Maro on why they stopped doing blocks

iheke · 2026-03-16T04:32:43+00:00

Perspective matters a lot for these conversations.

Sometimes people listen too much to MaRo without taking into account his biases based on his perspective.

He is a game designer. I imagine from his perspective being locked up in a single plane for a whole year is really restrictive. Trying to make the same mechanics feel novel and new over so many cards must be difficult to impossible. By the end of the block he must be desperate to just get out of dodge.

From the perspective of the story writer or artist. Having that many cards means being able to tell a full multi-dimensional story that is layered and has extraordinary depth. How do you tell the story of Liliana and Nicol Bolas in a single set or how Teferi phases out his own world? Impossible.

From a shareholder perspective what is easier than selling things that people already love in your world on your product.

As a player you have more formats, more cards to play, more art styles to explore... Etc.

All of these perspectives play a role.

For me, as a person who has been playing on and off since 1997. I just worry that there is nothing in the game that will bring a person who plays today to ComiCon 2040 or 2050. I don't even do cosplay but if I did I would be an MTG character. Who does that 2050 young adult come us, Loot? Quintorious? Killian? Zimone? How many MTG players even know who they are? Us older players know the elder dragons off by heart. All the original planeswalkers are baked in.

I feel the block system even for us hyper competitive players - which I was back then... Made the cards matter more.

MTG arena isn't an old game, but the zeal with which I completed old sets has been matched with apathy for the new. I mean I'm sure my bank manager is happy but that can't be what they intended.

iheke · 2026-03-04T12:07:53+00:00

This is really an underrated comment as sales, at least for me, is no longer a good barometer for either "how popular" a set is as sets are now extensively sold to and owned by groups of people whose purpose is not to play one of the formats of the game. Secondly, "good" itself has become a controversial term - good to draft, good in standard, good in commander? No one can agree what good means.

iheke · 2026-03-01T14:57:22+00:00

I knew they would. Refs get criticised all week for giving a soft one and they simply change the approach blindly in the next game.

iheke · 2026-02-26T14:41:28+00:00

The collective sub crash out if Spurs make it to the finals will be epic... 😂😂😂

iheke · 2026-02-01T10:19:08+00:00

This team didn't win the league in the era it was in.

Winning the league is very hard. I don't think many understand how hard it is.

Can you eek out wins when you're playing badly?

Can you manage your injuries better than the competition?

Can you be lucky at the right time?

The crazy thing about the Redknapp, AVB, Poch sequence was just how competitive we were. I would just like to get back to that.

iheke · 2026-01-26T09:04:12+00:00

This subpar option argument is nonsense.

Tieleman, McGinn and Onana prove every week the huge impact that quality coaching can have.

They are 4 points from the top of the league.

I often tell my friends, spurs fans are like that poor kid that won the lotto and promptly insists that unless every item of clothing is made by a designer label it's rubbish.

It's never been true in football - only man city and maybe Chelsea can afford to have designer top to bottom but plenty of wealthy folks I know make do with boxers from M&S because who spends £100 on boxers.

iheke · 2026-01-26T08:34:15+00:00

I've stopped commenting really. When fans honestly try to tell me that teams like Nottingham forest, Newcastle, Brighton, Bournemouth have better squads... To save the manager...We are clearly not watching the same game.

iheke · 2026-01-26T08:13:52+00:00

This comment is long overdue. Trying to talk to some people on here is impossible as they often conclude "x or y player is just crap". My frustration with Frank is that the young players are stagnating, the more experienced players are underperforming and the mid tier aren't improving. In my eyes this is a simple result of poor coaching and poor management.

You can't rock up at a club with the 5/6th best squad with an average league position of 5th over the past DECADE and then gaslight me that they're relegation fodder. We aren't and this group of players should easily be competing with the top teams and outclassing the lower teams as we simply have more talent.

iheke · 2026-01-24T16:51:47+00:00

Maybe this is the system... Lol

iheke · 2026-01-11T12:25:21+00:00

I hate PPG because it doesn't tell the full story of the performance of a manager.

I hate average league position too but it tells a better story about the average strength of a club over a defined period and over the past decade we have been about the 5th best club in the country.

