RonVitale

Onslaught’s New Ability: Morph

Published on the now defunct Grimmoire.com, September 7, 2002

Onslaught’s New Ability: Morph

by Ron Vitale

I’m an old school player and am proud of that. I’ve ranted and raved about the lack of new ideas coming into the new Magic sets because I want to see the game grow beyond its current, static playing field. I have not been impressed with Odyssey and even less impressed with Torment and Judgment. I enjoyed Invasion’s split cards and will be sad to see them go. I still wish that Wizards would branch out of their limited designs and add new colors to the game. I think trying something new might bring back old players. Almost all of the people I know who used to play Magic have left the game, bored with it, and moved on to bigger and better things.

Why do I remain? I’ve met and played cards with Richard Garfield (creator of Magic) and believe his vision of the game to be imaginative and fun. We’ve seen a lot of subpar cards over the last few years, but I am encouraged by the new morph ability found in Onslaught. First, let’s take apart what the ability does. Here’s the official wording for the Blistering Firecat that has the morph ability:

“Morph RR (You may play this face down as a 2/2 creature for 3. Turn it face up any time for its morph cost.)”

What do I think of the new ability? I like it a lot. The idea is borrowed from the Illusionary Mask that came out in the basic set many moons ago, but I always enjoyed the idea then, and I like it even more now. Given the fact that you can use the morph ability to put out a surprise army and then morph your creatures without a player being able to respond with a card like Shock is a powerful ability.

For me, I prefer to play Blue in Magic because of the bluff factor. I enjoy bluffing or holding onto Counterspells because my opponent needs to gamble: Can she play a spell and I won’t counter it? It’s a difficult choice to make. With the morph ability, a player will be able to put out a creature and use the bluff factor to intimidate an opponent. Having three morph creatures out, can cause some frustration for your opponent.

There are some interesting interactions of older cards with the morph ability. According to Wizards' site, if your opponent plays a Faceless Butcher and use its ability to remove your morph creature from play, the morph creature will leave play face up and then return (if the Butcher leaves play) face up. This potentially weakens cards such a Faceless Butcher. If all you have in play are face down morph creatures that are 2/2, your opponent might think twice before playing the Faceless Butcher. She might play it but then wind up bringing your 6/6 creature into the mix. And better yet, you didn’t have to pay the morph cost!

Wellwisher: Elves Are Back in a Big Way!

Published on the now defunct Grimmoire.com, September 21, 2002

Wellwisher: Elves Are Back in a Big Way!

by Ron Vitale

I attended the Onslaught prerelease and had a great time. Unlike the Judgment prerelease which was in an extremely small room with smelly teenagers, the Onslaught prerelease location had plenty of room and good competition. Being unable to make the first day, I attended the Sunday event and talked with several of the Players there. Many had attended the day before and owned a good many cards. I felt a bit intimated, knowing that I hadn't memorized the entire Onslaught list, but happy in knowing that I was familiar with some of the cards people were talking about. Of course, I heard the usual names of bombs being dropped as Players talked about how great Exalted Angel was and other such cards, but I overhead a bit of conversation that caught my attention. In between rounds, I heard someone mention: "And he had 200 life with Wellwishers out and Clones."

I thought about this phrase that I had heard and couldn't believe that in a limited environment someone would be able to get to 200 life in a match. Then in the second round of the tournament, I played my red, green, and a splash of blue deck, obtaining 30 life. I had only one Wellwisher in the deck! I couldn't imagine what would have happened if I did have a Clone or four Wellwishers.

For those of you who haven't seen too much of Onslaught yet, elves are back and in a big way. Let's take a look at the Wellwisher common and I'd like to make an argument for its upcoming importance in the Standard environment that will go into effect in November.

Here's a breakdown of the card:

Wellwisher
1G
Creature-Elf
Tap: You gain 1 life for each Elf in play.

Feeling Blue: Is Blue Countermagic Still Viable in Standard?

Published on the now defunct Grimmoire.com, October 6, 2002

Feeling Blue: Is Blue Countermagic Still Viable in Standard?

by Ron Vitale

If I had to pick my favorite color in Magic, it would be, hands-down, Blue. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing my opponent’s disappointment as I tap two islands and cast a Counterspell that stops her from playing a game winning spell. Yet with Onslaught cards about to rotate into Standard, I can’t help but wonder: How will my favorite color fare? To be perfectly honest, I’m a bit concerned about the lack of good countermagic in the new Standard environment. In reviewing Seventh Edition and Odyssey block cards, Counterspell, Force Spike, Memory Lapse, Remove Soul, Circular Logic, Envelope, Syncopate, Rites of Refusal, Liquify, Grip of Amnesia, Laquatus’ Disdain, and Fervent Denial are the only cards Players have to choose from, and many of these have limited uses or are extremely expensive to cast. Wizards’ R&D appear to be pushing Players away from strong countermagic.

