Anyone know if M'sian stores are hosting Spectral Safari event?

I don’t understand how people can keep saying this change will improve the diversity of the meta. It defies logic. How can anything be diversified with 2/3 of its sample population being removed?

The only thing this announcement does is force people to play decks they did not previously, or sub-par variations of what they used to play because the previous favourites aren’t viable anymore.

Diversifying the meta means to increase the variations of deck archtypes and strategies. Not reduce it by taking away the presently dominant ones and giving under performing decks a chance to be a star (not by virtue of their construction but by virtue of there being no competition).

The argument that the environment was stale also does not hold water. The dominant deck types in the latest NACC and EUCC are similar, but not largely, there was still a good mix of decks (bunnies not included). To argue that the rise of Spider Solitaire is proof of dominance is not accurate. NACC and EUCC were both using the same blocks. We didn’t get a chance to see how Twilight would influence the Core and whether there would be any new decks that would be dominant after Twilight. If anything, Spider Solitaire instead makes for a great argument of how diverse the meta was and how much potential that block had. Almost every key card in Spider Solitaire was in print before WB block came out, yet it took almost two blocks later for it to emerge.

Of course, the devil's advocate would point out that Spider Solitaire ignores the entire WB block save for a few cards. One could also say that that is a design flaw in WB block that it had nothing much defining to offer in the first place.

Sure, there are staples in every deck that come from Scourgewar. But who’s to say that won’t still be the case when SW rotates out? There will always be staples. To blame stagnation on the staples is a cop-out for bad set design and poor playtesting.

So is this change good? That depends. I think it’s good to give sub-par decks that could not compete with the current meta to shine. It’s also good to force people to think outside of the box and redesign the entire environment.

But it’s not good from the way it was managed, handled and implemented. That is my main complaint. In catering to the desire for “something new”, it has grossly and adversely affected the value of the cards as well as the confidence and good will players have in the ability of the company to manage its product.

We all knew Scourgewar would not be core legal one day, it just happened much much sooner than expected or intended. Would it make a difference if they had announced this 6 months earlier? Of course! I for one would have changed my spending pattern. And don't give me that crap about "you can still play classic". The whole reason core format is around is because new people like myself do NOT want to play classic due to the inaccessibility of cards.

This post has been edited by CKJMark: Aug 3 2011, 02:10 PM

I agree with you on all points. Being ex-MTG and L5R player, I've been through a lot of reboots. But the way this was done is really bad. They already planned a reboot and it was scheduled. I'm sure when they did the initial planning they would have taken all this into account like the non-US launches. Suddenly push it up by a year?? 6 months also I can excuse them, even if its up till Worlds. I cannot imagine all those ppl who bought stuff for Worlds and now have to reboot from scratch. Pain sia.

If they wanted profit, they could make certain power cards like mounts and talents redeemable foils with BOJ or Archeology tokens, driving sales of WB/WOTE/TOTD and still helping newbies have access to the older staples.

If they want to cater to the Japan/China market, there is nothing stopping them from launching a catch-up Base set in Japan to earn even more money. It's not hard to do. Or have a "Japanese Core".

Before I started buying I made sure i did my homework to buy only things with a decent lifespan, which is why I didn't splurge on Weldons, Adams, Hesriana, etc. Manatau... Crypto turnaround and slap gao my and laugh "kakaka suckerrrrrr"

Regardless of their intentions, this incident shows very clearly that Crypto is not a very well run company, nor is it one with much integrity.