Mage Cast 12

[SharkBait]

The Arcane Duels team is back and talking about the ADMW winter special group stage!

Listen to it HERE

[silverclawgrizzly]

Nice episode boys. One clarification about the Gen Con War mentioned at the end:

Don't come watch if you want some smack talk. I'm a keeping talking as much smack as I can leading up to it, I'll probably even talk smack at Gen Con itself, but come August 18th we're done talking just taking names.  As a matter of fact I hope both you boys make Top 4, be even sweeter when we crush ya.

Also Zot, Sailor Vulcan, Romeo are all on my list. Gents I haven't forgotten ye either  Also yes Biblofilter you're getting a fight as well. I'm very aware our story is a long way from over.

See you at Gen Con.

[RomeoXero]

 Come and get it griz, ill be a waitin for ya!

[Sailor Vulcan]

Would like to remind everyone to not CCGpomorphize Mage Wars. There was a comment made in this episode that said that the wolverine must not be OP because you can still counter it. The thing about Mage Wars is that it is pretty much impossible for any card to be truly overpowered in the conventional sense because of the spell point system. In Mage Wars any card that would be expected to unbalance gameplay for individual games unbalances deck design throughout the meta instead. The problem with OP cards in Mage Wars isn't that they can't be beaten during a game. It's that you have to spend a lot more spell points in order to deal with them and then you don't have enough to do what you need to do in other matchups. This is what happened with the wizard before his errata.

Just in case anyone missed it, my earlier post basically sums it up.

People hated the wizard because he was so powerful that he overcentralized the metagame. Everyone had to use a ton of spellbook points to deal with him leaving less leftover for everything else they needed to do.

The wizard didn't even play like a wizard back then, the optimal thing to do with him was to totally ignore his natural trickstery style and just overwhelm the enemy with sheer force. The wizard had more answers that could fit in his book than anyone else did, and he could generate mana and actions faster than everyone else and lock you down before you could do anything unless you devoted a ton of spell points to that one particular matchup. And no one ever played the wizard with air training. They always picked water fire or earth because those were more powerful.

On top of all these advantages, the wizard also had his tower which had spellbind at the time and he could still change the bound spell for free. This was effectively the same as raising his available spell points even more. He didn't need to include as many copies of his attack spells to make use of his tower, and he could include a lot more attack spells and he would never run out. He could easily have used 3-4 towers but he never needed to. 2 towers was always more than enough.

After the erratas the wizard is finally FINALLY fun to play and to play against. Most people probably don't hate him anymore. He's become one of my favorite mages ever since the errata. He's not the same as before. You should totally give the wizard another chance.

Also would like to emphasize in case it wasn't already clear, Mage Wars cards are basically never overpowered in the conventional sense in their intended formats because of the spell point system. If a card is really powerful, it often will require opponents to devote more spell points in order to deal with it.

Make no mistake, the wizard had been more powerful than all the other mages, and this did cause the game to be unbalanced. But the kind of brokenness that in other games would have resulted in an imbalance of gameplay ended up as an imbalance of deck design instead. Whenever you built a new deck one of the most important questions you had to ask was how would it deal with the wizard?

Also basically nobody used air wizard at all until after the errata.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[zot]

Nice episode boys. One clarification about the Gen Con War mentioned at the end:

Don't come watch if you want some smack talk. I'm a keeping talking as much smack as I can leading up to it, I'll probably even talk smack at Gen Con itself, but come August 18th we're done talking just taking names.  As a matter of fact I hope both you boys make Top 4, be even sweeter when we crush ya.

Also Zot, Sailor Vulcan, Romeo are all on my list. Gents I haven't forgotten ye either  Also yes Biblofilter you're getting a fight as well. I'm very aware our story is a long way from over.

See you at Gen Con.

a lot of tough talk from some snivelling zoo keeper. i love animals too. they are delicious.