Xyx wrote:I didn't mean to call your baby ugly.
It's just that Fallen Empires is forever branded in my mind as a contender for the Worst Set Ever. You speak of power creep, but there was never actually a time when it wasn't a contender for that title.
The set has decent
average card quality, but all of that is in the commons. The fact that you can buy the entire set for $50 tells you all you need to know about the other cards.
You could get it for cheap because these are the numbers of the cards printed:
Alpha + Beta: 10 million
Unlimited: 40 million
Arabian Nights: 5 million
Antiquities: 15 million
Legends: 35 million
The Dark: 75 million
Fallen Empires: over 350 million
If a set has high average card quality, at a time when there aren't all that many MtG cards around, it means the average cards is better than most MtG cards in existance. Which it actually was, and so it can't be a contender for the worst set ever. Legends had a low percentage of usable cards and lower overall power level, but it was 10X rarer, and the Dark was 5X rarer, while Antiquities was, what, 30 times as rare? None of those sets were much better, or even at all better than FE. The "it has no chase cards" / "I can buy the whole set for 50$" thing is a fallacy, because if FE had chase cards in they would still be 30X more common than anything from Antiquities. If Antiquities was as overprinted as FE, people would be lining the walls with
Mishra's Workshops , and if Legends was as overprinted "everybody has a million
Mana Drain" would be a meme.
But it's also pure nonsense because what does "where the value is" actually matter to players? Throughtout MtG history sets which had the good stuff at common and uncommon created bursts and surges of new players and playgroups, while sets which had the value at the top or opressive standouts dominating the metagame just drove them away. Playables being anywhere except common is awful for players, and has nothing to do with set quality (except when it comes to drafting). It's just a sales thing. Most people who are opening a booster would rather open a booster with a high chance of getting multiple playable cards than a low chance of opening something really broken. This only becomes a problem once everyone has all the cards they want in a set, because people stop buying boosters. And that's only a problem for WotC, but
that's mostly true for every MtG set.
What saved the game overall from that constant problem was the invention and popularization of draft, and if draft existed back then and was sanctioned FE would have easily been remembered as the best of the old sets. Not even overprinting would be a problem, precisely because the huge supply making it cheap to draft would mean it would have been the most drafted set ever, and as I keep saying, no old set drafts quite like it.
lujo wrote:FE boxes were so cheap due to overprinting
Not
just to overprinting. If the boxes were loaded with chase cards (like
all the other sets at the time), they wouldn't be given away for free. Wizards didn't accidentally add an extra zero when they sent their numbers to the printers. They printed what they
expected to sell based on their track record.
Well, the chase cards from those old sets were mostly ludicrous, and history has shown that there's no room for much of anything if you don't cordon them off. The non-chase cards were on average worse than ones in FE or outright unusable (or insanely niche). The kind of stuff that was going on at the "chase" level was the kind of stuff that has driven away swaths of the playerbase every time it was attempted or stumbled into afterwards (
Urza's Block , random mishaps like Affinity ). It always sold very well, no mistake, but it tended to make the game unplayable and degenerate.
lujo wrote:The reason it might have been dissapointing was because it's designers had an eye for balance, so they tried to do away with a lot of things which were later deemed too good anyway, but were staple at the time.
True, but unfortunately nobody remembers a set for what it
didn't have.
But since we have an electronic platform where what people remember or don't remember doesn't matter, where you can see for yourself if all the cards work as intended and the thing got properly re-templated, no reason to insist on a meme and miss out on a rather good set. It got screwed over by history, and if all the cards worked it would actually play better on a computer than it did in RL, too.
I actually put
Spore Cloud into a Pauper deck (
Jace's Erasure Mill), but who still plays
Tangle? If even the "powercreeped" version has fallen out of use, that's not a good sign.
It's fallen out of use because it wasn't legal anywhere where it could've been used, same what happened with a bunch of FE (and not just FE) cards. If you need a mean fog, they don't really come much meaner. It's also been upstaged by
Moment's Peace which is also a 2-turn
Fog variant - more expensive, more flexible and more tutorable.
But saying it's a bad card, or even that it was, and not worth a second glance, or unused... It's just not true. There wasn't anything up untill
Constant Mists that did anything simmilar, and
Tangle shut down aggro in the days of
Flametongue Kavu ,
Blastoderm and
Fires of Yavimaya , wich was quite some aggro.
No,
Crusade is the more
famous card there, and one which screws you up in the mirror as opposed to the other two which don't and are rather underappreciated cards these days but weren't back then.
