity than their ability to play.
@MorningStar:
Yes, you don’t respond to game actions that occur as a result of the phase/step. You actually respond afterwards. Assigning combat damage is a game action. Pre-M10, you could respond afterwards. This is intuitive, as this is how the game works in EVERY other case sans the Untap Step. You know what WOULD make the game more intuitive? Giving players priority in the UNTAP STEP as well. Then everything flows in identical fashion throughout an entire turn.
Untap Step causes everything to untap. You can’t respond to the untapping of permanents in this way.
Draw Step causes the active player to draw a card. You can’t respond to this player drawing a card. Both players may respond after this special action.
Declare Attackers Step allows a player to choose which creatures he or she can attack with. You can’t respond to this declaration. Both players may respond after this special action.
Declare Blockers Step allows a player to choose which creatures he or she wants to block any given attacker. You can’t respond to this declaration. Both players may respond after this special action.
Combat Damage Step allows each player to assign their damage to an attacking or blocking creature. Players cannot respond to others while they are assigning damage. Both players may respond after this special action.
[b]It is actually QUITE intuitive as is.[/b]
Do I need to break it down any further?
This is intuitive. Everything functions identically. If you don’t think that this is intuitive, then you simply don’t understand what intuition is.
They should have changed creature damage to inherently say “if [creature name] is in play, deal x damage to target.”
Bam, combat is now intuitive (in that creatures that aren’t in play no longer get to do their damage), and still gets to use the stack. No deathtouch exception is required, and none of this stupid Conga Line of Doom.
I’d like to hear the argument that the current change is better than my proposal.
I noticed people are focusing on the increased power of pump spells, but with the changes in rule 5 I feel like this would greatly buff kill spells. Since the attacker is allowed to order the creatures, the defender most of the time would always buff the first creature.
So for the example with the 5/4 being blocked by the 3/4 and the 2/2. Lethal damage is required to destroy the first creature to even deal damage to the second blocker and in which case the buff would prevent any damage to spill onto the second creature. In any case, a simple terror dooms both blockers, especially if the attacker waited for the buff to be put on the stack first.
How much “skill” does one need to put damage on stack and then sac his mogg or play his giant growth ? Apart from rare situations, there are mostly obvious decisions anyway. I liked David’s comment about the fact that with 2010 rules it opens up possibilities for real decisions (do A or B, not both).
So many cards are “nerfed” because of this its not even funny.I think the new rules caters to dumber players.I think WOTC thought behind this was: “Let’s dumb the game down and attract new players(customers)”.I feel WOTC
oops accidently hit enter >< as i was saying.. I feel WOTC
sonofa… keep hitting tab damnit >< one more time… i feel WOTC is doing what Marvel did; appeal to new cusomers whilst screwing over the loyal fans i.e. “Ultimate Marvel” and rewriting strorylines to match the movies, etc. It happens far to often.Companies overly focused on building capital and meanwhile letting the quality of the product go by the wayside.
By the way I hit the tab button twice accidently (not enter as I said in my last comment.[I meant tab]).
first let me say kudos to zvi for a great article and podcast. it should be required reading and listening for wizards staff. its hard for me to explain but i’ve had this feeling for a long time that there are a lot of people working for wizards that don’t have that “fuzzy” feeling about magic the same way that some of us do ( and not even close to a lot of the original people who development the game was a labor of love on all levels, r&d and executivley ). for most of us, i think it would be a “willy wonka” kind of experience to be involved in the development process and see and experience all the inner-workings of the fabled wizards “factory”, sorry to say, not everyone in the factory cares as much,or on the same level as you and i.
