Post by sdfkjgh on Mar 24, 2024 2:06:31 GMT
5:31p, 3/23/24
I just lost to this godawful abomination, and it's emblematic of everything that's wrong with Alchemy. Yes, there is some salt, but Mel won't stop screaming, so this has to be done.
When Alchemy was first announced, it was touted as a way to rebalance bad cards--the broken, the underpowered, the mistakes. And there was much rejoicing. But now? The rebalances are few and far between, and we keep getting broken shit like this!!! Conjure, seek, spellbooks, perpetual effects--they're ALL horrible! Emporium Thopterist reads like it was designed by a little kid who just started homebrewing, with no thought for game balance, design, or anything beyond "iS ThIs fUn?"1 Thank you, garbagef.i.r.e. design!
An excellent comparison to make is Tendershoot Dryad: another token creature vomiter with very fragile personal p/t. However, there's one main difference, and it's pretty key, and the reason why Tendershoot Dryad is a fair card, and Imporium Thopterist is utterly broken. Perhaps you can spot it[url=
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wi8Fv0AJA4]...go ahead, I'll wait.[/url]
Gives one time to prepare a defense, while 
just screams in your face "FFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKK YYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!! YOU LOSE, NOOB!!!" Also, Tendershoot Dryad requires a bit of setup to get full power out of the tokens. Not so with Emporium Thopterist[/url], just a free Wind Drake every turn, no questions asked, no hoops to jump through, and no concern for game balance!
I told my mom (who doesn't play Magic, and is only aware of it via the tangent that is me) about it, and she was immediately able to understand how utterly broken it is. When completely fresh, innocent eyes can see exactly where you fucked up you know you fucked up!!
Even worse are the spellbooks. Now I could be persuaded to think of them as interesting, and mebbe fine if you get me drunk enough,2 but only if they were exhaustable--draft a card from a spellbook, that card is gone from that spellbook for the rest of the game (and be thankful I don't restrict it any further, like "The first time ANY player drafts a card from a spellbook, that card is gone from ALL COPIES of that spellbook, FOR ALL PLAYERS!"). Spellbooks, as they are now, are just wrong! It's not that they're an additional 5-15 cards you didn't have to put in your deck yourself (deckbuilding is a key restriction, and we all know MaRo's Maxim, say it with me children! "Restrictions breed creativity"! That's right!), it's that they're actually an infinite supply of those 5-15 cards!!! This was another one that mom spotted immediately as being a colossally stupid idea. She's not always the brightest, but that's an even further indictment of inexhaustable spellbooks. This is th sam criticism I have for all conjure cards: if you didn't put the conjured cards in your deck, you shouldn't have access to them. The cost of access is actually having them in your deck, and with formats with a hard ceiling to decksize, spellbooks and conjure are actively exposing themselves and making rude gestures to that very concept.
Seek could've been good, but only if it was kept squarely and solely within the confines of smoothing out your mana/curve. Something like "If an opponent controls more lands than you, and you have no land cards in your hand, seek a land card onto the battlefield tapped." But, if you're going that hard trying to make seek happen, you might as well just make Abundance be a fundamental rule of the game, and be done with it! #ReprintAbundanceIntoPermanentRotationYouCowards (What I mean by permanent rotation is every set has a Naturalize effect, etc., so that it's never out of rotation.)
Perpetual effects just ignore the fundamental rules of Magic for the sake of chasing dat Hearthstone money, and while it's a little reductive to go on a tirade--
Teferi: You're literally going on a tirade right now!
--about the corrupting and destructive effects of end-stage capitalism--
Ral: Never stopped you before.
--do I really need to say anything else at this point?
Ral & Teferi: Never stopped you before.
The most egregious example of perpetual effects is Patriar's Humiliation, a card that for some strange reason, is legal in all Commander-like formats. "Hey, you know that super cool card you spent who knows how long building an entire 100-card deck around? Now it's just a vanilla creature. Fuck you." Davriel, Soul Broker literally broke the game for a while after its printing, before they changed his "ultimate" to only be able to target your opponents' creatures, and that was one of the earliest incarnations of perpetual. A first outing breaks the game, and nobody thought to say "Mebbe this is a warning sign that we shouldn't be doing this"? Course, we all know WotC's track record of refusing to learn from their mistakes, or even outright ignoring them.
This is all to say that I've come to a realization. While the worst, most ASPD players out there see fun as a zero-sum game, in the sense that if anyone else is having fun, then they're not having fun3, I realize that I too see fun as a zero-sum game, but in a different way: if only one person in a 2-player game is having fun, then nobody is actually having any fun. Once you get into multiplayer, this situation produces negative-sum games, and any and all developers should be panicking about even the barest possibility of a negative-sum game being possible in their game, and doing anything and everything to prevent it from happening.
Thank you for coming to my TEDx talk4.
1I should know, I was that kid for far too long.
Ral & Teferi: Some would argue that you still are, you snotnosed, bratty little twerp!
2But it's gotta be with my choice of alcohol, and no, I'm not telling. Can't go making things that easy on you now, can we?
3And because of this worldview, and their personalities, it follows that the reciprocal becomes true as well--if they're having fun, then no one else is. For the worst cases, it goes even further: they're only having any fun because no one else is.
4I'd recently watched hbomb's Roblox video, and in it, he mentions that his editor, Kat, made the joke that tommy tallarico is the kind of guy to say he did a TED talk, but it was really a TEDx talk, and tommy actually did that! So I wanted to reference that for self-deprication, but unfortunately, I can't remember the timestamp, and this has already taken too long to do without further rewatching just under 2 hours of dunking on yet another narcissist.
