Thanks Evu! I love this

This is really incredibly sad. I learned about this yesterday and still can’t really wrap my head around it. I remember finding out about JBro 5 or 6 years ago by seeing “TeamJbro” constantly at the top of the Vintage Cube Draft leaderboard on MTGO when I would watch people streaming it. I looked up his name and was so happy to see that he was also regularly streaming.

I watched him regularly for years, also admiring him and how incredible his energy was and how happy he always seemed to be. Over the last few years I absolutely noticed his stream taking a more non-interactive, distracted turn. He started streaming much less and less, and when he did it looked like he was not well. I always just thought of it as the tiredness from having 4 young kids, or from his political career and all of the time and energy that takes.

This news is just so counter to everything I ever thought about him but that just shows how you don’t really know anything about someone unless you’re with them, spending regular time in person, or having regular real conversations with them. We only ever had this image of JBro, but I can’t even imagine what kinds of things he was dealing with mentally or emotionally or what.

I feel so incredibly sad, to lose this wonderful person but also for what will be an impossible thing to overcome and try to explain for the family he leaves behind. Those little kids won’t have that wonderful dad anymore, and will have to forever find some way to make sense of this if they ever can.

This is just so sad. I and so many others will miss you JBro. You were an amazing person, just through and though, and there was so much positivity that I added to my life that I learned from you. There is so much about you that I have taken into my life and I’m so happy for that.

ETA - 1 final Bless Up for you JBro.

Not very often, I think its been months since the last one but hopefully they start doing them more frequently

what is the actual player retention rate from these sets?

I would love to see this too. It’s like a company that doesn’t care about retaining any customers, just using the new customer data to show growth. The bottom falls out of that because any company/game/etc needs a core group of repeat and engaged long-term customers/users to keep it alive. That same group kept Magic alive for 30 years and they’re now being told the game isn’t for them anymore.

I think they truly think of Magic like Fortnite, and just as a joke, but in that they don’t really care if someone plays for 2 weeks or 2 years, they just want as many people in the “system” as possible, thinking they will come and go throughout their lives. Maybe they see a new set that interests them and they come back in for a few months or years.

I don’t think they care about or want to support the interests of players who play EVERY set and try to collect every card. I think that ship has sailed and it’s now just all about casting a much wider net of peripheral customers and perhaps that can keep them showing growth for a while.

However, this all hinges on a couple very flimsy assumptions – (1) that UB sets will never lose appeal as In-Universe sets supposedly have, and (2) that there are enough of this type of customer-player. What happens when UB sets are scraping tier 2 and tier 3 properties and sales go down? What happens when there’s no more in-store in-person standard at all? At what point do they have to scale this back and return to “Classic Magic” to regain what was lost and try to grow the company again? What happens after 2 consecutive down-growth quarters for WoTC?

I think this is just unfortunately where the game is going. They’ll put more and more money and set design effort into these and less into the standard sets.

Standard being a turn 4 format is too crazy for me. That feels like Modern.

I’m glad they acted on this in Bo1, I think its totally fine and should be encouraged to be pro-active about bans in Bo1 in Arena. That is definitely a different game than Bo3 and should be treated as such.

I just really am not very interested nor do I see what the crossover appeal is for the Marvel Universe. These cards look kinda neat but Marvel already has Snap as a game. Also, is this basically a preview of the upcoming two Marvel UB sets that are to be released?

Sad but necessary for the Professor to spend the first 7 minutes telling magic players to not harass or threaten people online anonymously.

But onto the video - I have to disagree with the Professor entirely on this:

[08:57] I was much more in favor of reasonably reprinting these cards so that they became affordable

He first says that Commander will be more fun in 3 months, and then says he thinks WoTC should have just re-printed the problem cards to make them more available. I can’t understand how any entrenched player could believe this. Especially given just how long and how many reprints were needed for Sol Ring to get the cost down.

But beyond that, if you first agree that the format is better without the cards, how and why are you suggesting to first reprint them to oblivion? There is a clear problem with fast mana in commander (and tutors and other things) and there’s no amount of reprinting that will ever solve this.

He also says that Jeweled Lotus should never have been printed, but then says it should not have been banned? And instead just printed MORE? A card that should never have been printed should now be printed more? This makes no sense, and it’s inconsistent, which is very out of character for someone who approaches things very logically.

Also, the comparisons to other formats like Pioneer make no sense to me. There is no comparison with these formats, Commander is completely unique compared to competitive 60-card formats. It’s not even apples and oranges, it’s apples and baseballs.

Finally, his suggestion to put the cards on a watchlist as a waiting period does a huge disservice to players who don’t follow news closely. It would create a cash-out event for entrenched players and leave non-entrenched players as the bag-holders. That is nuts to me, and this is yet another reason why I agree with the path they took here.

Didn’t see this until today, but ZNR might actually get me back onto Arena drafting again 🤣 That was the last set I drafted a lot of. UB Rogues for me forced.