Hacker News Reader

Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

Still hilarious to me seeing Ironclaw Orcs in there, when a 2/2 for 1R had to have a drawback, compared to the absolutely absurd power level of even red 1-drops now. I understand the rationale over the years of re-centering the game on creatures and so pushing their power level, but it does result in a lot of very dull Standard metagames (e.g. right now).

View on HN

I've always had a deck that was famous for being able to drop a Craw Wyrm (4GG) 6/4 in turn 3. Later, the Yavimaya Wyrm (4GG) 6/4 Trample meant I had to replace that iconic card. Much more recently, I bought my son a box with cards, and his deck has an Aggressive Mammoth (3GGG) 6/6 Trample but gives all your other creatures trample too!

Modern creatures are just so much better than anything we had back then. But my red/blue direct damage deck is suddenly unfair with its lightning bolts and cheap counterspells.

Big creatures were overpriced in the beginning. Most of the creatures that cost more than 3 in Legends were underpowered

They were in a slow deck, but my big green deck could get them on the table fast enough to win. I think it was mostly the 3/3 creatures for 4 mana that were a poor deal. But it's not like in the 1990s nobody used creatures, or spell-focused decks always won, but I guess the recent changes do give creatures the more central role they were always meant to have.

Yeah, the big-creature decks I recall that didn't suck from that era were green.

Black had great mana advantage too, but Mind-twist and Hymn were both better ways to spend it.

True. Some cheap old creatures still see a lot of play: birds, elves, the merfolk lords for example.

They mostly see it in tribal or for mana or oddball abilities though. Old magic really over-estimated stats and combat abilities, you’d get heavy downsides on anything even passing the vanilla test (cf mogg jailer or mogg squad), especially out of color. And under-estimated fast mana and card draw.

You want to see broken old stuff? Anything involving mana:

https://scryfall.com/search?q=mana

The thing that frustrates me is that there are so many creatures that you have to remove or they basically end the game in 2-3 turns, alongside a bunch of creatures that provide value even if removed. That means removal is "bad" but you still need a certain amount (~6-8 minimum) or you'll just outright lose a lot of games to a single card. It makes the game feel like paper rock scissors + a coin flip, with maybe one or two decision points (one of which may be your choice to mulligan) being the limit of your player agency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com