It's an inefficient on-board trick.
It's not meant to be a trick if it's on-board, is it?
Aeolipile is inefficient on-board burn and
Serrated Arrows were inefficient 1 counter per turn removal but they were certainly played and playable.
lujo wrote:Conch Horn (Was colorless card draw, of sorts, and is today considered the most powerful in it's cycle as it's a colorless way to manipulate Miracles)
Does anyone actually play this card, in Miracles or otherwise?
If it was available as part of block or standard with miracles in it, do you really, honestly think it would not be used? It reads: "1, sac: Draw two, set up a miracle from your hand." It's not a very good card overall, but it got better, much like
Brainstorm started out looking a bit meh but then got progresively more nuts as time progressed.
lujo wrote:Homarid Spawning Bed (Always a terror of kitchen tables, but it became downright ugly when faeries were printed in Lorwyn. They were never available in a non-degenerate format, if they were, it would likely be really widely known.)
Can you explain what this has to do with faeries? Or why this card is good?
You do understand
Bitterblossom is "good" card, yes? It's very similar to it.
You pay three mana at any time, and you sacrifice a blue creature to get tokens equal to it's mana cost. Blue creatures tend to have a higher mana cost than is their power. As long as you counter the board wipes, any time anything of yours would die to targeted removal (or back in the day trade in combat) - you got a bunch of guys to keep swarming with.
What faeries do is ideal, you can play them whenever and they have CiP abilities AND they generally have a hefty stats-to-cost disparity because of the flash and the evasion and the whathaveyou. You just sit back, draw-go , play your faeries and casually turn them into vawes of tokens. It's kitchen table, because, again, it simply was never available in a non-degenerate format alongside Faeries.
Alternatively use it with suspend cards like
Veiling Oddity ,
Errant Ephemeron or why-ever-did-they-call-him-that-must-be-pointless-nostalgia
Viscerid Deepwalker . The point, again, isn't that you have to sacrifice them immediately , but that you suspended them, plopped this thing down, do your controll thing and when the guys pop in and the other guy goes to remove them they turn into a mass of tokens.
Used to be a fun casual thing to do with
High Tide and
Urza's Legacy free dudes, too, if you wanted to play them but didn't want to bore people with more deadly combo shenannigans.
lujo wrote:Thrull Retainer (Totem Armor , cheap and nice , what's not to like)
If only it was totem armor. At the time, Wizards threw around the word "bury" like it was confetti.
That's true, but not everyting lobbed at you was
Wrath of God ,
Swords to Plowshares or
Incinerate. I enjoyed bringing it into black-on-black mirror as it was annoying to play against.
lujo wrote:Armor Thrull (Was always a fine card - stopped aggro, made your dude beat up the other guy's dude, could be sacrificed to
Soul Exchange , lovely card).
We're talking about a 3-mana 1/3 with an unremarkable ability here.
3 mana black 1/3 stopped a lot of aggro, and what it didn't stop most other things wouldn't stop either. It had something to do if a bolt got lobbed at it, and also if a bolt got lobbed at anything else, whereupon that something else would henceforth be know as "that thing that's quite difficult to bolt now, and also to burn out otherwis, yes, and is not exactly easy to tackle in combat with what I've got here, and hmmm, it seems to be able to block everything I've got, and you know what, I better just
Wrath of God ".
If it sounds far fetched, well, you haven't played with or against
Armor Thrull back in the day. In ye olde days the low overall card pool with clear standouts meant there was a lot of mirrors (or effective mirrors), and +1/+2 counter meant your dude was strictly better than thier dude. If it comes attached to a nice little blocker, what's not to like? Oh, and it sacrifices well for
Soul Exchange , too, if you want to bring back the guy you ritualed out on turn 1, but with +2/+2 on it this time.
I also saw some
Basal Thrull bashing. You play
Dark Ritual to bring out 3 mana stuff on turn 1 and you play
Basal Thrull to bring out 5 mana stuff on turn 3 or 6 mana stuff on turn 4. The rest of your deck makes use of the tons of ramp, including the amazing and card-disadvantageous opportunity to bring a 7 mana monster out on turn 3 if you just drew both. Not that there was all that much to bring out, granted. Or you dump all the mana into a
Drain Life somewhere down the road. What is, in fact, the problem? You mean you guys didn't do it?
lujo wrote:Vodalian War Machine (Believe it or not, this used to be used as a budget option for blocking and killing. Because of it's low power it was easy to make it unblockable in several ways and then have it hit for a lot.