Don’t believe me?? look at the changes they have put in place over the years
mirrodin block forward R&D has had artistic control over the cards and has implemented its ” magic meets the matrix” policy regarding the look and feel of the game. this mostly effects old artists as they have been alienated (ed beard jr., kaja, phil foglio,ect) but not all, you still see guys like tedin and poole and most of the power artists but i think this is akin to why garfield is at every major public event, they are a little to big to stuff in a closet somewhere and ignore and if thats the only reason they are still around then thats a shame. out with the old. this to me is the beginning of a mental shift in the basic core of magic. the game has these basic elements, water, fire, earth, death, and life. the development of the game itself is based on specific elements also and the original artistry and design that added that flair that made the game not only original and beautiful but who knew was the beating heart of the game. actual paintings cant be blown up to whatever size for posters, banners and wallpaper for your computer so they are gone. next..
mythic rares are a direct correlation to wizards attempting to compete in markets that have nothing to do with gaming but more in line with sports cards. mythics are supposed to be magic’s version of super rares like the cards with pieces of players jerseys and bats and other pieces of the actual game. ask a rep and they will tell you that thats the market they feel like they are competing in, or just go to wal-mart. they have designed a whole product just for wal-mart for the new player, packs that only cost 1.99 but you dont receive a rare every time (obviously for the new guy, right next to the topps and upperdeck)next…
m10 introducing new cards. wow how can we sell this product that never sells and get everyone exited about it??? i got it, we’ll add a couple new cards, so the competitive guys gotta buy it, add some sexy old stuff so the casual guys want it, and well put some new “dual lands” in so everyone will have to get it. by the way they suck!!! i dont know if i want to play them or the shard lands really sad. all of this in a attempt to sell a product that has continually tanked for wizards. the most obvious thing here is how they made “new” cards by just changing the names.and last
changing the rules. i gotta tell u im lost with the explanations ive gotten so far. i was around for 6th changes, and i dont remember people being this upset. the way i understood the old changes went like this:
last in first out
i play lightning bolt,
you play counterspell,
i play brainstorm
no more responses
brainstorm resolves,then counterspell resolves, and lightning bolt is countered.
it was like zipping up a zipper on a jacket, you start at the bottom and go all the way to the top with no stopping until u got to the top or bottom. then it changed to:
play bolt,
you counter,
i play brainstorm
i resolve brainstorm and draw counterspell
i play counterspell on your counterpell and bolt resolves
instead of zipping up and down with no stopping, it was more like placing one book on top of another, still lifo but alowing more interaction and making the game better. that was really the only fundamental change. this new one is a doozy. the point of all this……
let the people who play the game decide how it is played made and developed. include us in the process.Dialogue, please please please, because here is what u have to deal with now.. new player walks in a store and wants to learn how to play, i have to teach him and i hate the new rules. he cant play by himself (motl) and absolutely cant learn by himself, most likely didnt gain an intrest in the game on his own, so were back to square one. your players drive this game you should listen to them, they will make this game last, not some potential new guy who it seems like these changes are centered around. magic is about word of mouth and showing your friend a new game. once you get in its every man for himself but you gotta get over that first hurdle, getting cards in players hands, and not listening to the majority of your player base doesnt seem like the best way to accomplish this. on the eve of the pre release im a little worried about how people are gonna feel about these rules and as a person who sells cards for a living ive never been more uncertain of magics future. i hope i am wrong
The loss of damage on the stack will bring BIG changes to how decks are built. I just dont think it will be for the better. A lot of cards in the shallow pool of type 2 will lose their intended functionality with the old rules. Strategic plays are being forced to be played earlier and combat damage tricks have almost been crippled.
While it helps younger players and newbies, it doesn help the masses that have played under the old rules for years such as myself.
we are losing damage on the stack, that is a big rules change for me to swallow and accept as a major welcome.
I will give it a try and see how it goes and I am sure it will take some time to get used to new rules.
It did affect my gameplay at a recent booster draft with Vampire Aristocrat in play. as i could not kill off one extra creature and sacrifice with damage on the stack. Frustrating but I wont base my distaste for the new rules changes based on one game.
