Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

    Magic is a constantly changing beast. New cards are constantly being made, sets rotate in and out of standard, and new strategies are being though up. However, the time I was away from Magic brought some major changes; Some of them I like, and others not so much.

     Let's talk about the big one first. Planeswalkers. I do not like them. Several of them are much too powerful in my opinion, but it's not the power that makes me dislike them. It's the fact that they don't really fit into the game. The card frame looks different than any other cards and really makes planeswalkers feel like they were shoe horned in. The rules about what can target them, and the fact they are a new type of permanent after over a decade can make for some clumsy interaction. And having planeswalkers as a castable cards spits in the face of all the previous lore. They were god like being traveling through the different planes of the multiverse, not some one to do the bidding of whoever summoned them. Yes, I know in time spiral, planeswalkers were powered down, but they still should never have been made a card.





     Another big change was the removal of mana burn. For newer players out there mana burn was an old rule that whenever you ended a phase you would take a point of damage for every point of mana in your mana pool. It made cards like Mana Flare interesting as it could accelerate your mana and also harm your opponent if he couldn't spend his extra mana. It also screwed you over a lot. I do miss the rule a little bit out of nostalgia, but it is probably for the best that it is gone.

     One of my favorite changes to the rules was the removal of putting damage on the stack. Sure there were a lot of fun things you could do with putting damage on the stack, but a lot of those fun things were broken. It bogged down the game tremendously, and confused newer players. Removing it cleans up the game so much.

     Wizards also added a new rarity, mythic rare, to the game. I hate this. it is just a ploy to make you buy more packs of cards to get the good cards. There are still a few decent rares, but so many competitive cards are now mythic, and it drives the price of putting together a standard deck up so much.

     The last thing I want to talk about is the increase in speed. The game is so much faster than it used to be, especially creatures. You get bigger creatures, with better ability for less mana. I will admit that playing these cards is a bit of fun, but it has hurt the meta game imo. Today almost every deck is an agro deck. The few that aren't are control designed to stop agro. Combo is dead, and there is no more creativity in deck building.

    I know I seem pessimistic about the changes made to Magic, but it is still the best TCG out there and hella fun to play. I look forward to seeing what changes the future will bring to the game.