Well the Dominaria update hit, and it's just too much for me.

The Planeswalker redirection errata is as terrible as one could imagine, with five different rule sets that need to be applied to any card that could damage a player ever. The new language changes are significantly contrary to 20+ years of my magic gameplay, and also the english language. Then, to rub salt in the wound, they killed my Multani's Presence Shattering Spree deck as an afterthought.

I'm out.

Our you could apply the one rule set of "What's it say on Gatherer?" We all have smartphones now. Errata is not as much of an issue as it was in the late 90's/early 00's. I'm glad they finally pulled the trigger on a change that should have happened 10 years ago.

As a related question, how on earth did you Multani's Presence/Shattering Spree deck work? Because the things have to be artifacts before you replicate onto them, then you have to turn them to not-artifacts after, but before the replicated copies resolve....

I think the idea is that you replicate Shattering Spree a bunch of times targeting the same artifact, so all but one of them gets countered. But Multani's Presence specifically refers to spells you've cast, so I don't think that works.

Yeh the only ruling I ever saw on that specific combo said it didn’t work on countered copies, just the actually cast original - that was almost a decade ago, and I don’t believe anything on that rules front changed til Dominaria (where it now doesn’t work for two reasons rather than just one).

http://www.cranialinsertion.com/article/236


I mean, before this DOM rule change you could replicate shattering spree to draw ONE card per MP - replicate once to make the copy destroy the target before the original resolves, then when the original resolves it would be countered, and since you cast it, you would draw a card. Now that a ‘fizzle’ no longer counts as a ‘counter’ you don’t even get that one. But I can’t imagine your deck was built around turning Shattering Spree into a discount Smash and reaping the riches of that.

I actually don't like the fact that WotC is retracting on 20+ years of promo policy, I don't like the SJW creep, nor the retconning of lore. You're complaint seems fairly mundane,but I agree with the rule headache this is going to be.

I'm not sure why everybody thinks this is a SJW thing. "They" is what people actually say in real life, "he or she" was from the Chicago Manual of Style. Why is there a complain there?

more often people in real life say "he" rather than "they" or "he or she"

Yeah, because "they" can cause confusion about the number, which is way more important than confusion about the gender.

(Most things are.)

I don't think I believe that. Regardless, "they" is the better choice and I'm glad the style manuals are moving in that direction.

I don't think Thrull Champion is referring to the change from "he or she" to "they". At least, I doubt it is exclusively what he meant.

Look no offense, I usually try not to offend. But there is literally no goddamn reason to complain about using They/Their here and this is basically the only thing I'll full confidence say that someone complaining about is flat out just looking for reasons to complain, and opinions of people who do stuff just to complain aren't worth a cent.

Good were full.

they/their isnt a big change

if youre upset it should be over the frame tweaks/saga frames which are legitimately and undebatably atrocious

I can agree with you about that at least.

Sometimes, your comments are legitimately and undebatably atrocious

Count me in as someone who will very hotly debate that. The Sagas have been uniformly stunning and made great use of their vertical orientation.

I won't lie, the sagas made me really feel weird at first, but as more released they all did amazing jobs. I fully support them.

The legendary frame is water under the bridge. It's a hack of the washed out, characterless 8e frame, but it's at least got a little more character so I'll take it? I'd really prefer M15's style with Planar Chaos' color choices or some Progenitus-supporting hack of Future Sight, but these crumbs are neither here nor there.

I'm actually opposed to common use of singular 'they'. Not in Magic cards, because it's a weird specific scenario where every character counts, but I feel like for normal communication, number confusion from adopting singular they is a more common and serious issue than identity politics triggered from "he or she" or stilted over-formality of specific references (taking a phrase to unambiguously define the entity rather than using a pronoun). On cards, though, rules language is specific enough to dodge most number confusion and, again, saving characters is paramount as opposed to a nonissue I liked the cheat that 3e Dungeons & Dragons manuals used, though.

I've used "they" as the singular gender-neutral pronoun for a long time. The only reason I was ever typing out "he or she" was when I was designing something that used the "he or she" template. I like using "they", because I can often identify or single out a person without making them feel uncomfortable in pointing out that they actually are a he when I've said "she" or a "she" when I've said "he". It's my default internet-speak as a result, and unless someone's made it a point to indicate their gender, I will default to "they" almost uniformly. If you're running into a situation where "they" may cause confusion over the number or individuals, then it's probably safer to assume you should re-type or verbalise whom it is you are speaking about without a pronoun, which happens exceedingly rarely for myself.

I also like the use of "they" in Magic cards because it reduces the number of letters you need to type. Not for laziness, but aesthetically, the fewer characters you can use to get the function of a card across on a Magic card, the better.

I like "they" instead of "he or she" because it only takes up four letter spaces on a card instead of nine, which leaves room for better rules and cleaner cards.

On that much, we can agree.

Understand that while I may primarily be a fiction writer (Where I can just pick a pronoun set for a character and keep to it), I also have an eye to technical uses of writing and the priorities thereof. Which, unlike polite conversation, has an extreme clarity requirement and few other pronoun considerations. Honestly, avoiding pronouns in general is good but if you can't, singular "They" is probably the worst choice since it introduces ambiguity. In that context, even insistently referring to the singular third person entity as "Subject X" would work out better.