u/Gamma05772156649

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I think we mostly all agree now that this limited format is pretty underwhelming, and that HOB being a small set is a significant factor why that's the case. But another factor I don't see talked about enough is just how much some of the common designs in the set suck in the sense of being unplayable garbage. In a set that's already small, having so many of the commons suck just makes it feel that much smaller. And a lot of these commons aren't only bad, they're bad in a way I'd think any competent set designer should be able to catch, which just makes them even more baffling. So let's talk about some of them.

[[Little Bear]]. Why is the cheapest bear in the set the one they put the "add a +1/+/1 counter to an existing bear" effect on?And why is the card costed so it's significantly below rate if you don't get the counter? Why does the set with a bears subtheme not have a bear that's a 2/2 for 2? It seems like such an obvious flavor slam dunk to have a literal grizzly bears, and it would give little bear something to curve out of. You could even make the 2/2 for 2 the common Beorn adventure and nerf the other side of the card to compensate, which would have the side effect of making that card not trash also.

[[Mirkwood Meditator]]. Like genuinely why? This card would be stone cold unplayable in every set for at least the last 3 years, probably longer, and is equally unplayable in HOB. I genuinely cannot fathom how the designers gave this card the OK. I want to find whoever designed this card and warn them about COVID since they appear to be living in 2018. (EDIT: I had originally written Mirkwood Nurturer instead of Mirkwood Meditator. Nurturer is a fine design, and can be a solid playable. Meditator is a baffling joke.)

[[Old Thrush]], [[Giant's Boulder]], [[Long-Bodied Grey Dog]]. I get wanting to have a below rate colorless fixing card to help enable splashes. But did we really need 3 of them in a set without a multicolor theme or strong tri-color rares? Especially considering we already have the cycle of common duals and hobbit hole as common fixing lands, plus the ponies at uncommon. And it's a small set so having 3 of this effect at comlon is like having 5 in a normal set. Just give us thrush, and maybe also boulder, but did we really need the dog? And also how long is that dog that it has reach when literal giants don't.

[[The entire white color]]. As it stands, the 17lands data has 4 white commons at a C, and the other 6 are D+ or lower (not counting instirctor). I get that color balance is tricky and it's hard to predict ahead of time how strong a card will be (e.g. no one thought that common Gollum would be that good). But also, white has no obviously exciting commons. Like in black, murder and bent blade were obviously great. Blue had common Bilbo, apothecary, and nuisance. Red had pinecone strike. Green had I guess quarrel, though green is fairly weak at common too. Where's white's exciting card? Magnificent End I guess, but that's hardly an exciting card, just a solid removal spell. Shortsword maybe? Or lookout maybe could be good in a different format? It feels like white's entire common pool was designed to be fine role-fillers at best, and 23rd card playable at worst. Which could be fine if they were aiming for a lower power set, but they clearly weren't considering the grixis cards. Also where's white's good 2 drop? And why is UW marketed as the "draw 2" archetype, but white has no draw 2 enablers or payoffs at common.

[[Gandalf, Wandering Wizard]]. He's fucking GANDALF. One of the most iconic characters from The Hobbit, and one of the strongest in-lore. When people think The Hobbit, they think Bilbo, Gandalf, the Dwarves, Gollum, Smaug and maybe Bard. The designers did a great job with the rest---all the Bilbos and Gollums are great, the legendary Dwarves are everywhere in RW and get their own archetype, Bard is a premium signpost uncommon in UW, and Smaug is a scary imposing late game threat in Red (though a lot less good since this is a fast format). So why is the common Gandalf such an underwhelming design? The flavor is on-point but the numbers are just... obviously bad. Tweak the numbers, or give him an adventure, or give him draw 2 synergy, or give him another ability or something. This is my smallest complaint since Blue is pretty strong in this set and doesn't need the extra help. But it would be nice to have Gandalf be a playable card in the Hobbit set, and also making him a draw 2 synergy piece could make blue a bit less reliant on getting apothecaries and councillors.

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Day 1 of a small set is crazy. How many bird is too many bird?

Imagine the next iteration of powered cube includes alchemy and initiative (please god no, but imagine it for this hypothetical). You're drafting a fairly typical Boros aggro deck and you see Tajic and Dungeoneer in the same pack. How often do you think you'd take each one? Obviously it somewhat depends on your deck, which is why I said "how often do you take each one" not "which one do you take".

