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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t play Standard, or constructed, so this could be a dumb idea, but how would players feel about shifting what “Standard” means?

    Right now, you immediately have access 10 sets worth of cards. The obvious argument to having that many sets is to present lots of different options to keep the format feeling fresh and changing. But of course, the new problem is that it doesn’t feel fresh anyway, so the value of having all those cards available is diminished.

    What if instead, after launch week, you slowly introduced the 9 other sets (or more) of the format on a weekly basis? As in, for launch week only the launch set (let’s call it Set A) is available to play, then week 2 adds the next most recent set, so A + B. Week 3 is ABC, and so on. So, every week you get a sort of developing meta that’s subtly different from any other period of play. Older sets are more naturally phased out, newer sets have renewed emphasis, the format has a chance to build and evolve over time, weaker niche cards could have their chance to shine. I don’t know.




  • or played the game

    I would argue it’s actually a detriment to experience anything other than the source material when adapting a work. Especially with books, different people are going to have wildly different interpretations of the world. The character that exists in your mind is going to be different from somebody else who read the same book. But once it is adapted to a visual medium, you lose a bit of that magic. Which sucks, because all of those previous interpretations are still valid! More valid even, than anything that was put to screen, because they were yours.

    I think the argument for accuracy is kind of bullshit anyway (not that you said this, but others have). Is The Shining (the film) worse for the changes it made to the original text? Stephen King might think so; he would also be wrong. You don’t want something accurate, you want something that’s good. You want somebody with passion and artistic vision to create something new and uniquely amazing. The recent Last Of Us show, to my knowledge, tread pretty closely to the source material. “Aha!” you might say. But what is also true, is that the best episode of that first season was also the probably the biggest deviation from the source material. I probably don’t even need to say which one if you’ve seen the show.

    Anyway, companies should hire people who are both passionate about the source material, and want to make something cool and new in that world - not robots who are just going to recreate the original work beat for beat. If I wanted that, why wouldn’t I myself just, you know, read the book?










  • I’m sympathetic to the view that artists should be paid for their work. Collectively, artists have produced so much, and these tech companies are funnelling all their work into a machine and recycling it into new works, and profiting off that, without any compensation for the people partially responsible for this new reality. I’m also not interested in people who argue “but actually it’s not copying that’s not how the technology works it’s actually a really complic-” yeah I don’t care. Without the artists you would have nothing.

    BUT

    Don’t confuse the business practices that make this technology a reality with the technology itself. These tools are incredible, and will result in things that could have never existed previously. I just believe we need to have serious conversations about what they mean for our future.