7:19p, 3/23/24
I just lost to this godawful abomination, and it's emblematic of everything that's wrong with Alchemy. Yes, there is some salt, but Mel won't stop screaming, so this has to be done.
When Alchemy was first announced, it was touted as a way to rebalance bad cards--the broken, the underpowered, the mistakes. And there was much rejoicing. But now? The rebalances are few and far between, and we keep getting broken shit like this!!! Conjure, seek, spellbooks, perpetual effects--they're ALL horrible! Emporium Thopterist reads like it was designed by a little kid who just started homebrewing, with no thought for game balance, design, or anything beyond "iS ThIs fUn?"1 Thank you, garbagef.i.r.e. design!
An excellent comparison to make is Tendershoot Dryad: another token creature vomiter with very fragile personal p/t. However, there's one main difference, and it's pretty key, and the reason why Tendershoot Dryad is a fair card, and Imporium Thopterist is utterly broken. Perhaps you can spot it[url=
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wi8Fv0AJA4]...go ahead, I'll wait.[/url]
Gives one time to prepare a defense, while just screams in your face "FFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKK YYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!! YOU LOSE, NOOB!!!" Also, Tendershoot Dryad requires a bit of setup to get full power out of the tokens. Not so with Emporium Thopterist[/url], just a free Wind Drake every turn, no questions asked, no hoops to jump through, and no concern for game balance!I told my mom (who doesn't play Magic, and is only aware of it via the tangent that is me) about it, and she was immediately able to understand how utterly broken it is. When completely fresh, innocent eyes can see exactly where you fucked up you know you fucked up!!
Even worse are the spellbooks. Now I could be persuaded to think of them as interesting, and mebbe fine if you get me drunk enough,2 but only if they were exhaustable--draft a card from a spellbook, that card is gone from that spellbook for the rest of the game (and be thankful I don't restrict it any further, like "The first time ANY player drafts a card from a spellbook, that card is gone from ALL COPIES of that spellbook, FOR ALL PLAYERS!"). Spellbooks, as they are now, are just wrong! It's not that they're an additional 5-15 cards you didn't have to put in your deck yourself (deckbuilding is a key restriction, and we all know MaRo's Maxim, say it with me children! "Restrictions breed creativity"! That's right!), it's that they're actually an infinite supply of those 5-15 cards!!! This was another one that mom spotted immediately as being a colossally stupid idea. She's not always the brightest, but that's an even further indictment of inexhaustable spellbooks. This is th sam criticism I have for all conjure cards: if you didn't put the conjured cards in your deck, you shouldn't have access to them. The cost of access is actually having them in your deck, and with formats with a hard ceiling to decksize, spellbooks and conjure are actively exposing themselves and making rude gestures to that very concept.
Seek could've been good, but only if it was kept squarely and solely within the confines of smoothing out your mana/curve. Something like "If an opponent controls more lands than you, and you have no land cards in your hand, seek a land card onto the battlefield tapped." But, if you're going that hard trying to make seek happen, you might as well just make Abundance be a fundamental rule of the game, and be done with it! #ReprintAbundanceIntoPermanentRotationYouCowards (What I mean by permanent rotation is every set has a Naturalize effect, etc., so that it's never out of rotation.)
Perpetual effects just ignore the fundamental rules of Magic for the sake of chasing dat Hearthstone money, and while it's a little reductive to go on a tirade--
Teferi: You're literally going on a tirade right now!
--about the corrupting and destructive effects of end-stage capitalism--
Ral: Never stopped you before.
--do I really need to say anything else at this point?
Ral & Teferi: Never stopped you before.
The most egregious example of perpetual effects is Patriar's Humiliation, a card that for some strange reason, is legal in all Commander-like formats. "Hey, you know that super cool card you spent who knows how long building an entire 100-card deck around? Now it's just a vanilla creature. Fuck you." Davriel, Soul Broker literally broke the game for a while after its printing, before they changed his "ultimate" to only be able to target your opponents' creatures, and that was one of the earliest incarnations of perpetual. A first outing breaks the game, and nobody thought to say "Mebbe this is a warning sign that we shouldn't be doing this"? Course, we all know WotC's track record of refusing to learn from their mistakes, or even outright ignoring them.
This is all to say that I've come to a realization. While the worst, most ASPD players out there see fun as a zero-sum game, in the sense that if anyone else is having fun, then they're not having fun3, I realize that I too see fun as a zero-sum game, but in a different way: if only one person in a 2-player game is having fun, then nobody is actually having any fun. Once you get into multiplayer, this situation produces negative-sum games, and any and all developers should be panicking about even the barest possibility of a negative-sum game being possible in their game, and doing anything and everything to prevent it from happening.
Thank you for coming to my TEDx talk4.
1I should know, I was that kid for far too long.
Ral & Teferi: Some would argue that you still are, you snotnosed, bratty little twerp!
2But it's gotta be with my choice of alcohol, and no, I'm not telling. Can't go making things that easy on you now, can we?
3And because of this worldview, and their personalities, it follows that the reciprocal becomes true as well--if they're having fun, then no one else is. For the worst cases, it goes even further: they're only having any fun because no one else is.
4I'd recently watched hbomb's Roblox video, and in it, he mentions that his editor, Kat, made the joke that tommy tallarico is the kind of guy to say he did a TED talk, but it was really a TEDx talk, and tommy actually did that! So I wanted to reference that for self-deprication, but unfortunately, I can't remember the timestamp, and this has already taken too long to do without further rewatching just under 2 hours of dunking on yet another narcissist.
7:19p, 3/23/24