Zvi Mowshowitz
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Zvi Mowshowitz's LiveJournal:
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| Saturday, July 4th, 2009 | | 11:05 pm |
Thoughts on the Twitter M10 review concept
I wanted to try something new, since I don't have a good outlet for a normal style review and the usual style would run into the problem of far too many cards that are functional or actual reprints and don't justify much in the way of comment. I feel at this point that I've proven to myself that I CAN do it if I want to (although it would take a long time to do it with any kind of quality), but is it worth doing, with or without a traditional bookend or five? I would like everyone's thoughts. | | Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | | 7:31 pm |
Magic 2010: Take a Third Option
Proposed Rule Changes Alt-5 and 8 (Replacing new rule 5): Rule Alt-5: Combat damage does not use the stack. When combat damage is dealt, players may assign damage however they like and that damage is dealt including trample damage. There is no ordering of blockers. Rule 8A: Instead of creatures with lethal damage being placed directly into the graveyard, whenever the stack is empty an effect is placed on the stack that says "All creatures that have been dealt lethal damage are put into their owners graveyards." Rule 8B: All effects that can save creatures that would be dealt damage, including regeneration, damage prevention and protection, are errata-ed such that they can also remove damage that has already been dealt. Technical Note: Deathtouch would likely go back to being a triggered ability, and you can choose how it deals with damage prevention however you like. Note that this change creates a different intuition for new players. There is now a universal, intuitive rule that all creatures can be saved in a variety of ways after damage has been dealt. My instincts tell me that unlike the stack there is nothing unintuitive about this and it seems easy to explain (e.g. "You get a chance to save your men.") and you can understand it without the stack. New players get a game that's easy to understand while old players get to keep using good old stack tricks. The one issue I can think of so far with this could make cards that damage your own men more powerful by refusing to let the stack empty and thus keeping them alive, which may enable new combinations. It is possible there is a card or two we would have to alter to prevent this if it got out of hand, but there are a number of possible fixes for that. Note also that yes, this is similar to the pre-6E system, but its problems were in large part caused by only allowing certain types of spells and effects during a special 'damage prevention step' rather than simply giving players a chance to do whatever they want. EDIT: A dealbreaker objection now that I've considered it is that now you can't kill anything with damage while a stack is in progress, such as in response to an enchantment or a giant growth. One fix to to say that the trigger is whenever a creature is dealt damage or its toughness is reduced, at which point a trigger is placed on the stack (empty or not) for all creatures that were effected and are now about to die (or each creature triggers seperately, which we want to avoid due to Magic Online). Thus: Alt-8A: Whenever a creature is dealt damage or its toughness is reduced, and this results in it taking lethal damage, put upon the stack an effect that says "If this creature has taken lethal damage then place it in its owners' graveyard. If multiple triggers occur simultaneously, combine them into one trigger." I like that last sentence for other places too! This now creates the problem that when trying to save a creature anything that damages it all will re-kill it. I'm guessing that is the price we pay... Thus: This is why it doesn't work. Alas. You have to get more and more convoluted to avoid doing ugly things and while you're doing that add a lot of extra stacks all the time, making the game more complex. The lesson here is that the stack works the way it does for a reason. It is simple, it is elegant, and it gives us the game we love. Combat damage uses the stack because otherwise double blocking is an ugly mess (see new rule) and because it allows us to do all sorts of cool things. We've decided that we dislike the cool things, because they are 'not intuitive' and that the ugly mess is an acceptable loss towards that end. The attempt to make these things intuitive was a noble idea, but just like the actual new rules it ends up making things more complex and ugly in the name of making them intuitive. I enjoyed thinking about that quite a bit, and I think I learned a lot about the game and the way it works. Kudos to everyone who gave me all the great feedback, which is one reason I love the internet. There is no way to cheat this one. I still can't help but feel like there's a better way to handle double blocking, but so far I haven't been able to think of one. | | Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 | | 8:50 pm |
Restrictions breed creativity, or perhaps the opposite. We shall see.
I'm going to try out Twitter, because I realized that it actually does make sense in a strange kind of way. If you post one line on LJ, it simply feels wrong. It shouldn't, but it does. I'll still keep checking things out around here no matter what happens, cause there are many people worth reading (plus this is how I read xkcd so it's basically a free trip) and when I have something long to post, if it's not MTG-centric I'll probably post it here unless it belongs on Less Wrong which is another site where I'm going to post just as soon as I figure out what it is I should be posting. It'll probably be interesting, at least. Oh, and the user name is the same as this one. | | Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 | | 7:45 pm |
You know that moment...