Long gone are the days of Force of Will and Dissipate. And starting November 1st, Undermine and Absorb will rotate out of the Standard environment. Important countermagic is leaving and what’s replacing it? I’m not impressed with Onslaught’s new crop of counterspells: Complicate, Discombobulate, Ixidor’s Will, and Psychic Trance. Out of the four of them, Complicate and Discombobulate will be the most effective. Certainly, Discombobulate can be an excellent spell (being able to look at and rearrange the top four cards in your library can be extremely useful), but its cost of 2 colorless and 2 Blue make it rather expensive. Even Complicate’s ability has only limited uses. Used best in the early game when an opponent lacks mana resources, Complicate’s cycling ability could help add card advantage for a Blue mage. But the choices involved in such a decision, can be more difficult than they appear. If given a choice of holding onto a Complicate and using it later to stop a bigger threat or using it as a pumped up Force Spike that allows you to draw a card, a Blue mage will need to weigh his choices wisely. Card advantage will help a Blue mage in the long run but not if she used a counter too early and now can’t stop a turn three Grinning Demon.

When I play Blue, the rule of thumb is, if I can’t bounce a threat, then I hold onto that counter. Any good Player is going to bait you with spells to test how many counters you have in your deck. And starting November 1st, the number of extremely effective counters could be few and far between.

Moving on to Ixidor’s Will, a tribal theme begins to emerge. If a Blue mage chooses to play a Wizard deck, then Ixidor’s Will might be extremely ffective. The problem is that your choices are going to be limited. You’re either going to be playing a Wizard deck or not. Those Blue mages who choose not to play with Wizards will have no use for this card. Although I suspect that better Wizard creatures will be available in the next two Onslaught block sets, that day is still far off. Blue mages need options now. November 1st will soon be upon us and what is a Blue mage to do?

Psychic Trance, the final Onslaught counterspell, offers little hope. Again, the Trance’s ability is wonderful, if you’re playing with Wizards. Will we see some Wizard decks? Yes, but the more important question is: Will we see tournament winning Wizard decks? That’s a question that only time will tell.

Granted, we can make some easy assumptions. The Opposition deck (U/G) will mutate and take a different form in the new Standard environment. But as long as Call of the Herd and Opposition remain in the block, I see no reason for players to ditch this formidable deck archetype. Along similar lines, the Psychatog deck is here to stay. That wacky looking Atog isn’t going anywhere. He’s helped too many people win tournaments. Similarly, Black control will modify itself and take the best black cards from Onslaught and strengthen itself.But let’s talk about an all Blue deck? Is that a viable option? I’m not 100% certain that it is. I am concerned that the counterspells available for the November 1st Standard environment are too weak. Potential for a Wizard deck exists, but I’ve not tried to test this theory out yet. Can a Wizard deck be built that will beat the other top archetypes in the new Standard environment? I do not know. Black’s control of the board is amazing. I can see several Players sneaking in one or two Grinning Demons to a Black control deck to add faster beatdown to help win the game faster. I don’t know if Blue’s countermagic will be able to hold off the Black control threat. And with Psychatog and Opposition decks, it’ll come down to who has the mana and counterspell available. An intelligent Blue mage playing against Psychatog will have plenty of opportunities to counter the Upheaval or Psychatog. Again, it comes down to luck: will the Blue mage have the counter in her hand? Chances are that there will be some difficult choices to be made for a Blue mage with the limited number of good counterspells.

And what about rogue decks? A revamped Sligh will most likely be back as well as tribal decks--I still believe that Elves are coming back with a vengeance. Pack in several elves (Wellwishers and Heedless Ones) and a Green mage can have a simple stompy deck. From a historical erspective, Blue decks tend to have a difficult time in countering all the threats that a Green mage can drop on the table. The threats that I can’t predict are what worry me. The old Blue Skies deck of the past can’t be recreated in this environment. There are no spells that can counter by pitching a blue card or throwing islands back into your hand so I doubt that an all Blue deck will be powerful enough to win a tournament.