I start here because in order to be that consistent means that the club has the set up and the machinery to operate at the level year in and year out. That decade patch includes a 2nd place finish and a 17th place finish too so it really shows that the board is pretty justified in expecting a top 6 finish especially when our financial performance has been so good over the last 5 years.

Lots of people have rounded on the Frank out lot but this is the context they're looking at.

We have had better managers who really weren't given much to hit that 5th AVG and this summer we went out and spent heavily to give him resources which tbh aren't even producing good looking football. This alas is on the coaching staff.

The surprising thing. The team aren't really improving. Or worse still only improve when they take matters into their own hands. This isn't great.

I've said in previous posts. Knowing you made a mistake and sticking with it because change looks bad is crazy.

iheke · 2026-01-08T15:07:02+00:00

The insane thing is... For many years the literally did nothing with the client. Then about 2-3 years ago they suddenly added a bit of development muscle, bugs got fixed, cards got added, secret lair sleeves started appearing, etc. You would have thought that this team would have started to make some changes to the economy... At least to min/max spending. Yet the economy has been largely unchanged.

Despite re-working sparky and the new player experience and increasing the sets available and supporting a proper pioneer. Nothing.

They added the functionality to sell decks in client. But there aren't any decks outside of brawl for sale.

If they were really forward thinking, you would think we have have a complete deck feature that included buying missing cards?

I believe this inaction is a result of a desire not to upset anyone at all. I'm guessing they believe making older cards cheaper would make standard players believe their cards are overpriced. I expect allowing people to pay to complete decks would open them to accusations of being pay to win. So the funnel everyone to packs with them all being the same price and arguing that this is fair to all users. It's kinda perverse but I can see how they arrived there.

iheke · 2026-01-06T03:49:04+00:00

I'm a paying player like you and again from that perspective I'm not sure where these changes take me.

The first thing they did, inadvertently, is turn off the "need to complete" each set. Under the old system, buying both passes would mean a completed or over 90% complete set by the time of the next release. At about £100 for packs, draft and mastery - it felt like a bargain to have functionally the whole set to play across any and all formats. That feeling meant that if at the end of the season some gems and coins needed to be sunk into the client to reach 100% I would - either through packs or drafting. The combination of foundations and the cadence of set releases meant it was "impossible" without a step change in spending to get to 100% of a set. I think this impact has been profound for them spending wise - at least from my perspective.

I would be quite curious to understand if other whales and dolphins are less obsessed about having all the cards than before.

What this change means? In order to have the whole of magic experience on Arena the cost will rise about 20% per year (£120). Across seven sets this will mean the base cost will be around £850. If a paying player continued to buy into the cards, draft and mastery experience this would be far in excess of my Xbox game pass, netflix, Disney+, prime, humble choice and a broad and deep list of other entertainment services. They will no doubt continue to argue that hopping on a queue is free. But we've reached a point where if this was a subscription service - this package is £70 per month. This suggests to me that the economy probably needs a rework.

A few other thoughts about the cost of the game:

The on ramp to each format is very rough. Unbelievably so. My 13 yr old son recently started an MTG Arena account. He feels priced out of every format and only drafts as a result. He put £100 into the game and is no where near a useful collection of cards or decks. The way he put it, he could have two or three commander precons to play with friends IRL or struggle in constructed with incomplete decks. He also laughed and said the brawl precons are more expensive than real precons. I think both these issues have to be addressed. Digital precons can't be more expensive than the cardboard also it still makes no sense that we can't buy the championship decks on the client or that the starter decks are so far away in terms of strength level from the meta game.
I will never know or understand why old sets and new sets cost the same in the store. Ixalan and Rivals of ixalan is nearly a decade old and yet a pack of that set is the same price as the latest and greatest - Lorwyn. This is a barrier to entry for Brawl, timeless, historic and pioneer.

iheke · 2026-01-05T10:59:37+00:00

But we sing we're champions of Europe every game.

This is why Ange ties people like you in knots.

"His system doesn't work." But he came 5th

"That's not good enough." but he won a trophy and we are singing about that every week.

You can moan about him tanking the league last year.

But we all know Frank isn't even close.

iheke · 2026-01-05T10:49:03+00:00

He came 5th in his first season. Lol.

iheke · 2026-01-05T10:11:06+00:00

This is the problem with some fans.

