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Wizards of the Coast, in all their finite wisdom, has decided that Magic, a game which has never seen the kind of success that it has at this moment, needs to be changed on a fundamental level. And here we are, stuck figuring out what that means to us.
I'm not happy. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I'm upset. And yet, as each moment passes, I realize that I'm not really as mad as I was the moment before. I may even be coming to terms with it. See, I played way back when, back when things were much different. Back when Mishra's Factory was a much worse card, when Lotus Vale was pretty simple to understand, and when Mogg Fanatic, while good, was far from Mogg Fantastic. For those people who remember playing the game under pre-sixth edition rules, these changes - or at least the one getting the internet all abuzzled (the combat changes) - should seem like a return to form, more than a change for the worse. In reality, we should consider the past ten years as an interesting variant on the game that we had been playing for years prior. Of course, the fact that we've now been working under this rules paradigm for longer than the period between the game's origin and Sixth Edition is not a trivial one, but we must remember that we've seen changes this fundamental before, and while some players were lost, overall the game continued to push on.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not happy to see many of the best creatures in the game be relegated to the injured reserve. Morphling - once hailed as the best creature ever printed - is now pretty much garbage in combat. Ravenous Baloth is significantly worse. And hardest for me to swallow, my new love Qasali Pridemage is no longer a rootin-tootin Disenchant with a punch. Now he's pretty much just a three mana Disenchant - still ok, but not the powerhouse he was yesterday.
And yet, if you step outside the focus of a player who knows the rules intricately, and take an objective view of the way combat should work, there is no reason why a creature should be able to exchange blows with another, and then, in the final grips of death, go out in a blaze of glory and take himself out for a beneficial gain. Realistically, should you be given a mortal blow, you're dead. If you want to make a valiant play on the way out, you shouldn't get to punch your opponent's Tarmagoyf along the way. This all makes sense to me. I think in time, with some distance from the issue, it will to many other players, as well.
I don't really have much else to say on the matter. It's annoying to me that yet again, people are calling mutiny against the vile dastardly villains at WotC, but at this point, I'd be more surprised if no one picked up that flag. So I say, let's let the chips fall where they may, and get used to this change for a while before we really judge it without experiencing play with it. Maybe we'll see it as a positive change somewhere down the line, just like we all do about the Sixth Edition changes today.