Between the dumb pricing, all the alchemy nonsense, and the general vibe of domain goodstuff slop, I think there are good reasons to be skipping the current planar cube. But I've been playing and enjoying it, and I imagine others here have also, so I wanted to offer this piece of advice. Taking a screenshot of your deck before queueing that you can reference during games is good practice in general, but there are two major factors that make it especially important for the current planar cube.

1. Your manabase in many/most decks will consist of a lot of fetches, but not a ton of fetchable nonbasics. So being able to reference your deck can help you plan in advance what fetches to play, so you don't end up in a situation where you fetched the wrong lands with the wrong fetches at the wrong times, and now you can't get an (untapped) source of the right color, or god forbid, end up cracking a fetch without realizing there's nothing to get.

2. There's a lot of heist running around in this format, and basically all the heist cards are super pushed, so you should expect to get heisted somewhat often. Heisted cards are face down, but whenever you crack a fetch (which you'll be doing a lot, see: point 1), if you have the focus and the time on your clock, you can determine what card is missing from your library to deduce what card your opponent heisted. And this can be extremely relevant since a lot of heisted cards that aren't played right away are either a lategame bomb that it's useful to be ready for, or an interaction spell that's useful to know to play around. I won a game a few drafts ago by noting that my opponent had heisted my Grenzo, and hence recognizing that I needed to hold up a counter on turn 6. It was a very marginal game, and while it's possible that I would have won anyways, knowing that piece of information was a significant boon, and could easily have been what pushed me over the edge.

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Three of the most common archetypes I see complained about here are mill, discard, and removal/counterspell tribal, and all three of them largely suck.

Mill is bad burn against a larger life total, and also you often actively help your opponent in the process of killing them since most decks have some way of using their graveyard. It's always baffled me that people find mill annoying since it doesn't actually take away any resources from you. But for some reason people treat it similarly to discard.

Discard and removal tribal I'm lumping together since both decks focus on trading interaction one for one and grinding their opponent out. And I guess this sorta works as a bad version of a control deck. But every competitive control deck I'm aware of in present day mtg, across all main formats, has a more proactive and resilient strategy than "counter/remove/discard everything and then grind your opponent out once they're hellbent. Gone are the decks that tucking your own teferi and milling your opponent out to their draw step hearthstone style is a viable wincon. Yet people here still seem to talk about "removal/counterspell tribal" as though that's a real deck. I'm not sure what format this is happening in, so maybe there's some deck like this that I'm not aware of, but in general, I feel like if your deck is decently well constructed it shouldn't be too hard to beat these decks considering how good proactive threats have gotten these days.

So what's the deal with this guy. The cutscenes make a big deal about it only being hostile when they touched the flowers, and that it's seems familiar to Maelle. Which is really interesting foreshadowing... except it goes nowhere? Like there's a lot of people, myself included, who took this as evidence towarda that the gommaged people were being reincarnated as Nevrons and the flowers are special somehow, or even that Goblu somehow was Sophie.

But then it turns out that this is totally false, Goblu wasn't even created by the Paintress or even the person behind the Gommage, and he's presumably just another nevron. And the reason he cares about the flowers is... because he's just like that? And he seems familiar to Maelle because there's a painting of him in the irl manor, but there doesn't seem to be any other special connection. Monoco and Noco are dogs, Esquie is a childhood plush, but Goblu is just a random painting in a house full of paintings, with no clear reason why it would be any more important than any other piece of art.

So what's going on. The whole thing feels like a weird loose end in a story that's otherwise so cohesive and tight.

Title. The event is advertised as a "high stakes competitive draft event" yet if you're low rank, you play against noobs in premier draft queue. So it's less of a competitive format and more of a free gems/packs button for any competent drafter that had taken a break for a few sets. I played 3 drafts, starting from bronze 4, went 6-3 7-2 7-2 facing barely any real competition, and profited 9600 gems, 32 packs, and 24 mythic packs.

How is this remotely fair? Like I'll take the free stuff, but how is it fair to active draft grinders that I get a massively easier version of the "competitive draft event" with the same prize structure just because I took a break for a few sets. Why am I being rewarded for being low rank with a prize arguably better than the one for top 250 finish, and certainly a lot better than top 1200? Why is there a fancy title attached to this event when you can win it by beating bronze players? Why do the bronze players, some of whom might even be new to magic, have to play against a multiple times top 1200 drafter tryharding contender draft? Make any of this make sense.

