Cecilily discusses the financialisation of Pokemon cards as an investment vehicle.
It’s one thing that makes me pause in teaching my niece how to play, I don’t want her to get caught up in the abstraction of the cards as anything other than pieces of cardboard with funny pictures of animals
Commander turned to shit shortly after they started making precons for commander. The first few decks were decent value for money and then they turned on the moneymaker. It sucks so much. It used to be a fun little thing where you found a legendary and decided to have some fun with it, see what you could squeeze out and now it’s just slop and every single legendary is made with commander in mind and it has a bahillion effects and ugh.
Take me back to the days of kitchen-table “canadian highlander” with Krenko and Talrand
For real. Back when you would read one line of text on a card and it would turn into the entire floor covered in cards because you had an idea for a deck.
Back when "you got that deck off the internet! " was an accusation, not an assumption
Original Innistraad block
And now it’s all just content. Feel like shit, just want him back - “Him” is the collective reaction to Garruk’s Companion - A 3/2 for 2???
It’s just a better bear has power creep gone too far
And these days everyone and their mum gets crazy bears. But it’s okay because the good bears are rare, so they’ll be incredibly expensive, which is what matters.
edit: Last good block was Khans of Tarkir. I had a big box full of cards and decks running from return to ravnica up to two sets past khans and I’ve lost it in the move and it sucks so much. I had this kickass Rakdos Deck I would bust out whenever I was teaching someone how to play, gave them my bulk (plus a few good rares, so they would have some inspiration) and at some point they would be feeling their oats, thinking they were big adults now. That’s when I would break it out. It always worked. It made them want to beat the shit out of my deck, and next kitchentable session they’d bust in with some weird construction they’d tinkered with to fuck with me. Maybe even bought a few singles to get it going. Usually it would take them a few tries of deckbuilding, and it was so wonderful when they finally beat me.
wotc ruins formats by designing cards for them. they should go back to focusing on what used to be a normal standard powerlevel, and let everything else be an accident handled by the community/an organized play body that isn’t beholden to the beancounters.
It’s not even that they ruin them out of maliciousness or anything - now it’s greed, but it used to just be a sort of accident.
The whole concept of formats like EDH or pauper was basically a jailbreak or a refitting. “Hey what if we used this machine for something it wasn’t supposed? It will be janky, but it could be fun!” It’s like when people refit TTRPGs or mod video games to be in other settings. As soon as it is embraced by the machine it changes the purpose.