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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7725037" data-attributes="member: 4937">A bit more of an explanation, attempting to show that 'unbalancing' is an essential aspect of "power creep" not simply the act of having a more powerful replacement.Since magic seems to be coming up a lot, and I've been playing it since the beginning of the game, I'll use magic as an example even though balance in magic is an extraordinarily complex topic.  To keep matters as simple as possible, I'm going to focus on the games early phases which tended to be best described as 'power decay' rather than power creep.At the beginning of the game, no one really know the 'right' cost for anything because no one really knew (and Garfield to a certain extent did not care) whether any card was fairly priced for the effect.  Garfield made assumptions based on players having small ever changing collections of cards and the idea that the game would self-balance under those conditions.  As a result, at the beginning of MtG, everything useful was under-costed compared to a creature.  The vast majority of competitive decks were creatureless and depended on victory on resource control, various combos to control resources, and cheap direct damage - most notably the infamous black vice.   Those few decks that did have creatures tended to only rely on a handful of creatures to finish off the opponent once they'd gained full control over the game - Serra Angel was a favored choice.  Without a defined metagame, it was "easy" to build decks that produced 1st turn kills 99.999% of the time.  WotC responded by introducing rules for a metagame describing how decks had to be built to be legal, and by printing much less powerful cards.  Gradually, as weaker and weaker sets were introduced that did not allow the resource control and easy kill mechanisms of the earlier era, people were forced to turn to creatures.  But interestingly, no big creatures were part of this meta.  Instead, we saw a era so dominated by 'weenie decks' that even a card like 'orcish catapult' which had previously been considered unplayable was famously used to help win in this meta.Why did that happen?   Well, it happened because up to that point no one had really considered how efficient a creature had to be to be worth using.  What we discovered was essentially that the line existed pretty close to mana cost = power.   If the power of the creature was less than the mana cost, it wasn't efficient enough to play because there would always be something faster - direct damage, weenie decks, combos of various sorts.   What this means is that I could print something very like a vanilla 3/3 at a casting cost of 3 and it would enter the meta, perhaps change the meta, but would not dominate the meta by being broken.Now you might object that this creature was "power creep", because in one fell swoop I've just obsoleted all the grey ogres, hurloon minotaurs, hill giants, pearl unicorns and all of their various clones that had been in the game since the beginning.  But there are two big problems with that line of thought.First, while it is true that those cards existed, they were never a part of the game at all.  No one at any point had played gray ogres, hurloon minotaurs, or hill giants in any sort of competitive deck.  They showed up mainly unused in people's card boxes, and they persisted - indeed persisted for a good long while after the point that we knew that they were useless - mostly out of tradition and not for any valid reason.  Indeed, their existence mostly acted as an unnecessary design constraint that prevent otherwise useful and balanced cards from being created.  It would not have been power creep to print such cards, because the new cards should be judged not according to whether they were better than unplayed cards that couldn't even serve cherrypickers (or johnnies in MtG speak), but whether they would be invalidate existing strategies and approaches to play or instead just become a new approach that utilized hitherto unexplored space in "medium sized" creatures.But the second and more obvious reason that such a card is not power creep despite being strictly superior to hurloon minotaur or hill giant, is that cards like Sedge Troll and Granite Gargoyle have existed since the very beginning of the game - and they were both already better than gray ogres or pearl unicorns and yet despite that were never ever able to enter competitive play.   Sure, infamously, some mediocre players looked at how much better Sedge Troll was than Gray Ogre and assumed on the basis of that comparison that Sedge Troll must be some killer gamebreaking unbalanced card and tried to play it competitively, but they were infamously unsuccessful despite loudly trumpeting their insight that Sedge Troll was undercosted compared to a Gray Ogre.   Printing something as good as a Sedge Troll was not in and of itself "power creep".  Indeed, quite arguably you could print things that looked on paper better than a Sedge Troll and it still wouldn't be power creep because Sedge Troll was never really playable anyway.Rather hilariously, rather than realizing this, the 4th edition Magic Designers actually had decided that creatures - even though they didn't actually see play - were undercosted and very temporarily had banned staples like Serra Angel and anything actually borderline playable on that grounds.  This only further contributed to a full year of the game entirely dominated by creatures with a casting cost of 2 or less.None of which is to say that at some point later on, there wasn't significant power creep in creatures.  Yes, obviously, at some point the reins were fully relaxed and then they truly did start printing creatures that were significantly more powerful than anything that had been seen before and would dominate the meta.  Indeed, for an old timer like myself, it's obvious that the design team is committed to having a game dominated by creatures and interactions between creatures.   But that is also as much the result of power rot in other areas of the game as it is power creep in creatures.</blockquote>

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