Too put things bluntly, I don’t give a rats ass if somebody’s infant finds the game easier to play. If I wanted to play a game as boring and juvenile as Pokemon or Yu-gi-oh, I’d be playing those games. I am the aforementioned “casual player”, even though I’ve been playing since Unlimited. I’m not big into tournaments and only rarely compete in FNM. I have to admit, I never liked damage on the stack. I found it highly counter intuitive that my healers went to work on the wounded before they ever got wounded or that my troll had to regenerate from a wound he hadn’t even taken yet, but this new system to replace it is simply horrific. Rather than fixing the problem regarding healing and regen, it makes it worse, while introducing an idiotic system for preset must kills. Reducing flexibility and eliminating strategic options under the guise of increasing intuitiveness while actually not improving the intuitiveness at all, is just a case of dumbing down magic. WOTC seems insistent on targeting a younger and younger audience (which may or may not have anything to do with the fact that they are now owned by Hasbro), but I for one am likely to become even more “casual” a player, in that I will give the new rules a try, but if I find them as stupid and pointless as I suspect they will be, I won’t be participating in ANY more sanctioned play, as I will only be playing in venues where everyone agrees to play under the older, better rules.
No mana burn kinda annoyed me. I made a deck that forced my opponent to mana burn himself to death, it was pretty funny. Useless, but funny.
I still don’t understand the change. It could have something to do with the fact that I quit playing before sixth and recently took it back up. The judge at our FNM could not articulate the differences succinctly and I don’t think the rules language helps. Please help me.
If I block or attack with a morphling can I still not pump in response to an opponent’s giant growth. Can I not save creatures with bounce (although they would then not deal damage). I need this explained well and it hasen’t been thusfar. Zvi, please help!
This #5 change was just nonsense. Ridiculous.
Some neat tricks and decision makings are lost forever.
I dunno, I think they want players to buy their new stuff, and forget the old ones. As a 13-year-playing Magic player, I’m just disapointed.
I don’t play in tournaments anymore, I don’t like their new stuff, and I just use my old decks.
Suddenly I realise that my Anurid Brushhopper deck is not as good, as the little guy won’t be dealing damage e disappearing, the Yavimaya Elders won’t kill creatures in combat anymore, and Ravenous Baloth is just less usefull.
Well, maybe I’ll splash blue so I can draw cards. ‘Cos I’ve just my card advantage tricks.
Or I’ll just add bigger and dumber creatures…
Thx WotC!!!!
“The genius of the 6th Edition change was that combat worked like everything else”
This is nonsense. Not everything uses the stack. Playing lands doesn’t use the stack, paying costs doesn’t use the stack, activating mana abilities doesn’t use the stack, drawing cards doesn’t use the stack, creatures being destroyed because of having 0 toughness doesn’t use the stack, tapping and untapping doesn’t use the stack, removing combat damage at the end of turn doesn’t use the stack… Heck there are probably a hundred times more actions in the game that don’t use that stack than those that do. Making combat damage not use the stack actually makes it more in line with the majority of actions.
Having combat damage use the stack is unintuitive, both from a flavor and from a gameplay point of view. Flavorwise these are physical creatures hitting each other. It makes no sense that a creature hits another and the other hits back and then, somehow, one of them is eg. unsummoned but its hit still connects afterwards, but it doesn’t get any damage itself. How exactly does this physical hit somehow linger between the hitter being unsummoned away, and the other creature receiving the hit?
The gameplay trickery that using the stack for combat damage allows is just gimmicky (and quite unintuitive, and can feel unfair for good reasons). Removing the stack from this does not remove strategic depth, it just changes it. Now you have to decide whether you want to block with that creature you can sacrifice or not; you have a choice to make, you can’t have the cake and eat it too: Either you block and deal combat damage, or you block and sacrifice without dealing combat damage. You can’t have both, sorry, tough luck. But that’s the name of the game.
What people are complaining about is that they could do more before, and now they are more restricted. It’s not about strategic depth, it’s about the strategies being different.
I’m pretty certain that if the current combat rules had been used from the beginning up to 2010, and then they changed it to use the stack, people would still complain as much as they do now.