Please reduce the common tax

knthrak

Same set, same power and toughness. Both have trample. Soul Swallower even has an additional ability. Yet the common costs 14 mana more.



Same set, same cost, but Exquisite Firecraft does twice the damage.

There are lots of other examples of terrible commons, but these stand out the most to me.

I'm not asking for the costs / effects to be equal, but can the gap be narrowed some in the future? Better commons make newer players less likely to rage-quit, and make color mastery less of a chore. Better commons means that events that affect deck construction don't have to be so frustrating because of horrible cards like Twins of Maurer Estate (that card is still bad even after Lilliana makes me discard two cards, granting it 6 mana).

A 6 mana 2/2 should not be your baseline for a common these days. The 5 mana 2/2 only see play to satisfy tribal / mechanic requirements.

16 mana for Kessig Dire Swine should be fine. It's not exciting at that cost, but it's not completely embarrassing to play either. With lightning javelin, you've got a lot of combinations of lowering the cost and upping the damage to make the card more reasonable. 5 mana 4 damage feels reasonable to me.

Ekkias

Yes, totally. Up voted.

mouser

There are a boatload more commons that could (and should) be played in place of the swine.

Common cards should mostly be inferior to rare or mythic cards, with the occasional exception or deck synergy benefit that increases the value of the common card. This is a core concept from paper MtG.

Plastic

But if all the lesser cards become good, why would anybody buy exclusive mythics anymore?

Netatron

Plastic wrote:

But if all the lesser cards become good, why would anybody buy exclusive mythics anymore?

Even if Kessig Dire Swine got it's cost reduced to 18 it's still garbage compared to just about any mythic. The point is just to make them not unimaginably uselessly bad.

Steeme

Mythics and Rares should remain OP compared to Commons.

However, some (most?) commons are just so utterly embarrassing that giving them some love would actually do the game a great benefit.

I do remember using Lightning Javelin a lot when I was first starting out. That and Stonefury. They are quite useful at low levels, but you reach a certain point where they are no longer effective (creature and planeswalker HP++++).

I suppose that's Ok for players starting now, where they will have those common cards mastered at low levels and replace them with better cards that they pick up along the way. Then again, with every new set comes a new set of commons, and it's disappointing to see how useless most of them are. Seems like a waste of effort to even create the cards in the first place.

One strategy to alleviate this problem is to have a series of Events that restricted the "power level" of your deck. That is, the higher the rarity of a card, the higher the power rating, and thus you could only include a few powerful cards rounded out with a bunch of commons. Or you could go the route of all Uncommon cards. Then we would see more value in these common cards and perhaps see a new style of deckbuilding.

Monk

Steeme wrote:

One strategy to alleviate this problem is to have a series of Events that restricted the "power level" of your deck. That is, the higher the rarity of a card, the higher the power rating, and thus you could only include a few powerful cards rounded out with a bunch of commons. Or you could go the route of all Uncommon cards. Then we would see more value in these common cards and perhaps see a new style of deckbuilding.

That's a pretty good idea I think. But it does not avoid the 'dumb-AI problem'. At equivalent deck, the player should always win...

jackvett

A Pauper MTGPQ event sounds fun because it's different, but I think it'd get old fast as the power level of commons is extremely low.

jimilinho_

Certainly some of the commons are terrible, but that is the same as in paper mtg.

There's still plenty of very good commons, Sure Strike, Fertile Thicket, True-Faith Censer, Uncaged Fury, Murderer's Axe, Yavimaya Coast, Smite the Monstrous Etc....

Kessig Swine is just a terrible card, however if you made it cost 18 it would arguably better than World Breaker and that's a mythic

Sortash

Even commons and uncommons share this issue. I just got puzzled when i drew a

"magmatic insight" red uncommon spell (discard 1 Card, draw two Cards, cost 5 mana)

and was pretty sure that i had seen the same effect elsewhere. So i checked and found

"tormenting voice" red common spell(discard 1 Card, draw two Cards, cost 6 mana)

Why use the exact same effect for both cards. It would be so easy to change the common to a cheaper yet less reliable / delayed form of effect (discard 1, investigate 2 for example, or create countdown-gems that that grant the carddraw when not destroyed in time).

I also think it is the completly wrong way to trash commons by the means of utterly high costs for the same or even worse effect. The "kessig dire swine" is the best example for this madness. Create diversity by keeping the commons cheap, and their effects unreliable (maybe 16-18 mana, make the trample-effect bound to a condition). Or make them have other drawbacks (decaying stats for example) The rare Cards should be better by the means of beeing more reliable (constant trample, regeneration) or by having mechanics that power them up so they truly shine compared to their common brethren. They also should be (slightly) more expensive to play. But definitly not less then halve the cost and additional effects for the mythic version in comparison to the common card. That totally denies the common its reason for existence

shteev

jimilinho_ wrote:

Certainly some of the commons are terrible, but that is the same as in paper mtg.