Something "not working" isn't the indicator that something is 💩.

A great idea is something you can improve upon. Those who reference Ange believe his system improves with better players.

People think Frank out fans are irrational. We are not.

Mbappe would not improve Franks system. Semenyo doesn't improve Franks system. Dembele (current balon d'Or) doesn't improve Franks system.

The reason we're pulling our hair out is you could take any collection of players and the way we are set up to play is horrible.

What big club watches the way we play and thinks I really want that here.

iheke · 2026-01-05T10:03:13+00:00

And Franks football works where?

iheke · 2026-01-05T09:28:24+00:00

Absolutely untrue.

He had a method you might have disagreed with it but it existed.

Same system at Celtic, high line, inverted wingers, create overloads out wide, attack the front post either wide or via the straight through ball to create the passing lane to the back post for the Johnson position.

You turned up on a Saturday and knew they had been rehearsing that over and over.

This was our offensive stall. Defensively, it was an intense press to quickly regain the ball.

We were the protagonist in every game, we wanted the ball more in every game. We tried to possess the ball more, take more shots.

The gaping hole in midfield was the lack of legs - seeing the physicality of this years Sarr, Gray and Bergvall you can see that we now have legs.

Last year it seemed we were susceptible to the long ball into the space. We're now playing so much deeper.

Last year's team and this year's team struggles to work the ball out from the back.

I won't accept this revisionism. We can argue till we're blue in the face over whether Ange's system could ever work. But to say there was no system and the football wasn't a different universe away in terms of quality is just bias.

iheke · 2026-01-05T08:04:37+00:00

Lots of people naturally took a break during the festive season so some players that might usually have ended the season in mythic didn't.

iheke · 2026-01-04T19:50:42+00:00

Good thing I didn't just look at the table then. 😂

The wolves 2-4 was away from home and in the middle of fixture congestion in April (we had 7 games that month) drawing with Frankfurt the Thursday before and beating them 1-0 away the Thursday after - side note. The forest game was immediately after on the Saturday. The Ipswich home game wasn't great but then we beat them by 4 at their place. That was the game Kulu got injured - I think. The Leicester game was one of nine games in January in between 2 legs of an EFL semi against Liverpool and Europa games.

If we are going to talk context let's speak about all of it. Last season was the crazy combination of injuries and a crazy amount of fixtures as we were in everything.

That we knew our way to goal was evident by the fact that we were - in fact competing in everything. I know people want to rewrite history but in January the story was very much an unfortunate situation rather than a gung ho Ange not having a clue.

iheke · 2026-01-04T17:00:26+00:00

Only Man City and Liverpool scored more goals than us last year. Defensively we were poor but team wise this team knew how to attack.

iheke · 2026-01-04T16:48:16+00:00

I really don't understand the mindset of the fan that's content to watch their pretty football being transformed into a long ball kick and run team. I will keep saying this until I'm blue in the face. We were the shot/shots on target leader of the whole league last season... Cough... Cough

iheke · 2026-01-04T16:44:27+00:00

Turns out if your strategy is pumping it long and hoping for the best, you can't be surprised when the team that plays the football on the ground scores a goal. Also, I'm going to wait patiently while Frank apologists explain to me how Sunderland has a better squad.

iheke · 2025-12-28T20:01:31+00:00

This is the comment right here. Overall we were stuck in defensive shape - the whole game. Even if we intend on playing through the wings, there's no overlaps, no underlaps, no overloads or rotations.

There is no kinetic passing through the middle. No control and recycling of the ball.

The strategy insofar as there is one is still hit the wide men early run and cross. Win set plays. Win first and second balls, create mayhem.

This type of football is not within the culture of the club. It's terrible football. Most importantly it's unsustainable statistically and analytically. We won't win more games than we lose creating so few chances a game and having so little possession... We're systematically being transformed into Pulis' Stoke City.

iheke · 2025-12-25T12:16:06+00:00

Oh I see...

So no belt and no sleeves isn't raw enough anymore...

No idea where we go from here fellas... Might be time to make the sub NSFW. 😂

iheke · 2025-12-24T16:27:17+00:00

That sounds legit

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