...when they say exactly like you'd say a trio of points that Livan is "one of the better hitting pitchers in baseball, one of the better fielding pitchers in baseball..." and then Ron just drifts off with a whiff of quiet depression in the air? And you know exactly why? Yeah. I know it too. | | Sunday, April 26th, 2009 | | 7:07 pm |
The fate of Arizona is in their hands!
The Arizona Diamondbacks announcers are so partisan it crosses the line into comical. I've experienced the Atlanta Braves announcers, who fail to acknowledge that any other team contains human beings or has fans. I've listened on the radio to Phillies announcers talk about how to score local green points, after the video failed and was accompanied by the previous night's Mets game audio. I often watch the Yankees announcers, who consider victory such a birthright that they barely can find the words to inform you how many outs there are. But these guys from Arizona are an experience. They played a series of flashbacks of previous home runs in the hopes that one of them would 'rub off' on the current batter. They talk constantly about what needs to happen, as if a Giants victory would mean the terrorists win. The giant, blue state terrorists. It was quite a thing to hear. | | Friday, March 20th, 2009 | | 10:36 am |
Money is Fungible
What is to stop the banks that recieved TARP money from simply no longer paying anyone a "bonus" and instead giving people frequent salary adjustments? Raises and cuts in pay are still legal, as far as I know, and there is no reason for either side not to welcome such a change. Yes, you'd have to spread out the money rather than writing one big check, but even if that proves to be a serious problem we also already have one big bank giving its employees loans. In short, while this will hit the bonuses that were already paid out and guarenteed (in other words, the bonuses that are not a bonus) I see no reason for it to ever hit an actual, fully optional bonus. There is no salary cap in banking. Yet. That doesn't make this any less scary. There's the abstract case that all taxation is theft, and then there's actual theft. Anyone who isn't terrified by the fact that this is happening either isn't paying attention, lacks basic grounding in economics or is blinded by rage, but it does look like a pretty basic loophole. Please don't tell congress. | | Saturday, December 27th, 2008 | | 7:50 am |
Merry Christmas, Everybody (except you over there, with the face)
That guy is creeping me out. I was away on Christmas so sorry that I missed all such merry messages while being off with actual tree actual gifts and actual Christmas dinner for the first time. Having experienced it, I actually think I prefer the Jewish version. The stores stay open, which is to say you don't make such a gigantic production out of it. People don't scramble to spend money they don't have to buy gifts they don't want to buy because they're afraid someone else is doing the same thing. They don't torture you with a month's worth of music - you'd be lucky to get a Chanukah in Santa Monica in my sandels lighting candles by the sea. Similar superiority is achieved in television, movies, books and other media avenues. So I say, instead of a Christmas Miracle I will happily settle for a Chanukah Happening. I need my miracles for when I'm working! | | Thursday, December 11th, 2008 | | 10:33 am |
Magical Thoughts at Worlds Time
I will not be in Memphis this weekend. I considered going, but there were several strong reasons why not. I am going on a lot of non-MtG trips lately, and work needs me at this time of year. While I have the opportunity to draft several times a week, I've only taken that opportunity once and the set felt like it wasn't something I would particularly enjoy. On top of that there were two constructed formats, one of which (Extended) is miserable right now. In my opinion not dealing with Elves at all was a mistake. Yes, there are solutions and decks that beat it, as there always will be for all but the most extreme solutions, but I don't think I'm the only person who thought about having to deal with that deck and deciding to skip it - not that I probably wouldn't have anyway but that made it easy. The other problem was simply that the local team that did such good work for Worlds 2007 and Hollywood (and KL draft preperation) does not exist in that form any longer, and my presence would not have saved it. On a similarly sad note, Neutral Ground is closing its doors at the end of the month. This will leave Manhattan without a place to game. I have nothing against Kings Games and Alex is great but that's an hour away. I remember the days of going out to King's Games, Queens or even New Jersey (I know!) and it was no fun having to do that, although the times were good once I got there. Without a substitute for Neutral Ground, New York's gaming community won't survive aside from the old school group. There is some work being done on possible solutions now that a new place wouldn't have to compete with Neutral Ground, and I hope for their success; certainly there is room for one viable place, and certainly there is not enough room for two. | | Thursday, September 25th, 2008 | | 8:07 am |
| | Sunday, July 13th, 2008 | | 9:47 pm |
| | Friday, June 20th, 2008 | | 9:25 pm |
Ponder: A Restricted Series