My honest prediction is that Blue will be best used as a splash color. Either Blue/Black, Blue/Green, or Blue/White appear to make the best color combinations. I’m not certain that the Standard counterspells can hold their own in a match against a power Standard deck. Maybe someone can convince me otherwise, but until that time, I’m going to continue pairing Blue with another color rather than building a solid color Blue deck. Anyone who thinks they have built a winning New Standard mono Blue deck should feel free to contact me.

What Question Would You Ask?

Published on the now defunct Grimmoire.com, October 22, 2002

What Question Would You Ask?

by Ron Vitale

I got to thinking and that’s a dangerous thing for me. You never know what I might come up with. I started thinking about the past, remembering good times in playing Magic back during the days of Arabian Nights and how we used to go to a 24 hour diner and hangout there until the sun rose, playing cards and having fun--back during the days of my college years. Now I’m “working for the weekend” as the song goes and I just don’t have as much time to play Magic as before. Friends have come and gone, people have dropped out of the game, and yet Magic still survives and moves onward.

What originally started my writing Magic articles was a frustration with the current Magic system. I ranted and raved about the status quo mentality of the game and wanted to see the system shaken up. I urged for the color purple to be added to a set or new abilities and for fun to be injected back into the game. So I started thinking: If you could ask Wizards one question, what would that question be? I developed this thought for a bit and many, many ideas popped into my head. I started asking myself questions and here are the top ones:

• Why are Magic: the Gathering Online packs of cards really so expensive?
• Why does Wizards stick to their reprint policy when so many users would like to see a return of the older cards?
• Where is Magic headed in the next five years?
• How is Wizards going to try and get older players back into the game?
• Why aren’t crossover Magic sets being created? (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, etc.)

These are just the top five questions that I could think of off of the top of my head. But I wasn’t really satisfied with these questions. They didn’t encompass all the thoughts that I had in my mind. I started to imagine what you might ask Wizards and that started off a whole new approach to the original question. Some people would ask, “How come you printed [banned card name]?” while others would come up with something I hadn’t even thought of. I looked at the questions I had written down and realized that there was a deeper motive behind my questioning.

I put the idea away, filing it in the back of my mind, and started reading the new Onslaught cards being published on the Web. Right off, I decided to whip up an article on the new morph ability. My initial belief is that this ability is cool. It will challenge Players, and anything that challenges people will make the game more interesting and exciting. The element of surprise cannot be underestimated. Hitting someone with a face down 2/2 and then morphing it into a Grinning Demon is going to hurt.

I compared the Onslaught morph ability to the rants I had written several months before and can say this: I am happy to see that Wizards is beginning to add some more excitement to the game. I’ve not been impressed with the Odyssey block. Nothing in the sets really amazes me. Upheaval is a great card, but outside of Psychatog decks, would you really play the card? There just aren’t many winners in the set. I believed that Magic had become stagnant and stale. But the morph ability, along with the races of creatures (elves, goblins, etc.) being added back into the rotation, might spice up the game a bit.

Mix the new cards with Odyssey and there should be some good matches coming up down the pike. But that still led me back to my question: What would I ask Wizards of the Coast, concerning the game of Magic? I took this idea, stretched it out a bit, and then asked a bigger question: If the Magic community had a chance to ask Wizards a question, what would we say? We’ve read about how R&D staffers read through the various Magic forums on the Web, but I haven’t seen a comprehensive survey for Magic players. I’ve seen several small surveys being offered on the MagictheGathering.com site, but nothing more than this. My major complaint is that I would like to give feedback to Wizards, but on a major scale. I believe it would be useful to have a comprehensive survey put together via the Web so that we could, collectively, send our thoughts to Wizards. I would like for them to know that I would like to see old cards reprinted (non-tournament legal), new colors added to the game, and for crossover genres to appear as Magic card sets (I’d love to see a King Arthur set). But I bet that my ideas are not in the majority. Yet, I do believe it is important, especially with the 10th anniversary of Magic coming up soon, that we, the people who buy the game, are given the chance to have our voice be heard.

Let me use a comparison. Fans of the TV show La Femme Nikkita got together a while back to create an online petition asking TV execs not to cancel the show. And guess what? It worked. The Internet can be a powerful tool. Online petitions have been put together to convince Lucasfilm to put Star Wars on DVD (it worked for the Phantom Menace) and one is currently being run to save the Sci-Fi Channel’s Farscape. But why should Magic players just be sitting around without a voice? In the past, I know that there was a flurry of e-mail campaigns trying to convince Wizards not to change the rules when the Classic Edition was released. Recently, there was a flamewar over pricing of the new MTGO system. I took part and sent my e-mails to Wizards, complaining about the price.

