No I dont get annoyed by folks talking about it, I'm annoyed it happened but I still really love, perhaps the IDEA of Magic, or what it potentially could still be. Other formats, cube, EDH, all that stuff is still great.
MTG could absolutely be saved by the community if there was a will to do so. The game itself is still great, Wizards in their greed just damaged the historical fabric of the game.
The part that I cannot get over, is that they knew what they were doing. I know in the deepest, darkest corner of my soul, that Maro and Forsythe knew exactly what FIRE was going to do to the game, and they did it anyway to hit a bottom line that Cocks set for them and its embarrassingly upsetting to me still to this day, and I've been out of the community/game for 5 years or something.
Thank you for letting me know Scribe.
FIRE design is certainly not healthy when they are creating artificial set rotations via power creep instead of actually rotating out sets. There is a reason that mtg survived for so long, they had a very good formula for set releases, with the power level of cards rising, then falling again in the next rotation to keep things balanced.
This also matched with mtg sales over the release of older sets (when you have a more powerful block of sets like Urza's block, you got more sales, while sets like Fallen Empires, Homelands, & the Kamigawa block all suffered in terms of sales in comparison to higher powered sets, to the best of my knowledge). They decided to change this formula in recent years, the previous one was designed so sets had an ebb & flow to game design balance so that they would never cross over the line in terms of imbalance (then cards would get banned when they were a mistake).
The current issue (for C-Suite) is that every set needs to sell more than the last one, so they threw out the old model for a profit model. Even the rules have fallen behind when you look at what is & isn't getting banned (but anyway that's for another conversation I guess).
One other thing is that before EDH became the go-to format for the game, is that it was a more interesting format where you had to look over old cards to find new uses for them in a new format. Instead today they are designing cards exclusively for EDH/ Commander and IMHO it is damaging the format because the spike in power creep is not just powerful cards, but more of them, particularly recurring cards that do effectively the same thing to add redundancy to your deck, which defeats the entire purpose of a singleton format like EDH. A good example are legendary creatures, they used to be unique creatures with unique abilities, now many are designed as one-card value engines that only need one other card to combo off.
Just to note for the public: that criticism of a game can come from a place of good intentions, like the hope that a game will improve over time. Not every criticism is a condemnation, as even Richard Garfield has has his own well worded "constructive" criticism's of the current health of the game.