I had a longer post I was writing to try and break down the economics involved, but it seems unnecessary now. Instead, a brief summary of the other changes they will be making soon. Having heard the actual explanation for Ponder, which was that it is an attempt to shift the metagame away from combination decks, while banning the best combo and a superior enabler with Flash and Brainstorm, I think it's downright silly. Basic Land in the Boosters: Epic Fail. This is really freaking dumb. Basic land wants to be free, not liberated and inexpensive. The change makes producing boosters costs more, it probably makes drafting worse, making fully 12.5% of the booster useless for limited and constructed. Maybe the 16th card didn't feel like taking a card away, but this one? Good luck with that. These lands will mostly just get thrown away, whereas dedicated gifts of land are cheap to make and would be welcomed. If you want everyone to have land, just sell land tubs at cost plus shipping to whoever wants them, have stores give away as much as anyone could ever want as part of standard operating procedure and no one will ever want for basic land again. However, this isn't all THAT big a deal, since 15 was always an arbitrary number, although my instincts and 7E experience tell me 14 will be worse. Less Cards: Good Idea. Things were getting rediculous and something had to be done. The new level seems about right. Lorwyn was gone in a flash and Ravnica was also gone before its time; there will be plenty of play left especially if we take the lost common and lost cards as an excuse to reduce the chaff as the next phase in power inflation. It will also likely be good for constructed formats, but it's a strange statement that Standard can have 'too many' cards given Extended is doing just fine. Of course, I love block constructed, so there you go. Mythic Rare: Shockingly Good Idea. At first I thought this was a shameless attempt to maximize profits and then I realized that it was a shameless attempt to maximize profits. The big difference is whose profits, and realizing that in this case we are all in the same boat. Preserving the value of booster packs is good for all of us, because it reduces the cost of opening packs which is the main effective cost of playing Magic. This assumes some things about distribution and pricing curves, but it seems reasonably safe. For those playing constructed, the cost of cards goes up but that only matters to the extent that transaction costs go up. If I can get 4 Tarmogyf for $200 and sell them for $190, then the cost is still very low, in fact not much higher than a card I buy for $20 and can only sell for $10, which is closer to the real market than you might think as only expensive cards have liquid markets. That isn't the reason I'm for it, though. I'm for it because it makes Magic Online cards much harder to arbitrage with offline cards, since you need a set of Mythics to move a set of Rares offline, thus making it hard to impact that market too much. This arbitrage was providing substantial downward pressure on prices and on sales, its surplus got eaten by the dealers and it needed to be stopped. Overall, other things I've seen and heard in the past year, particuarly the player Q%A at KL, scare me far more than these changes. What worries me most of all is just that Shadowmoor doesn't work for me at all; I've played 2 limited games, both of which I lost to enchanted Swans, and in constructed it leaves me cold. There's also the power inflation, which is slowly getting quite silly. Finally, some bad news. Due to the fact that the timing sucks, I don't care for Shadowmoor limited and the prizes aren't what they used to be, I'll probably be skipping US Nationals. The next time you see me may or may not be Berlin. | | Monday, June 9th, 2008 | | 3:37 pm |
I'm always just behind it
I'm at what iTunes thinks is 7:17, and Rock Band says is about 78% (which is a lie, it's more like 90%), when I utterly lose track of Foreplay / Long Time. I have no idea why I can get through everything else and suddenly this last thing, this final boss is driving me nuts. On Hard I managed to survive it by simply not quite dying, but on Expert that plan is no longer working. Every time, I make it to that last Eh, and then I can't hit the notes any more. Here we are, level 180 of 180, with the other 44 songs in the bag, and I'm falling about four bars short. I'm this close to Virtuoso, and I have no idea why I can't get this (I'm primarily a vocalist). Anyone have any ideas? | | Friday, June 6th, 2008 | | 1:30 pm |
The Final Ponder
Turian has come in with the 'explanation' of why Ponder was restricted, and I have to say I was hoping for something a little more descriptive. Instead we essentially got nothing, and so I find the restriction even sillier than I did before. However, I am not going to back Kowal up and call for bringing Brainstorm back. Brainstorm has had its years in the sun, and it is time to make room for other things for a while. If we like, we can bring it back later. I will continue to respond to your R/G questions throughout the day, as I can. Oh, and if anyone knows a good guitar teacher in NYC, please let me know. | | Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 | | 7:30 am |
The R/G Q&A Thread
Post your questions here, and I will do what I can. To answer the obvious one, the five players were: Jacob+Chris, Sadin, Jamie Park and yours truly. Paul Jordan's article is missing one of us, and if I did some math I could probably figure out who. | | Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 | | 6:13 pm |
The metrics of good restaurants