There's still plenty of very good commons, Sure Strike, Fertile Thicket, True-Faith Censer, Uncaged Fury, Murderer's Axe, Yavimaya Coast, Smite the Monstrous Etc....

Not to the same degree in paper MTG. Also, paper mtg has many different formats in which the commons and uncommons have to be relied upon during play, such as Pauper, Sealed, or Draft.


What I think is, they should take every card which no-one ever plays with (I'm sure they'll have this data, and if not, they can certainly start collecting it), and just drop their costs by one. If nothing breaks in the game after a month or two, just do it again. They don't have to keep doing it until every card becomes ultrapowerful, or even, playable to most players, just enough so that *everyone* doesn't look at the card and think 'that's garbage'. There should be bad cards in the game. Just not half of all of them.

And if they temporarily end up with a card that's too OP for the game somehow, then, so what? They do that all the time releasing new mythics and bugged cards anyway.

Ingest/Process/Void must have taken a lot of time to code, and nobody cares about it because all the synergies you create by playing with those cards is irrelevant compared to just playing with a deck full of good cards. I mean sure, I play with Transgress the Mind, Grip of Desolation, and Oblivion Sower in the same deck, and occasionally they create a little synergy, but generally I couldn't care less, and it certainly doesn't affect the outcome of matches.

tm00

Is not like lighting javelin is bad, it got a little superfluous now that touch of the void and inner struggle exist, but is still pretty good with chandra's and ajani's second ability.

Personally I'm just glad that commons aren't automatically auto excudes

And ingest is awesome, seriously is weird how nobody uses it, is mana denial costed as if it did nothing.

Also I'm pretty sure that if you would pay five mana for magmatic insight you would gladly pay six mana to double the number of insights in your deck.

alextfish

The forum isn't letting me thumbs-up anything, so I'll just post to say I agree. The game should be about synergy and skill, and buying more cards should give you more opportunities for finding fun synergies/combos and assembling more focused decks.

At the moment the power differential between mythics, rares, and the rest is so absurdly large that the game isn't really about synergies so much as it's about who manages to open the best mythics. (Maybe up at platinum where you can assume everyone has everything you get back to focusing on synergies, just with decks containing 5 mythics 4 rares and one uncommon or common. But down here in silver the different between opening a playable mythic versus a bad one, or opening two mythics versus none at all, makes a painful amount of different.)

I'd rather 90% of this game's commons were bumped in power level significantly, and 90% of the game's mythics were nerfed significantly (mainly in mana cost or taking down the crazyhigh p/t), with the result that far fewer cards are auto-includes (currently many mythics), far fewer cards are auto-excludes (currently most commons), and instead many more cards become viable and many more decks become viable.

shteev

tm00 wrote:

Is not like lighting javelin is bad, it got a little superfluous now that touch of the void and inner struggle exist, but is still pretty good with chandra's and ajani's second ability.

I think it is bad. I wouldn't dare go into a Platinum Tier event game with it in my deck, that's just asking for trouble.

tm00

shteev wrote:

tm00 wrote:

Is not like lighting javelin is bad, it got a little superfluous now that touch of the void and inner struggle exist, but is still pretty good with chandra's and ajani's second ability.

I think it is bad. I wouldn't dare go into a Platinum Tier event game with it in my deck, that's just asking for trouble.

If devour in flames didn't exist I'd consider it as a second spell that doesn't cost a bunch of mana and can go to the face for harness the storm, if I just wanted removal I'd just use touch of the void,avacyn's judgement or that origin's spell that deals 4 to a creature instead.
There are rares that are probably less useful than it, so it isn't bad.

speakupaskanswer

This really feels like a "Make all cards good" argument and that simply doesn't work. I agree about the swine as it is really a ridiculously overcosted card. Javelin and Firecraft are both fine at their costs. Making the Javelin cost less would be really wrong.

Netatron

jimilinho_ wrote:

Kessig Swine is just a terrible card, however if you made it cost 18 it would arguably better than World Breaker and that's a mythic

Well, World Breaker is also a terrible card. It would need twice the stats to be worth that cost.

shteev

speakupaskanswer wrote:

This really feels like a "Make all cards good" argument and that simply doesn't work.

Lets just go through this, shall we?


http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/when-cards-go-bad-2002-01-28

1) All The Cards Cannot Be Good

- True, but this does not mean some cards should be so **** that no-one in their right mind would ever consider playing them. This is an argument for making Gold-Forged Sentinels, not an argument for making Hitchclaw Recluses.

2) Different Cards Appeal to Different Players

- True, but this does not mean some cards should be so **** that no-one in their right mind would ever consider playing them. This is an argument for making Gold-Forged Sentinels, not an argument for making Hitchclaw Recluses.

