Please DONT nerf cycling or 5 reasons why cycling is great

Gunmix25

babar3355 said:

I do understand where you are coming from and sympathize in many ways. Even us veterans were noobs at one point in time.

But oddly that is what I find so toxic about cycling.  When I was a mid game player with 5-10 mythics trying to compete, I simply was not to the end game yet. I was not able to beat the strongest bosses in PvE.  And when I moved to platinum... oh boy...  But it was fun... because I was working towards competing.. I just couldn't do it in a day. (And frankly I had an incentive to spend money... unlike newer players in the cycling meta)

Currently a player could conceivably get New Perspectives and Drake Haven in their very first booster.  Once they figured out how it worked they could beat Nicol Bolas or Avacyn on their first day.  Is that really what we want?

What about when cycling rotates out?  Should they create another "Win" button so newer players can continue to immediately beat end game content? ...............

.............."I Win" buttons are bad for the game.  Ones that are both easily accessible and a big waste of time are really bad for the game.  Most of us don't want cycling to be nerfed because we want to remain the king of the hill.  We want it to be nerfed because we think it will harm the game in the long term.  Will players who used to have an easy button just quit the game when cycling rotates out?

Let's not forget that this was Hibernium's idea of an "equalizer" [and we all know just how awesome of a job that they do about thinking things through]... highly doubtful that Oktagon would even entertain such an idea. *fingers crossed*

Rhasget

Bil said:

Anyway, in a few months it will rotate out... Let's hope oktagon will get rid of the mechanic after that so everyone gets happy again... 

Cycling came with Amonkhet and will remain in standard for a long time yet. 
Kaladesh (and Aether Revolt) won't rotate out of standard until the set after Ixalan (with subsets) and then AKH after the next released set. Which would put it at atleast a year from now.

TheDragonHermit

@ZW2007- said: (sorry my UI keeps derping from the snips I wanted to do)
Snip...
That should never happen. That is like starting an RPG, getting one new sword, and then skipping right to the end boss and beating it with ease. That doesn't sound like a game anyone would want to play.
Snip...

Oddly enough I recently watched a week long charity marathon of people doing more or less that, or similar. No real point being made there, just wanted to make that very off topics comment.

FindingHeart8

TheDragonHermit said:

@ZW2007- said: (sorry my UI keeps derping from the snips I wanted to do)
Snip...
That should never happen. That is like starting an RPG, getting one new sword, and then skipping right to the end boss and beating it with ease. That doesn't sound like a game anyone would want to play.
Snip...

Oddly enough I recently watched a week long charity marathon of people doing more or less that, or similar. No real point being made there, just wanted to make that very off topics comment.

Yeah, I'd say it's more like getting a cursed sword.  Yeah it gives you a ton of power and puts you much further ahead than what you anticipated...but at the hidden cost of tedious repetitive gameplay that eventually leads you to using it only as an absolute last resort.  Hopefully the monsters you slayed during the time it took you to realize this dropped some cool weapons you can use to branch away from cycling.  Eventually you leave the sword behind, but appreciate what it allowed you to accomplish, and that you're a better player overall.

morgue427

i did find that to be very true, yeah i beat the challenge bosses, now what i can beat it now i want to do it other ways with what i have, the challenge is a big draw for me. I know i can do it so now i do just enough to win not create huge drakes just because i can, honestly forgot about faith of the devoted and dont even have it mastered lol

Gilesclone

This fall I took my alt account from 0 to Silver.  Here are some of my observations.
A large percentage of bronze players never get out of story mode.
Of those rare players that attempt the events, a fairly large number are playing their unaltered beginner decks.  I would not be surprised if a high percentage of those go back to the story mode.
Most battles come down to a race since there is hardly any removal.
There are trolls with 1 or more overpowering mythics that never leave bronze.  What a sad life!
I never once encountered a cycling deck.  Only occasionally did I even see a cycling card played.
I haven’t played silver much (don’t have the time). But I don’t expect I’ll find much cycling there either.

Navgoose

Although I am on team nerf New perspectives, we might be past the biggest flood of cycle decks anyway. I saw them in abundance near the end of Amonkhet/beginning of Devastation. I saw the most in gold, platinum is still rather new to me but there are fewer.

morgue427

i see them a good bit in plat really but greg messes it, only thing is when they have lay claim and steal my creatures lol

Martin

Martin said:

Terrible post from start to finish. How do I downvote it?

If that was too strong for someone's tastes, let me put it like this: I strongly disagree with everything that was written in the initial post; I feel the need to say that because, I assume, this forum is the primary place that D3Go and Oktagon get their feedback; but I do not feel the need to write a lengthy treatise dismantling it because other people in this thread, and other threads, have covered what I want to say on the matter before.