As we all know, one good thing to look for is whether everyone who eats somewhere is fat. If they are, then there's probably a reason for that correlation and you might want to get out while you still can and think about what you're doing with what's left of your life. Then again, you might not, since sometimes that means the place is worth it. However, there's an even simpler one I can't help but notice lately: At some places the people simply are not happy. In particular, I often pass a restaurant inside a Bed, Bath & Beyond on my way to other places and I have never, ever seen a single happy person there. I wonder why it's that consistant. I'm sure the food's bad, but surely it's not that bad! | | Monday, June 2nd, 2008 | | 2:42 pm |
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Explain restricting Ponder
I'll start us off with Five Good Reasons: 1. Ponder allows you to find Merchant Scroll, Gush, Flash and even Brainstorm! 2. This will make (assuming I counted correctly) 53 restricted cards, so it makes it possible to draw your opening hand and have nothing but restricted cards left in your deck. Sweet! 3. It's in every deck in the WotC DFPL (Days of Future Past League) because as we all know: When in charge, Ponder. 4. It's so much fun when you disqualify that little kid because the block deck he's playing isn't Vintage legal. 5. You're Pondering right now. It's THAT GOOD. | | Sunday, June 1st, 2008 | | 5:34 pm |
Friends for Sale, Cheap
For a while I've known that people have been "buying me as a pet" on Facebook using Friends for Sale, which seemed like a not very nice thing to inform someone of without them being involved in such a thing. That goes double for the fact that the people doing it were people I didn't even recognize, which of course made the whole exercise no fun at all. What's the point of being owned by some guy? Then Adriana went and bought me, twice. That was a whole different story - suddenly the potential of this product was being realized, especially after she got into a bidding war with Hashim. In addition to any other let's say benefits, both scenarios and the contrast are pretty much comedy gold. After teasing her about it for about an hour, during which I accepted the application to make the situation funnier for all, I retired the matter, but today I decided that I should retaliate. First I tried to buy myself back, beacuse I was sure that I could make double profits on that, but the game won't let you do that, so I had to look elsewhere. Luckily I had a lot of options, as most people are remarkably cheap. But then, you knew that, didn't you? I got the tit-for-tat started by taking away Marco Blume, since she pretty much has to buy him back at least a few times (in fact it's possible I should have massively overbid for him, which I might do next time) and also generally went around buying up anyone who was cheap and hilarious. You wouldn't believe the bargains out there. Mark Rosewater and Aaron Forsythe at the league minimum! The Ferrett for almost the same price! I took a few of Hashim's targets, again as savvy investments. I mean, don't tell me I can't turn a profit on Pikula, but you start short on cash so I didn't get any big ticket items, although I considered splurging on Kibler. I just wish it wasn't so easy to get free cash by logging in every four hours. Cause man, that feels like cheating. But if you're in it, shouldn't you be in it to win it? Hmm... | | Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 | | 5:13 pm |
Free Bed?
I have a mattress and associated things, along with a TV stand and some folding tables, back in my old apartment which I have through the end of the month. If anyone wants such things and can take them away on their own, speak now, otherwise I'm simply not going to care. | | Monday, April 14th, 2008 | | 8:40 am |
Crushing Everyone's Hopes and Dreams
It's fun for the whole family! Alas, in this case the dreams are dreams of a set review. Simply put, there is no market for it. MagicTheGathering.com is a wonderful website, but it was never an option for this series. Star City Games is not interested - I know, it sounds bizarre, but I can't accept what they are offering. It's low enough that I'd rather run it in the open for free, which is what I've tried recently since no one else is in a position to make an offer (For historical reasons I will not deal with you-know-who). In the end, I simply can't invest the kind of time and energy I'd need to do this right, and if I can't do it right I'm not going to do it. So sorry! If you want this to change, mail your global website operator and ask for Zvi Mowshowitz Set Reviews, and maybe I'll be back some day. In other news, if anyone knows trustworthy movers in the NYC area, please do share this information with me. | | Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 | | 7:53 am |
Where to, sir?
So the question has become crystalized to this: Would one pay a thousand dollars (or more!) to move an apartment five blocks? That's what it's all about, folks. At 14th + 1st (up to 23rd + 1st) I can get all my needs met for under 3K. To get the same thing at 14th + 5th (well, not quite 14th and 5th, but something close) would cost at least 4K, or I could get less but still probably enough for 3700 or so a few blocks to the northwest of that. So I have to figure out, does that make any sense? I don't want to feel like I'm hiding off in a corner to save a little cash I can afford, but I also don't want to feel like I'm bleeding off giant amounts of cash for no reason. |
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