3) Diversity of Card Powers is Key to Discovery

- True, but this does not apply to **** commons with no abilities, or keyworded abilities, like Kessig Dire Swine, Knight of the Pilgrim's Road or Farbog Revenant, or cards which are strictly worse than other versions of themselves, like Lightning Javelin or Chitinous Cloak. Also, I'm *pretty* sure that most players starting to play the game will be able to determine for themselves that Crush of Tentacles, Engulf the Shores or Behold the Beyond are better than Kessig Dire Swine, even though the cards are not directly comparable.

4) Power Levels Are Relative

**** off. Kessig Dire Swine or Zulaport Cutthroat will never be the lynchpin of a viable combo deck. You can quote me on that.

5) Diversity of Power Rewards the More Skilled Player

Nope. That would only be true if it was difficult to tell that Crush of Tentacles is better than Kessig Dire Swine, and it isn't.

6) People Like Finding “Hidden Gems”

True! And there should be cards that look slightly ropey hanging around for players to discover, like Mantle of Webs or Haunted Cloak. Again, tho, this is not a reason for making Kessig Dire Swine, or, if you're getting bored of me naming that card, pretty much anything with Ingest or Void or Process written on it.

7) R&D is Only Human

I have no way of checking the veracity of this.





Oh, there wasn't as much in that article as I was expecting. I thought there might be an argument about how its a fun part of the game to make cards that LOOK good, but turn out to be rubbish, otherwise whenever you saw a card that looked good you'd always know it was without testing it. I enjoyed finding out that Kozilek's Return was pretty much unplayable, for example. Blight Herder I thought might be worth testing. I even threw United Front into a deck thinking, maybe I could get some use out of it with the right build. They were all rubbish, but I had some fun finding that out. Again, though, this argument hardly applies to Kessig Dire Swine, Yeva's Forcemage, Tide Drifter, Ally Encampment, Seagraf Skaab, Hitchclaw Recluse, Apothecary Geist, Zulaport Cuttroat, Ruin Processor, Tunneling Geopede, Harvest Hand, Ondu Greathorn... and so on... and so on....


I don't know if you've ever listened to his 'Drive to Work' podcast, but MaRo doesn't half talk a load of ****.

KroNoS

i would worry more about fixing the existing cards first.

in order of importance

#1. Fix cards causing game breaking bugs that freeze the game and leave no option but to force quit the game and take a loss.
acknowledge these horrible bugs and either disable these cards or fix IN A TIMELY MANNER.


#2. Fix the AI miss-playing your decks. almost the entire new set is not even coded correctly in terms of the AI using buffs on enemy minions and kill cards on its own minions. how a set was released with no quality control is just mind boggling.


#3. then we can worry about the common tax last.

Netatron

KroNoS wrote:

i would worry more about fixing the existing cards first.

in order of importance

#1. Fix cards causing game breaking bugs that freeze the game and leave no option but to force quit the game and take a loss.
acknowledge these horrible bugs and either disable these cards or fix IN A TIMELY MANNER.


#2. Fix the AI miss-playing your decks. almost the entire new set is not even coded correctly in terms of the AI using buffs on enemy minions and kill cards on its own minions. how a set was released with no quality control is just mind boggling.


#3. then we can worry about the common tax last.

I don't think anyone is saying the commons being too weak is the main problem the game has. But the other glaring issues have been discussed to death for the past month or two with no new fixes in sight, so we might as well discuss some other problems.

Irgy

One of the biggest problems is just that there's cards so directly comparable.

It's easy to have mythics be better than commons without making the commons completely unplayable:
* Have the mythics do unique things rather than being just plain better value. Build-arounds. For instance take Starfield of Nyx, it's a completely OP busted card, yes, but at least it doesn't obsolete a single common. In fact quite the opposite, it makes a bunch of commons suddenly more playable.
* Make the commons cheaper. They can still be worse value on the whole but the direct comparison is no longer there. For example, if Lightning Javelin cost 4 to deal 3, it would still be worse value than Exquisite Firecraft, you'd still be pleased to own Firecraft, but it's no longer strictly worse.
* Have mythics get better powers that replace the other powers. If Soul Swallower just didn't have trample, well I know which card is better but again at least it's not as enraging to compare them side to side.

I actually feel like this is part of a broader issue though that card costs just aren't balanced at all. It's bad enough comparing commons to mythics, but sometimes you can compare commons to commons and really wonder what on earth is going on. I mean, compare Grasp of Darkness to Exquisite Firecraft, sure you can damage the face with Firecraft, but is that really better? Mostly it just gives the AI a way to misplay the card. Roil Spout vs Ruinous Path, is it really worth paying 5 more mana (or 1 more mana and 2 less land-creatures) to let them draw the creature again next turn? Different colours obviously but mana is mana. There's no global cost balancing going on, and until there is there's always going to be strange comparisons.