ILikePancakes

FindingHeart8 said:

TheDragonHermit said:k

@ZW2007- said: (sorry my UI keeps derping from the snips I wanted to do)
Snip...
That should never happen. That is like starting an RPG, getting one new sword, and then skipping right to the end boss and beating it with ease. That doesn't sound like a game anyone would want to play.
Snip...

Oddly enough I recently watched a week long charity marathon of people doing more or less that, or similar. No real point being made there, just wanted to make that very off topics comment.

Yeah, I'd say it's more like getting a cursed sword.  Yeah it gives you a ton of power and puts you much further ahead than what you anticipated...but at the hidden cost of tedious repetitive gameplay that eventually leads you to using it only as an absolute last resort.  Hopefully the monsters you slayed during the time it took you to realize this dropped some cool weapons you can use to branch away from cycling.  Eventually you leave the sword behind, but appreciate what it allowed you to accomplish, and that you're a better player overall.

Well put. I got drake haven and new perspectives some time ago and I rarely use it now unless I'm trying to hit an objective  (usually in story mode). It's slow and boring.

Octagon has the stats on how much it's used in actual play and whether it needs a nerf or not. I doubt it needs a nerf. I maintain that any cards or card combo played by the ai that doesn't allow the human playing an opportunity to interact at all and then GAME OVER breaks the game. That needs balanced first. 

TheExaminer

Houdin said:

If a new player wants to spend 4 hours cycling wins that a veteran player can pull in 5 minutes in legacy that has some of the most overpowered cards in the game well all the power to you.

I am very happy that we agree on this point No one ever is going to play cycling combo on regular basis.

My current "OP" deck that I use to dismantle Avacyn and other unbeatable non-Bolas bosses is Kiora turbo-eternalize, featuring: resilient khenra, champion of the wits, quarry beetle, a couple cheap gem converters, reason/believe, farm/market, strategic planning and gather the pack. 0 mythics and it is still very powerful. 
I use cycling only against Bolas, because my only other way of dealing with him is to spend 1 hour playing Chandra1 creatureless burn...

TheExaminer

FindingHeart8 said:

TheDragonHermit said:

@ZW2007- said: (sorry my UI keeps derping from the snips I wanted to do)
Snip...
That should never happen. That is like starting an RPG, getting one new sword, and then skipping right to the end boss and beating it with ease. That doesn't sound like a game anyone would want to play.
Snip...

Oddly enough I recently watched a week long charity marathon of people doing more or less that, or similar. No real point being made there, just wanted to make that very off topics comment.

Yeah, I'd say it's more like getting a cursed sword.  Yeah it gives you a ton of power and puts you much further ahead than what you anticipated...but at the hidden cost of tedious repetitive gameplay that eventually leads you to using it only as an absolute last resort.  Hopefully the monsters you slayed during the time it took you to realize this dropped some cool weapons you can use to branch away from cycling.  Eventually you leave the sword behind, but appreciate what it allowed you to accomplish, and that you're a better player overall.

Oh man, why cant I give you a million upvotes? Well done, I couldn't say this better!

FindingHeart8

TheExaminer said:

FindingHeart8 said:

TheDragonHermit said:

@ZW2007- said: (sorry my UI keeps derping from the snips I wanted to do)
Snip...
That should never happen. That is like starting an RPG, getting one new sword, and then skipping right to the end boss and beating it with ease. That doesn't sound like a game anyone would want to play.
Snip...

Oddly enough I recently watched a week long charity marathon of people doing more or less that, or similar. No real point being made there, just wanted to make that very off topics comment.

Yeah, I'd say it's more like getting a cursed sword.  Yeah it gives you a ton of power and puts you much further ahead than what you anticipated...but at the hidden cost of tedious repetitive gameplay that eventually leads you to using it only as an absolute last resort.  Hopefully the monsters you slayed during the time it took you to realize this dropped some cool weapons you can use to branch away from cycling.  Eventually you leave the sword behind, but appreciate what it allowed you to accomplish, and that you're a better player overall.

Oh man, why cant I give you a million upvotes? Well done, I couldn't say this better!

why thank you, the thought is much appreciated

Gunmix25

I am not advocating for what I'm about to say, but merely pointing out that events, depending on their design, also influence a player's choice of whether or not cycling is used. I.e.: If QB was active, cycling would be a very bad idea due to how much it slows the game down on average. You wouldn't be able to log in as may wins as others would, despite winning every match.  

wereotter

Rhasget said:

Bil said:

Anyway, in a few months it will rotate out... Let's hope oktagon will get rid of the mechanic after that so everyone gets happy again... 

Cycling came with Amonkhet and will remain in standard for a long time yet. 
Kaladesh (and Aether Revolt) won't rotate out of standard until the set after Ixalan (with subsets) and then AKH after the next released set. Which would put it at atleast a year from now.