The Larpmaster at the end of act 1. It comes back to presumably attack Lune and Sciel while Gustave and Maelle are having their fight with Renoir on the cliff. I get that this is a plot device to explain why they couldn't intervene and save Gustave, but do we know how Lune and Sciel managed to deal with it? Did they just beat a Larpmaster phase 3 offscreen while Gustave was dying? Did they run away? Did they just stall and get saved by Verso? Did Esquie save them? Did it just hand them a business card with the Endless Tower/Flying Manor address and leave?

I like Expedition 33 quite a lot when playing it, but I've somehow come to like them game more and more reflecting back on it in the week or so since beating it. I think part of it is that I rushed through the main story since I wanted to learn what's going on with the Paintress and the gommage before I spoiled myself (no spoilers here if you haven't finished the game) so things didn't have as long to sink in at the time, and part of it is that I played it in a time of my life where I've been doing more reflecting on things in general, but the story and ending has sat with me in a way few pieces of media have managed (the book series His Dark Materials and the games To The Moon/Finding Paradise come to mind, but not much else, though to be fair I could stand to consume more good emotional media in general). As I was playing it, I could tell that E33 was going to be one of the better games I've played, but now reflecting back, I think it stands a very good shot at being my second favorite of all time (it will be very difficult for anything to top Outer Wilds).

So it seems like the Verso ending is more popular, and there seems to be a number of people that consider it to be the "good" ending, or at least not a bad ending, despite the devs having said (or so I'm told) that both endings were intended to be bad. I'm wondering if there's some artistic statement to be found here (intentional or unintentional) relating to the Verso ending being the easier one to justify. Because if you ignore or push aside the "small" detail of everyone in the canvas being erased, effectively killing an entire city of people who seem no less human than the people in the "real" world, then the Verso ending has all the trappings of a bittersweet happy ending. The Dessendres leave the canvas, have a proper funeral for Verso, and take steps towards moving on and healing. Everything fits together and wraps up nicely if you just push that one little detail aside. Sure it's a bit sad, and sure it's not the ideal solution, but it's "what needs to be done", and it's "the right thing to do". As Renoir says, "Your friends are right, and it changes nothing". This is the view Verso and Renoir seem to have, and it has a nice appeal to it, in the way that the "live in a fantasy world also lol jumpscare" part of Maelle's ending doesn't. And in choosing the Verso ending, and seeing an epilogue scene set entirely in the outside world, the player is lead to see things the way Renoir and Verso do.

But the whole point is that the canvas being erased is not a "small" detail, and things don't wrap up nicely as a result. You've destroyed an entire world to help one family, and also in doing so, erased the last fragment of Verso's soul. Renoir says "see things as they are, not how you want them to be", yet he either fails to take his own advice, or acts extremely selfishly, putting the needs of his family above the needs of an entire world. This is something that humans are really good at doing- - -rationalizing awful actions by making a nice little narrative in which the actions in question seem like an unfortunate sacrifice or a necessary evil. I'm not going to cite any specific examples from the real world, but "these people all need to die for what I consider to be the greater good, or even just for the personal benefit of myself and the people I care about, and I'm not going to give them a say in deciding that", is a polite way of describing the motivations behind some of the most atrocious actions in human history. And I think part of what's interesting about the Verso ending is the way it lulls you into seeing things Renoir's way, and diminishing the significance of what's lost. I saw someone in a youtube comment say that the Maelle ending is a "beautiful lie", and Verso's is an "ugly truth", but both endings are lies in their own ways. Maelle's is just made more obvious to the player, but again, I think this may be in some way the point.

I want to make it clear that I'm not saying all this to argue that the Maelle ending is any better. I could write an entire lengthy post about all the ways in which it's a "bad" ending, and many such posts have already been written by other people. I think both endings are bad, and if you forced me to pick one I might still pick Verso. Partially because I think there's a good chance Maelle's ending ends with the canvas being erased anyways, partially because of all the other things wrong with the Maelle ending, and partially because I do think there are real arguments to be made that erasing the canvas is not comparable to a real world genocide. I'm just saying that I think the Verso ending tricks you into thinking it's a better ending than it is, and that this might be the point.

And the fact that people get so worked up over the endings, and go to great lengths to analyze them and argue why their interpretation is correct, is certainly the point. I think this is one of the rare cases where reddit arguing endlessly and intensely about a piece of media is a sign that it's being interpreted as intended.