Can you please stop importing cards from paper that give +1/+1 to all your creatures? The realities of this game make this effect completely irrelevant.
First, in paper MtG, planeswalkers start with 20 life. Here, they start with 100-130. That’s a 400% increase in life total, meaning any buff effect from paper should be similarly scaled or risk being irrelevant.
Second, in paper MtG, you are not restricted to 3 creatures. The buff is obviously meant to scale on decks that have a lot of creatures. In MTGPQ the most you can ever get is +3/+3.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that in paper MtG, token creatures are all individual creatures that individually receive the benefit. Here, they are a single stack and receive it only once. Giving +1/+1 to 5 soldier tokens in paper MtG increased their damage output by 100%. In MTGPQ, it increases it by 20%. This, combined with the life total, means that a “all your creatures get +1/+1” effect is FIVE PERCENT as powerful. That is pitiful.
Consider Ethereal Absolution. This is a “mythic” (more like meh-thic) card that you might, like I did, suffer the misfortune of spending 400 purples on. This card is horri-awful. I wouldn’t play this card if it was FREE. (Seriously, with only 10 cards in the deck, it would never merit inclusion.)
So. Please. STOP importing +1/+1 effects from paper MtG straight across, especially for mythics and masterpieces. You have mechanics to deal with this “your creatures get +1/+1 for each reinforcement” and you have the option to just bump it up to +3 or +4.
Also had the misfortune of spending 400 pinks on Ethereal Absolution. The most play it’ll ever get is when I master it.
I agree wholeheartedly with this: however, I would like to add a caveat or two.
PWs at level 60 do indeed have 100+ life. But PWs at level 1 can have as little as 20.
Now this does not mean I disagree with OP.
Let’s remember that levelling a PW up from level 1 to level, say, 30, where they have maybe 60-80 hp or so, is very very cheap.
So, we have to ask ourselves, under what circumstances are players playing with ultra low-level PWs? I reckon there are two:
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The player has been playing the game for a matter of hours. Maybe days? Some cards, surely, must be designed for players who haven’t been playing the game very long. I would posit, however, that there are far too many cards for new players in existence. Sure, we all need to start out playing Orchard Spirits, Leaf Gilders, Shambling Ghouls, and Knight of the Pilgrim’s Roads, but we grow out of that phase well before a week is up. And yet with every new set that comes out, we see endless commons, uncommons, and even rares and mythics which are only relevant to PWs with very low life totals. If Origins has plenty of cards for new players as it is, does each expansion HAVE to have so many new ones?
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The player has been playing for months or years, but is playing a low level PW as an exploit/to get through games extra quick. Now, personally, I’d argue that it’s always an exploit to play a low level PW if you’re an experienced player in Platinum Tier. Honestly, tho, it doesn’t really matter if it’s an exploit or not: Platinum Tier players have already got plenty of cards already which break the curve: Capn Lannery Storm, Metalwork Colossus, Gisela, Gisa and Geralf, Decree of Justice, etc. These cards aren’t going anywhere, so printing cards which are less powerful isn’t going to stop people playing them (The Standard/Legacy split was introduced in paper to allow a drop in power levels to occur, but in MTGPQ that’s clearly not happening).
In conclusion: the fact that level 1 PWs have so little health is absolutely no reason to keep printing cards with “+1/+1” written on them. Or, god forbid, “+1/+1 until end of turn”. Or, kill me now, “Activate 1: +1/+1 until end of turn”.
Totally agree on the point, but would like to exclude the +1/+1 buffs on ETB who do in fact buff every reinforcement - making some uncommons and rares way more powerful than the mythic used as example.
I think that Path of Discovery shows us that the little counters aren’t a complete waste of time. I also like Simic Ascendancy even if it doesn’t seem madly competitive.
Nobody’s saying that it’s impossible to make a card that’s too powerful with “+1/+1” written on it. Here’s one: “Target creature gains +1/+1 and you win the game”.
But Oktagon don’t seem to have learnt how to scale cards correctly from paper MTG into MTGPQ, and a few hard and fast rules ought to help that them get up to speed, at least until they are competent enough to start breaking them.
They can fix red damage while they’re at it.
Count Judith among those needing a bump. +1/+1 to all my creatures on the board and 2 damage as a 4/4? Yeck!
At a bare minimum, every “all your creatures get +1/+1” should be adjusted to “all your creatures get +1/+1 and an additional +1/+1 for each of their reinforcements”. Which doesn’t seem like it should be that hard a change to make, coding-wise.