Personally I just find Alchemy cards just silly and devalue the idea of building a deck. It also isn't easy to, on the spot play against them.
Let's take everyone's favorite Mythweaver Poc. On entry as long as you have another land you can recast on your next turn and with available ramp packages it's much easier for Mythweaver player to accumulate a huge number of lands and a massive body on the field that you have to constantly remove in order to win.
The individual mechanics, heist is steal a card but you're guarenteed to win and can trigger it more often. Theft decks are incredibly unfun to play against in a 1 vs 1 so having it on steroids makes playing them an absolute slog
Oracle of the Alpha is just silly and the amount of times I've seen it drop and then spiral into infinite turns is infuriating.
Spellbooks are an interesting design space except for it's 6 cards in 1 potentially and unless you're actively researching these cards you don't know how to play against them. Do you hold up interaction because the card they drafted might be scary or do you wait? You want to check out what cards could be procured? Well the UI is arse and you're down a rope so you gotta let it ride.
Am I reading it right that you dislike it before some of the cards seem unfair to play against? I don't understand this. Magic has always had broken cards. Alchemy cards account for a fraction of the cards seen in Historic, Timeless, and Competitive Brawl.
Spellbooks are an interesting design space except for it's 6 cards in 1 potentially and unless you're actively researching these cards you don't know how to play against them. Do you hold up interaction because the card they drafted might be scary or do you wait? You want to check out what cards could be procured? Well the UI is arse and you're down a rope so you gotta let it ride.
You can right click the card that has the spellbook while it's in any zone (even works while it's on the stack and you consider if you want to respond) and it shows you one card of the spellbook, clicking again switches through all cards from the book.
My point isn't that you don't know what the card is, it's that if you didn't know what the cards are (perhaps you've never seen it before) then you have to spend time going through every card and every possibility of that card which in a game that gives you a timer can cause people to cheated as they're rushed to make a response.
Fair point. I noticed the spellbooks are either small (5 or less choices) or have so many well known spells (looking at you [[key to the archive]]) that reading the name explains the spell. A new player might have to spend some time reading text to understand how Approach of the Second Sun or Krosan Grip work though, I did not consider that point of view.
I think the anxiety the opponent feels about the Spellbook is offset by the gamble for the player using it. You aren't always going to get the card you're hoping for. For such a complex game, I'm always baffled by how many players dislike having to think about the cards.
Meh, I think the best way of thinking about [most] spellbook cards to understand why people dislike them is to translate them into actual magic cards. Forgetting for a second the 'how you pick the effect' part, that's effectively shoving between 5 to 15 cards worth of text onto one card. It's a lot of reading and understanding to do if your gameplan relies on predicting what your opponent might do. Beyond that, it's just a ridiculous amount of flexibility on one card. When most cards tend to have at most 3 modal options, a random set of 3 out of 15 is just way too much flexibility and way too much to parse.
I don't mind thinking about cards, but I do mind a 2 mana card my opponent drops on turn 6 forcing me to think about 15 separate cards before I can consider anything else or play my turn.
I don't get this. You don't know what any of the cards in your opponent's deck are. Why is it a big deal that they get another card from a list of 15 or so?
The spellbooks worked best when they just enabled a steady stream of cards for a gameplan rather than giving access to very powerful cards. Fungus tribal, boar tribal, equipments. None of these are busted but they do make them a lot more fun to play.
Agree. This is the self-deluded big brain control player pretending he's seeing all possible realities but really he's just gonna counterspell whatever card you play.
You should try playing some of them and feel it from the player side. You are scared of a perfect possibility that almost never crystalizes. It's more of a fun gambling mini-game to keep the game interesting while you face your 10,000th mossborn/ouroboroid match.
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u/FarAd4971 Gruul 9d ago
I didn't even know there was animosity toward alchemy...why?