[Editor's Note: In general, I have avoided publishing the landslide of articles I received about the banning of Skullclamp, not because the articles weren't well-written (some of you had very lucid points to make), but instead because the issue had already played itself out on the pages and forums of StarCityGames.com. Most of these new articles merely rehashed points already made between when the community first signaled a big problem existed, and when the banning was finally announced and explained. This article instead takes a look at what we've learned from this banning and the subsequent explanation, which I thought was an interesting angle on the whole issue, and therefore chose to publish it.
I'd also like to clearly state at the beginning of this article that the opinions expressed are the author's and are definitely not those of StarCityGames.com, the ownership, or the editorial staff. ]
In response Aaron Forsythe's article about Skullclamp's banning, I would like to toss my two cents in. I am not qualified to judge, but I would like to talk about what we do know about Wizard's R&D process from the point of view of someone dissecting his article.
From the article, we know several things.
1. Wizards will not be proactive.
2. Wizards releases sets before testing all cards in their current iterations.
3. Wizards knows which cards are good and which are chaff. Rarely are they wrong, but, in some cases, changes are untested. See point 2.
4. Serious problems exist in Wizards playtesting strategy for new sets.
5. Wizards does not have a list of effects that are carefully scrutinized.
I'd like to take the points individually and point out where I see the logic failing. I could be wrong. I will probably be wrong on a few of my points, because I do not know the internal structure on the Wizards playtest group and its procedures. But, taking this mistake as an example and a clearly written explanation of it leads me to several unavoidable points of contention with the process and the explanation of the mistake.
For clarity, I will state early that my sole sources of information are my experience with the game and Aaron's article. I will not attempt to spread rumors, nor will I try to put other sources of information into this discussion. I believe that the article stands on its own and should be viewed that way. So I will.
On to the points:
1. Wizards will not be proactive.
"We eventually figured out what a monster we'd created during that dark period during when it was too late to change, but way before the set hit the streets. We knew there was going to be a train wreck, and all we could do was sit back and watch."
"We knew what the future held, and we were powerless to do anything about it. There were whispers internally even then about banning the card, but we all hoped that maybe the players would find a way around the problem and it would all work out ok."
"On top of that, we weren't even sure Skullclamp would survive in Standard until Champions was released, so we decided to sit on our hands and let the results from Pro Tour - Kobe and US Regionals tell us what to do."
Wizards will not be proactive even in the face of clear and concise data to the contrary, in house. It will not happen. They knew... they simply knew and they chose to do nothing.
And now, Aaron (in the first two quotes above) says that they could do nothing. I disagree. They had the opportunity to cut the snake's head off and chose not to (as described in the third quote). This is completely unfair to players, and a shoddy way to do business.
My preference: Take responsibility for your mistakes as a company and fix the problem, not the blame. Later in the article, Aaron says, "Part of the excitement of building decks with new cards should be the idea that R&D might have missed something, and you could be the one to rub our faces in it." I don't want R&D to miss something. I don't want a Standard environment to be warped by a card that was missed in playtesting after changes were made to the card template. I want to view Wizards as a company that will not"whisper" about bannings (quote #2), but, loudly sound an alarm bell internally about the mistake and take responsibility for that mistake.
Does that mean when the alarm sound, ban the offender? No. But discuss it in the open at work, internally. Don't whisper about it in the hall between yourselves. Furthermore, I'd like to hear about the steps taken to ensure it won't happen again.
But, most of all, you could have posted the ban before the set hit the streets. Yes, before it hit the streets. Post the card on magicthegathering.com, tell us of the ban (proactively, by the way), roger up to the mistake and have some sack about it. Make all of this pre-street. We'd have a chance to proxy the card and find out for ourselves. But you didn't do that. You hoped we wouldn't figure it out, even though you say, "You outnumber us several million to under 20."
2. Wizards releases sets before testing all cards in their current iterations.
"Part of the problem was that our views of the card were tainted by its earlier incarnations, which were very bad. The other part of the problem was that, even without old bias, the card's power is not that easy to parse at first glance."
"We're paid professionals-we're supposed to find and fix stuff like that. But we were entrenched in our own internal metagame and this card slipped through the cracks."
