Card of the Week Contest #385: Volo's Guide to Monsters

And see, to that mindset I have a small issue: magic at its core is a game about interacting with the other players at the table (exceptions include: prison, protean hulk TZK), and to that point I think you should be able to sit down with whatever color you want and have the possibility of interacting with whatever deck happens to be across the table. The color pie is about, in my opinion, how well each color interacts with situations, rather than a binary choice of if that color interact at all.

The example I want to cite here is red. Red is generally bad at dealing with enchantments, but it still has ways a few ways of interacting with them: the king among them Enchanter's Bane. That what I mean when I say breaks and bends are an important part of making the color pie model work. Red shouldn't have no answers to enchantments: its answers should just be worse than green-white's. (SIMILARLY: LET WHITE DRAW CARDS DAMN IT.)

To that point, I agree that the original design that sparked this discussion was probably a bit too good of a creature remover to match green-blue's power level along that axis.

I get that your design sensibilities are exclusively based on Alpha, but the Pie's changed over the last two decades. Ritual effects, for example, haven't been Black for ages. It was moved to Red. "It was like this back before half of the people on this forum were born" is, to put it bluntly, unconvincing. The game's changed.

Is there a reason why every response you make to me comes across as so hostile? I am not nearly so rude to you, yet you seem determined to insult me at every turn.

That's actually a good question. However, this is one area where I do actually think that classic Magic design was superior. Reducing the prevalence of land destruction and color hate was an objectively good move. Giving Red more tricks, like rituals, creature theft, and impulse draw, made Red decks more interesting to design and play. However, I don't agree with the point of modern design that holds that each color should have certain "hard" weaknesses. That is, things that they just Do Not Do. If a color is going to get a change, it should make the game more fun, or at least more interesting, to play. Hard weaknesses, at least in my opinion, don't do that, though. Instead, they lead to some very boring, stale, and non-interactive games. It's a fact that mono decks just aren't as viable as they once were. If you have a deck that Doesn't Do whatever is needed to counter the opponent's strategy, then they just get to sit there and win. In older design, that was much less likely to happen, because colors didn't just not do things, they did them worse, or less efficiently. Soft weaknesses. Like with Blue burn. They got it, yes, but it was always either cost inefficient compared to Red (or even Black), or came with some drawback, like a Psionic Entity (which is actually both overcosted, and has a drawback). Design like this ensured that there was never a game in which one player just has to sit there and take it...or at least, that if there was, it was through a fault of their own deck construction. To me, if you have one design philosophy that says "Some matchups just can't be won." and one that says, "With forethought, every player has a chance.", then it's clear which should be considered superior design.

Sorry, but now it feels you're taking my comments completely out of context and twisting my words. First of all: Not in Alpha, but since Alpha. You argued with kefke about Fog having always been part of green's color pie would be no argument since the color pie has changed over tme - and all I said was that there would be parts of it that have never changed. That's literally all I said.

You might still think Fog should not be part of green's color pie - and that is a valid stand, no doubt - but that's just your personal take on the matter and has nothing to do with the prior argument at all?