The set after the Ixalan block is Dominaria, and Wizards has already stated it will be a single-set block. No subset. There will be no small sets going forward (small sets to put it in perspective here were Oath of the Gatewatch, Eldritch Moon, Aether Revolt, and Hour of Devestation) and instead all sets will be large sets. Not sure exactly how that will impact standard since not every block will be 2 sets, and they won't be able to rotate out an entire block due to mechanics at once if say there's a 1-set block followed by a 3-set block (as is speculated to happen after Dominaria)

That all said.... I think cycling is fine. Sure it's dull to play against, but then again there are other decks that have existed for years that aren't fun to play against for a variety of reasons. The Tezzeret deck that just makes your cards incredibly expensive to cast while draining your mana but still takes 70 turns to kill you, the Insidious Will/Silverstrike deck....

Cycling provides a way for players to meet certain challenges mostly just at the cost of time. And it makes certain encounters more readily accomplished. I'm thinking of in the current event, Uncage the Menagerie encounter. Sure I could probably do the fight without my Dovin cycling deck, but the fact that I can cycle my way into the Cast Outs I need to disable its creatures and not die to the "enrage" clock that's going makes it a safer strategy. And, honestly, I don't care if other people using this mechanic are getting good scores in events. I don't feel like just because I've been playing longer and have a deeper collection of cards or time sunk into the game that I'm any more deserving of a win than someone who just uses the new cycling mechanic.

Magic, especially in Standard, has always supposed to have been a place where anyone can come in and quickly be on even footing with everyone else specifically because you don't have to have a collection of cards that spans back many years in order to just get your foot in the door.

babar3355

TheExaminer said:

Houdin said:

If a new player wants to spend 4 hours cycling wins that a veteran player can pull in 5 minutes in legacy that has some of the most overpowered cards in the game well all the power to you.

I am very happy that we agree on this point No one ever is going to play cycling combo on regular basis.

My current "OP" deck that I use to dismantle Avacyn and other unbeatable non-Bolas bosses is Kiora turbo-eternalize, featuring: resilient khenra, champion of the wits, quarry beetle, a couple cheap gem converters, reason/believe, farm/market, strategic planning and gather the pack. 0 mythics and it is still very powerful. 
I use cycling only against Bolas, because my only other way of dealing with him is to spend 1 hour playing Chandra1 creatureless burn...

You do realize that resilient khenra is actually broken right?  Not just broken in the sense of "Cycling is broken!" but in the context of it isn't functioning as intended...  Should we not nerf it back to it's appropriate level because it helps newer players? 

To be fair, maybe it is working properly and they screwed up the card text.

Matthew

babar3355 said:

To be fair, maybe it is working properly and they screwed up the card text.

The fact that either possibility seems equally likely is a pretty damning indictment of Hibernum's standing in the eyes of the community.

Back to the topic though, so that I don't get mod'd to death, I'm mostly ambivalent, with a bit of a bias towards the nerf camp. I can see the point of view of both the "Nerf Herders" and the "Easy Buttoners" though.. On the one hand, I completely understand where the Nerf Herders are coming from, outlined below:

• First of all, this mechanic absolutely leads to an absurdly warped metagame. Saying that it does not do so is indicative of either a gross misunderstanding of what constitutes a "warping of the metagame", or alternatively, and quite simply, wallowing denial. There are examples all throughout this thread, from both sides, remarking on how overwhelmingly prevalent Cycling decks were at one point, or that they still are. I'm not here to debate whether or not they are still being used. I'm certainly guilty of it, and I run into them enough that I know the archetype is still enjoying its heyday. But the simple fact is that we are seeing this kind of skewing of the strategies being used constitutes a very clear warping.
  
• Regarding the point that it makes the game too easy, I have some mixed feelings about this that lead down the rabbit hole of what's actually wrong with this game right now (hint: it has to do with how we progress to higher levels of competition). But that's off topic. For now, let me just say that any game should not be easy at the highest levels of play. And as we can all clearly agree, Cycling makes things stupid-easy.
• Following on from my second point, this mechanic does not do any favors for the "new players" we're all so concerned about. Sure, it allows them to win games and get rewards and (eventually) enough orbs to craft new and better cards. But that's like giving out participation trophies. That's absolutely not how the world works, and I don't believe it's good for anyone to be in an environment that does work that way. And when you create or perpetuate such an environment, you're poisoning the well and setting yourself up to court bigger problems down the road when your entitled player base wonders what happened to all the free stuff they were getting after Cycling falls out of Standard. If you want an example of this, look at the people on this very forum who were griping about "Where did all the freebies go?" after the holiday reward rate went back down to the normal rate.
• Even further down this train of thought, this mechanic destroys the learning curve for both deck building and overall strategy. As I mentioned above, I use Cycling quite a bit. When crafting arrived, I reaped considerable rewards for my saving, and yet I found myself having some difficulty in taking advantage of all the new cards I'd suddenly gained. Much of that had to do with the fact that my deck building was pretty rusty. Cycling requires very little thought to use effectively, so my creativity atrophied while I was leaning so heavily on it as a mechanic.
• Finally, the argument that cards will eventually not be available is poorly thought out. Yes, eventually their availability will diminish. But crafting is still a thing, and as the only necessary pieces for the Cycling engine are rare, it should be pretty easy for someone to chase them.