What problem do I have here? Twofold. First, the card wasn't evaluated singly and in concert with other cards before the set was released to print. It simply wasn't. It sucked in the beginning and got better and better. Finally, "a decision was made to push some of the equipment cards." And a final tweak was made to the card and voila... Skullclamp. Infamous Skullclamp. Apparently, everyone said it was fine without actually looking and/or thinking about the ramifications of a phrase like"draw 2 cards" that might just fit into every deck that includes creatures. It is an Artifact. It's not a Blue Sorcery or a Green enchantment from many years ago. It's an Artifact.
My preference: Test all the cards. Not just the power cards, not just the cards that are flashy or cool. Test them all in their final form before releasing them to print. Without that step being performed, you are guessing about cards' power levels and their ramification to the environment. [Not possible due to manpower, workload and time constraints. - Knut, pointing out the obvious]
3. Wizards knows which cards are good and which are chaff. Rarely are they wrong, but, in some cases, changes are untested. See point 2.
"Often when cards are changed that will impact our constructed playtesting, a memo is sent out notifying everyone about the changes and urging people to try the new incarnations of the cards."
It is a simple matter for me to see the problem with the above statement. I'm spoon-fed cards that have power and cards that aren't. And, in this case, the change wasn't enough in one person's opinion to justify a memo to trigger testing of the change. One person not sending a memo warps Regionals results.
"Often when cards are changed that will impact our constructed playtesting..."
A single change to a single card should affect your Constructed playtesting. This is now a lesson learned about TCG's. Programmers have known it for decades. Change this and test it, test it... test it. Ask the programming team for Magic: Online about this... wait, that's a whole other rant with its own points of contention.
In short, Wizards knows which cards will affect the metagame and a change to it. But, they seem to be somewhat removed from the environment and what players want to do to win the game or, at least, to not lose the game.
"We have a decent idea of what decks will be good, but we never get it exactly right. We didn't put Wonder in our madness decks, Astral Slide in our cycling decks, or Patriarch's Bidding in our Goblin decks. We never had a tier-1 Tooth and Nail deck or white Urzatron deck. We thought Wizards were a real deck, for crying out loud! And we obviously didn't put Skullclamp in our Affinity decks (until it was too late)."
The playtest team seems to be out of touch with the current players and how the want to go about winning the game."We didn't put Wonder in our madness decks, Astral Slide in our cycling decks..." Huh? Buh...b-b-buh? What? I'll admit that I thought that Patriarch's Bidding was a bit of genius (at least when I heard it), but, the other two? They seem like socks and shoes, to me.
My preference: See note 2.
4. Serious problems exist in Wizards playtesting strategy for new sets.
"We didn't engineer this environment-heck, we didn't imagine Darksteel Standard to look anything like this."
Aaron... you did. I don't make the cards, you do. Your company releases the sets to print. You did engineer this environment and when you knew that a serious problem existed in that environment, your company decided it was in its best interest to hope that the players wouldn't figure it out. Or that someone would use the available tools to solve your problems for you.
"As Regionals crept nearer, we were kept hoping that some of these potential"answer decks" that we'd been hearing about-Mono-white with Damping Matrix, Tooth and Nail, Red-Green Beasts, etc.-would rise up and keep Skullclamp decks in check. But it just didn't happen that way."
This is hoping that the problem will go away instead taking steps to fix it. And you leaned on us, the same player community that you are now apologizing to, to fix your lack of attention to detail. As you so eloquently put it,"...it just didn't happen that way." Wizards seems to have the same attitude towards major problems that existed before the Challenger was launched. And your company knew about the problem long before the set hit the shelves.
My preference: I don't want to type it again, see Point 1.
5. Wizards does not have a list of effects that are carefully scrutinized.
To me, it's impossible to argue against this phrase given what we've read. If they had a list something to the effect of: (off the top of my head)
Draw
Add ...... to your mana pool
Zero-Mana spells
etc.
And checked every card that did those things, this whole mess might have been avoided. But, they can't have such a list or the list exists and someone didn't do their job. It's A or B. If you paid the kicker cost, do both.
That's it for me, people. I've spit enough venom for the day. This Skullclamp issue has left a bad taste in my mouth about an organization that I used to respect. The pendulum used to swing back and forth. It shattered because no one chose to stop it from doing so when they could have. Then, as an explanation of the issue, Aaron (who probably drew the short straw) didn't ease my concerns.
Flames or anything else can be sent to me.
Jon Kaus
angoth@hotmail.com
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