So what can we do? Well, you could choose not to participate and say, “I don’t care.” That’s always an option. Personally, I’d disagree with that, but I’ll point this out to you. Back before 1995, if I wanted to write a letter to a company, I couldn’t go on the company’s Website, get their e-mail address and write to them. I had to send it out via snailmail. Oh, what fun that was! We have two paths that we can go down. We, as players, can create our own survey and work together to come up with a list of questions that we think is important. This could be a difficult task. There’s Players from all over the world and each person would have a different point-of-view. It might be fun to work with some major Magic Websites and put links for the survey all over the Web. That way users could go to the survey, the responses would be saved in a database and the data could be sent via e-mail or snailmail to Wizards. Would they care?

That’s an important question. Would Wizards (who is now Hasbro—one of the top game making companies in the world) give a crap about we few Magic Players? I don’t know. But I do believe that it is important for a company to survey its customers. I’m not talking about a survey found in a game you purchase, but an online survey with relevant questions. As I was writing this article, I stopped to check my e-mail and received a Macromedia e-mail survey link. The company wanted to ask me some questions about a recent product I bought. Nice customer service. I like that and will take time to fill it out.

Why? Think about it: The more information I give back to the company, the better my chances of receiving a better product in the future. And that brings me back to my point: I believe it’s high time that Wizards of the Coast learns what we, as Magic Players, want with the future of the game. I want them to know what I think about the pricing of MTGO, the recent sets that have come out (I bought only 3 packs of Judgment), and why I’m unhappy that older cards aren’t being reprinted as non-tournament legal cards.

First and foremost, Magic is a game of the people. Without Magic Players, there would be no game. With people like you and I, who taught our friends how to play, the game wouldn’t have been as popular. We are the lifeblood of the game. Our dollars keep the Wizards employees at their jobs. And I haven’t been buying a lot of Magic cards lately—in fact, the last time I bought cards was at the last pre-release. I’d bet that there are a lot of Players out there who would love to answer a survey.

And let me clear something up: I’m not impressed with the “pick which cards go into Eighth Edition.” Yes, it’s a nice start by choosing what cards will be in or out, but the selection process is very limited and sometimes purposefully controlled (why couldn’t we have both Llanowar Elves and Birds of Paradise in Eighth?).

So let me clarify what I’m saying here. I think it’s necessary for the fan-based Magic Websites to ban together and petition Wizards of the Coast to create an online survey so that we, the Players, can give them our feedback. I’d be happy with no input in the questions: I trust that the Wizards team is smart enough to know what questions to ask us. I want to give feedback on pricing, abilities, playability, lack of support for older Players, and my thoughts on the Pro Tour. Granted, not all of our questions would be represented in the online survey, but I believe that the gathering of data from the survey would help Wizards see what the Players want in the game.

I’ve heard a lot of grumbling about how stale OCB has been and I bet there’s a whole host of other questions that people would love to give their feedback on. And to make the survey more fun, give away a foil Serra or something. If Wizards is smart, they would collect e-mail addresses and other contact information and use this data for product advertisements.

Here’s our choices laid out in a row:

• Ho-hum—we do nothing and accept the status quo buying whatever cards Wizards puts out.
• We talk about it for a long time but no one does anything.
• We band together, organize, and send an online petition to Wizards, asking for them to provide an online survey that addresses the future of the game.

All of this might seem ludicrous, but it isn’t going to hurt to try! Fill up the inboxes of Wizards' customer service and MagictheGathering.com’s writers (Mark Rosewater and Randy Buehler) with e-mails and maybe we can get some action. I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about how “such and such” card should be banned, but no one does anything to organize and complain. If www.brainburst.com, www.mtgnews.com, www.grimmoire.com, www.starcity.com, and the other major Magic Website worked together to create an online petition, I bet we could, collectively, achieve our goal. And what is that goal: If you had one question to ask Wizards, what would that be? It appears that I have found my new answer to that question. In fact, it was in front of me all the time: Why isn’t Wizards being more proactive to solicit the opinions of its Players through an online survey?

Good question, huh? Intelligent comments to this article are greatly appreciated as well as anyone wishing to volunteer to create the online petition. I have Web host space and can offer up that as well as my writing ability for the petition. Contact me.