Now, for all you Easy Buttoners, I do also get your arguments. I get the appeal of something that helps you win a crazy-difficult fight. Like I said above, I have used this strategy myself, and I was grateful for it. I also get that it might seem like those of us crying out for a nerf are doing so from the lofty heights of an ivory tower. But if you need proof to the contrary, you need only look back through the post history of all the Nerf Herders to see that they actually care a great deal about the user experience of the new player. Someone else mentioned this above, but I can't be buggered to go back and look for it, so I'll paraphrase: without a continuing influx of new players, this game that we enjoy so much will eventually cease to exist. But our desire to help new players goes leaps and bounds beyond that purely selfish reason, because we truly do enjoy the sense of community and camaraderie that has developed around this game.

We want new players to keep coming, and we also want them to stick around. When your easy button eventually disappears, it will be a difficult adjustment, and I'm sure many will decide it's no longer worth their time.

I'm starting to ramble, and also repeat myself, so I'll wrap this up now. Basically, I get where you all are coming from, but it seems to me that objectivity is being drowned out by all the clamoring for participation trophies.

TheExaminer

babar3355 said:

TheExaminer said:

Houdin said:

If a new player wants to spend 4 hours cycling wins that a veteran player can pull in 5 minutes in legacy that has some of the most overpowered cards in the game well all the power to you.

I am very happy that we agree on this point No one ever is going to play cycling combo on regular basis.

My current "OP" deck that I use to dismantle Avacyn and other unbeatable non-Bolas bosses is Kiora turbo-eternalize, featuring: resilient khenra, champion of the wits, quarry beetle, a couple cheap gem converters, reason/believe, farm/market, strategic planning and gather the pack. 0 mythics and it is still very powerful. 
I use cycling only against Bolas, because my only other way of dealing with him is to spend 1 hour playing Chandra1 creatureless burn...

You do realize that resilient khenra is actually broken right?  Not just broken in the sense of "Cycling is broken!" but in the context of it isn't functioning as intended...  Should we not nerf it back to it's appropriate level because it helps newer players? 

To be fair, maybe it is working properly and they screwed up the card text.

Yeah, this card is indeed broken because front half and token half work differently. Imo, token works properly, because that is how paper world Resilient Khenra is worded. 

ElfNeedsFood

TheExaminer said:

babar3355 said:

TheExaminer said:

Houdin said:

If a new player wants to spend 4 hours cycling wins that a veteran player can pull in 5 minutes in legacy that has some of the most overpowered cards in the game well all the power to you.

I am very happy that we agree on this point No one ever is going to play cycling combo on regular basis.

My current "OP" deck that I use to dismantle Avacyn and other unbeatable non-Bolas bosses is Kiora turbo-eternalize, featuring: resilient khenra, champion of the wits, quarry beetle, a couple cheap gem converters, reason/believe, farm/market, strategic planning and gather the pack. 0 mythics and it is still very powerful. 
I use cycling only against Bolas, because my only other way of dealing with him is to spend 1 hour playing Chandra1 creatureless burn...

You do realize that resilient khenra is actually broken right?  Not just broken in the sense of "Cycling is broken!" but in the context of it isn't functioning as intended...  Should we not nerf it back to it's appropriate level because it helps newer players? 

To be fair, maybe it is working properly and they screwed up the card text.

Yeah, this card is indeed broken because front half and token half work differently. Imo, token works properly, because that is how paper world Resilient Khenra is worded. 

The paper Khenra doesn't stack with every other Keherna token, so it's actually +4/+4 (eternalized strength).  And yes, the Eternalize cards tend to do "1" or "2" "somethings" when hand cast and then "4" of those when cast from the graveyard.

Theros

Rhasget said:

Bil said:

Anyway, in a few months it will rotate out... Let's hope oktagon will get rid of the mechanic after that so everyone gets happy again... 

Cycling came with Amonkhet and will remain in standard for a long time yet. 
Kaladesh (and Aether Revolt) won't rotate out of standard until the set after Ixalan (with subsets) and then AKH after the next released set. Which would put it at atleast a year from now.

Dev do not have to follow the same convention as real  MTG. This is unrealistic since real MTG will be around for many years to come compared to this digital version. Therefore, they should make their own rules. They can remove any set from standard whenever they see fit.