I don’t understand why the limited spots of these Anthologies are being wasted by cards they chose to omit from Amonkhet and Kaladesh remastered and/or Jumpstart.
Allied commands? Sweet!
Random Kaladesh or Amonkhet block uncommon or rare? Why?
Posted May 13, 2021, 8:02 PM UTC
Optimistic answer: Historic Anthologies have to be a certain number of cards, and limiting the number of potential format-warping cards by including commons or uncommons that might be more powerful than Standard commons/uncommons keeps the format from drastically changing and requiring nearly as many historic-only cards. Additionally, Amonkhet/Kaladesh cards may be in the Anthologies because they're useful for Historic constructed while being disappointing in the remastered draft format; for instance, [[Flameblade Adept]] was a potentially useful addition to Historic aggro decks but is a very disappointing draft card when the remastered format cannot emphasize cycling-matters as much and is also unfriendly to 1-drops in general. In specific cases, they may have "unbanned" a card they expected would be too powerful due to reconsiderations about the format strength (e.g. [[Sheoldred]] in a T4 combo world).
Pessimistic answer: Adding more filler allows WotC to provide less value for 25,000 gold, making Historic Anthologies a gold sink that is less effective at getting players a functioning deck and more effective at hooking players into committing more wildcards to finish their half-completed Historic decks, and also WotC sucks and gets rid of fun limited cards just to resell them later for more money.
Realistic answer: Probably a mix of both. There are good reasons to cut cards from a draft environment that are still useful for constructed, and there are also good economic reasons to not make your fixed-card-count bundle not contain 25 bomb rares that will let you build a T1 deck.
Probably cards they already programmed into the game and tested but didn't include when the sets were released.
Every single playable card they omitted from the remasters is something they need to introduce to historic at some point, and anthologies are the only way of doing that.
Or to put it another way; snipping cards out of sets was a dumb idea.
How does your first sentence mean it was dumb? They are remastered single sets that take cards from two different sets. The new remastered set isn’t going to just be every single card from a block jammed together.
There are two purposes for the remastered sets. Purpose one, and I will argue the more important one, is to get the cards onto arena and in player's collections.
Purpose two is to create an enjoyable if short-lived limited format.
Wizards must obviously cut cards to achieve the second purpose, that much is true. But by cutting cards that are constructed relevant they are failing at the first objective and making things more difficult for themselves. It leads to shit like putting [[Adorned Pouncer]] in a historic anthology because they have no other way of adding the card to the client in a logical way.
Adorned Pouncer - (G) (SF) (txt)
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Notice he said playable, meaning constructed playable.
Player retention comes from new content.
Disguise content people should already have had a year or more ago as new content.
Get player retention.
money
also some of them might be for cubes
The Amonkhet and Kaladesh remastered sets were single sets “remastered” from blocks, they couldn’t have literally every card from their entire blocks. That means some cards wouldn’t be included. How else would they give people the ability to get them without using wild cards?
Literally program every card. Have all of them spear in the store boosters and a curated list in the draft boosters. Draft boosters and arena boosters are different in arena already
Having them programmed is not the same as having a method of distribution. That’s still an inconsistent way of distribution.
Wildcards are the closest way short a p2p trading system which would most likely devolve into a secondary market which wotc seems to be trying to stay away from with arena.
They put plenty of chaff into those sets though. That’s the point.
That “chaff” is for Limited, it’s not purposeless.
Those limited formats were pretty bad
Amongst Remastered Limited was pretty excellent.
Highly subjective and to a lot of the people who played them a lot they were good.
Well they were designed as draft sets so chaff is expected. But I agree with you that we should just receive those cards when they want to add them to the format instead of putting them behind another paywall
The power level of Historic has increased since the release of Jumpstart. Therefore, many of those cards are now acceptable in the format.
They shoulda just banned them in historic and then I can them
[[The Quest for More Money]]
[[Revel in Riches]]
[[Negate]]
Negate - (G) (SF) (txt)
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Revel in Riches - (G) (SF) (txt)
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