It's also a good way to get all your dudes killed. I haven't seen it win any games but I've certainly seen it lose.
Idk. A card has a downside, it's in the color of counterspells and bounce. Someone gets his guys killed and it doesn't involve the words "split second", maybe crewing vehicles just isn't for them? Or...
Activated hexproof was introduced in Fallen Empires , and while it sucks it sucks because the guys introducing it figured you can't just stick hexproof on stuff without a downside. Which is rather reasonable, when you get down to it, and the introduction of actual hexproof has been controversial and the ability is grumbled about every time it messes up a limited environment.
Homarid Warrior was a bit too large to play competitively, but
Deep Spawn was
regarded as a good reanimation target because, well, among other things it had hexproof. Is being taken out for 2 turns to defend from
Terror ,
Swords to Plowshares or the like a fair downside for hexproof ? Who knows, but it sure cuts down on the "Yeah and then they just StP it" (Young wipper-snappers might know them as "Dies to doom blade") arguments like what was just presented up there.
So when you look at
Svyelunite Priest and wonder "How is that ability supposed to ever be useful?" there are 2 answers. 1 is that if you're about to get silly with your merfolk vehicle, but don't want it lol pwned by the ubiquous too good spot removal, then giving it hexproof until the end of turn is a nice ability to have. Not necessarily the best execution, sure, but that was the general idea, and for what's it worth "give this thing hexproof, dooh" was the intended way to use it even in Fallen Empires limited.
I'd agree it's not the best ever card, but it's less unwieldly than folk tales would have you believe.
If you couldn't afford a
Serra Angel, you shouldn't have bought a Fallen Empires booster!
If I need a
Serra Angel to win a game of MtG...
lujo wrote:Farrel's Mantle (Put it on a
Birds of Paradise turn 2, if you untap with them alive the other guy is in serious trouble if his plan involves creatures.)
But what deck scoops to a 0/1 on turn 3? Wasn't every deck at the time loaded with removal in case of turn-1
Hypnotic Specter?
Any deck that can't block a flier that fast (plenty of them) and which has a bunch of low 2 toughness creatures (plenty of them). Obviusly this was a silly move, but the general idea is to stick it on an small evasive critter and lock the other guy out, which was hardly undoable. It's even more doable these days in any casual playgroup. Just put an
Invisible Stalker down and then this thing on him, and then beg them to pay your hospital bill after they've broken both your arms as you would totally deserve it.
lujo wrote:But saying Fallen Empires was bad because it didn't radically stir up the metagame dominated by vintage staples...
But that's what Magic was like in 1994. And my meta didn't even have any Power 9 at the time.
My meta seems to have been a bit different, and we did have acess to a lot of Fallen Empires and played it a bunch so we understood the cards themselves a lot better.
EDIT: We also tended to allow Fallen Empires in more casual instances of old extended tourneys despite the official rules because a ton of folks had Fallen Empires cards and loved to play them. Off the top of my head, among the commons
Spore Cloud,
Goblin Kites , Golin Grenade ,
Farrel's Mantle ,
Hymn to Tourach ,
Armor Thrull ,
Icatian Javelineers ,
Homarid Spawning Bed ,
Aeolipile ,
Basal Thrull were often seen played and
Goblin Chirurgeon would occasionally cause someone who got lolpwned by goblins (before there was
Onslaught goblins) to threaten reporting the practice to WotC. I'm not even kidding, we kept using these things in sanctioned events up until god knows when, and those are just the commons...
lujo wrote:"set constructed" is just a matter of making constructed decks out of all the archetypes.
I fear that's a bit of a pipe dream. Which archetypes
already work? Is there anything I could still add to my quest world? I would really appreciate your insight!
[/quote]
Well, I'll get to that just don't provoke me until I do on this touchy subject. I have an abrasive personality, yet I need to somehow get some coder or such to help out with Fallen Empires cards which have a bad rep for no good reason. So while I don't really mind anyone's opinion on anything, somebody being cavalier about the whole FE was horrible is just a red flag for me to attack.
Which is pointless, all I want is a playable FE draft and a workable "Sarpadia".
As for which archetypes allready work, I'm having trouble testing it because I have to figure out which cards the AI keeps not putting into decks. Last time around I got it to use Derelors and stuff. This time around I'm finding it drafts Trull Champion along with a bunch of thrulls, but doesn't put it in the deck.
So I have to go tweak every single card (and possibly also figure out if there's more to it apart from getting rid of Svars which remove things from decks).
Posted: 30 Sep 2016, 17:54
